Nigerian govt ‘never lost control’ to terrorists

The Universal Watch Network has countered a recent report by the International Strategic Studies Association (ISSA) that the federal government has lost the control in engaging the Boko Haram insurgents.

It said the claim by ISSA that the government is no longer sure of what faction of the terrorist group it is fighting was a fallacy and mischievous.

The United State-based agency claimed the report first surfaced as a report by Washington-based group, International Strategic Studies Association (ISSA), which has now been repeated by many indigenous media organizations in Nigeria as intended by the originators of the report.

Roberts Gordon, vice-president, political affairs in an electronic release on Monday, observed that a deeper look at the document, however, revealed it to be a treatise that is filled with “rehashed information, innuendos, half-truths”.

“The report pushed the lie that the Nigerian government has lost the control in engaging Boko Haram while the country’s intelligence community is no longer sure of what faction of the terrorist group it is fighting,” he said.

“Nothing can be further from the truth since Boko Haram has not been able to achieve what its foreign sponsors had intended for it to achieve in Nigeria.

“Nigeria is no stranger to doomsday reports like the one issued by ISSA. The United States National Intelligence Council once issued a report that Nigeria will not exist beyond 2015 as it would disintegrate into smaller enclave states along ethno-geographic fault lines.

“Even when much was done to destabilize Nigeria to achieve this evil objective, the political maturity that produced the government of President Muhammadu Buhari in the same year and the patriotic disposition of his administration with a committed Nigerian Armed Forces frustrated the projection of Nigeria’s demise.

“It is most unfortunate and condemnable that the authors of this most recent report sat in meeting rooms of some plush hotels, far away from Nigeria, to insinuate that instances of random crimes that led to the deaths of highly placed Nigerians were masterminded by the state or its agencies.

“In the meantime, we are alerting Nigerians to beware of ‘Terrorists Politically- aided Propaganda (TP2) like the ISSA report, which is calculated to do damage to the country. We envisage that more of such reports will be released in the coming days and they bound to become tools in the hands of politicians that will cite such report to vote against a government that has laid the foundation to giving Nigeria back to Nigerians as is the norm in other democracies.”