BY NKECHI NAECHE-ESEZOBOR—The All Progressives Congress (APC) strongly condemns the call for foreign invasion of Nigeria by the new factional Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Tanimu Turaki. While addressing the press today over the crisis ravaging his party, Turaki called on foreign powers to intervene in Nigeria to save the country from alleged “Christian genocide” and to protect democracy. Turaki’s call for foreign invasion of Nigeria is reckless and unpatriotic.
For a man declared National Chairman barely 72 hours ago by a faction of his deeply fractured party, Turaki looked and sounded desperate, at his wit’s end, confused, incoherent, and grossly lacking in stamina and capacity to manage his party’s crisis.
Nigerians expected that Turaki would set himself on an urgent peace-building mission to bring his party’s warring factions together in dialogue towards finding possible pathways to peace and reconciliation. Instead, Turaki’s first official act as factional chairman was his call for foreign invasion of Nigeria as a solution to the self-inflicted internal crisis of his PDP. That is as shameless as it is a dangerous threat to national security and sovereignty.
Under the PDP’s 16 years in power, with its ruthless subversion of opposition parties, there was never a call for foreign invasion of Nigeria as a solution to crisis within opposition parties of that era. Turaki’s call is not only an admission of the party’s incapacity to manage its internal contradictions, it must be taken as a final certification of the PDP’s demise.
We trust the international community to dismiss the PDP’s disgraceful and unpatriotic call as a pitiful distraction from the failure of its internal democracy and embarrassing disintegration. The heightened desperation of the PDP and other opposition leaders is now clear for all to see. Turaki’s call shows how far they are willing to go, even to the extent of actively seeking destructive intervention of foreign powers on Nigerian soil in order to serve their sinister political agenda.
We urge Nigerians to stand firm in support of our great Party, and the visionary leadership of President Bola Tinubu as we continue the arduous task of building progress and prosperity in all areas of our national life.
