President Muhammadu Buhari has said that the Federal Government was not prepared to release former National Security Adviser (NSA), Col. Sambo Dasuki, from detention.
The president said that Dasuki, who is presently in the custody of the Department of State Services (DSS), has multiple cases in court, which he must diligently face and answer.
Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, in an interview with New Telegraph yesterday in Abuja, explained that the cases against the former NSA were all complicated.
Reacting to criticisms that Buhari does not respect court orders and continues to detain Dasuki, the presidential spokesman said that “the ex-NSA’s problem is not with President Buhari who I must say has the highest regard for the rule of law.”
Garba noted that the president remained the best friend of the rule of law and due process the country has seen so far.
“If five courts of the land are trying different cases in which a man is involved and one or two of those courts let the accused persons go home on bail, what happens with the other three cases? “If you are a prisons controller, will you set that person free when you have three other judges directing that he be kept in detention?
“Colonel Dasuki faces a multiplicity of cases and, sadly for him, his hand appears to be showing in more of the cases as recent revelations from the ongoing investigation in the Office of the NSA has shown,” he added.
Garba, who also spoke on the agitation by Biafra, said the matter was a rested case.
He said as far as he was concerned, Nigerians paid the supreme prize of going to a three years’ civil war, which claimed the lives of over one million people.
Garba noted that those calling for a State of Biafra have no grasp about the political history of the country.
He said the issue of Biafra was settled at the end of that civil war.
“Remember that this country fought a civil war for 30 months in which one million people were killed.
The issue of Biafra was settled at the end of that civil war. What is there again? “It is people who haven’t read Nigerian history and don’t know about it that are trying to raise new dust,” he said.
Buhari was recently quoted for supporting the liberation of the Saharawi people in Morocco, a statement which most Nigerians criticize as against the agitation of the Biafra group.
According to Garba, “for anybody to make comparison between Western Sahara and Biafra, that is a display of knowledge deficit in international politics. One, Western Sahara is a classic case of decolonisation.”
He said: “It is the last remaining colony on the African continent and we all owe it a duty to ourselves to liberate Western Sahara.
“In fact, as military Head of State, President Buhari was the first to recognise Western Sahara and then the rest of Africa followed. So, he is being consistent. But Biafra is for the dismemberment of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which is already a settled entity. These two scenarios are clearly different,” he stressed.
