USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Vice President of Nigeria (1999-2007) and a major opponent of Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu during the election of 2023 has said that Tinubu’s “declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State reeks of political manipulation and outright bad faith.
Anyone paying attention to the unfolding crisis knows that Bola Tinubu has been a vested partisan actor in the political turmoil engulfing Rivers. His blatant refusal — or calculated negligence — in preventing this escalation is nothing short of disgraceful.
Beyond the political scheming in Rivers, the brazen security breaches that led to the condemnable destruction of national infrastructure in the state land squarely on the President’s desk.
Tinubu cannot evade responsibility for the chaos his administration has either enabled or failed to prevent.
It is an unforgivable failure that under Tinubu’s watch, the Niger Delta has been thrown back into an era of violent unrest and instability — undoing the hard-won peace secured by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua. Years of progress have been recklessly erased in pursuit of selfish political calculations.
If federal infrastructure in Rivers has been compromised, the President bears full responsibility. Punishing the people of Rivers State just to serve the political gamesmanship between the governor and Tinubu’s enablers in the federal government is nothing less than an assault on democracy and must be condemned in the strongest terms.”(Issued on March 18, 2025)
