The Senate Minority Leader, Enyinnaya Abaribe, has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to resign as Nigeria’s president.

He made the call during plenary on Wednesday, while the Senate discussed a motion on national security challenges and the need to restructure the current security architecture.

He said: “When I was coming, I saw a newspaper headline of THISDAY, the commander-in-chief expresses shock at the level of violent crime, in other words, Mr president was expressing surprise, but, according to our rules – Order 53(13), I will not go into that but I can only say in pidgin English, ‘this surprise, surprise me.’

“I want to say, Mr President, if you didn’t insist that we will not be partisan I’d have called out the presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina, who, when the CAN leaders complained about the killings of a priest, he turned around and said CAN was acting like a political party.

“Now that we are talking about it here, let me hear him say that all of us are acting like a political party when many are complaining about these incessant deaths in this country,” he said.

“Boko Haram has been defeated, Nigeria is now safer, everything that was being done to make sure that the hard work that was supposed to be done in securing Nigeria was not done because certain people did not do their work but preferred to cover the eyes of Nigerians with propaganda and trying to find all these excuses for non-performance, have now come to stare us in the face.

“Nigeria did not elect the IGP, we did not elect the chief of staff, we did not elect the joint-chiefs or national security adviser. We elected the government of APC in 2015 and re-elected them in 2019. The reason we re-elected them is that they continued to tell us that they had the key to security.

“When you want to deal with a matter, you go to the head, so we will go to government and ask this government to resign because they can no longer do anything,” he said.

The Presidency has also responded to Senator Abaribe’s call for the resignation of the President. The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said the call was foolish. He argued  that Senator Abaribe should also resign as he stood as a surety for the leader of Indegenous People of Biafra, Nnamdi Kanu who eventually escaped from the country.