Former Vice President of Nigeria and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Atiku Abubakar has said that President Muhammadu Buhari’s government persecutes judges who enforce the constitutional rights of citizens.
Atiku made the claim in an independence message on Monday, September 30, 2019. He stated that Nigerians are in a situation where there is no free press and that the country’s judiciary was under attack.
October 1, 1960, our nation’s founding fathers could never have fathomed that 59 years after birthing the largest black nation on earth, we would be facing a situation where we do not have a free press, our judiciary being under attack, and our youths and activists who should ordinarily be the future of Nigeria, would be facing the very real threat of arrest and intimidation should they speak out about the state of the nation.
My dear citizens of Nigeria, I could go with the flow and the cliché and say all is well with Nigeria, but as the late Chinua Achebe once wrote, “When an adult is in the house, the she-goat is not left to suffer the pain of parturition on its tether.
… All is not well when Judges are persecuted for enforcing the constitutionally guaranteed fundamental human rights of Nigerian citizens. All is not well when Nigeria is now officially the world headquarters for extreme poverty and out of school children, yet the cost of maintaining those in government continues to grow, while the needs of the governed are not being met. And certainly, all is not well when the media cannot freely express itself without the fear that those who wield the big stick would use it on them for saying things as they are … Atiku Abubakar – pmnewsnigeria.com
