The 2023 Labour Party vice-presidential candidate, Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, has made allegations linking the rise of terrorism and insecurity in Nigeria to political desperation by key figures within the All Progressives Congress (APC) ahead of the 2015 general election.

He specifically fingered former Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, whom he accused of hypocrisy and complicity.

Speaking on Channels Television’s current affairs programme ‘Politics Today’ on Tuesday night, Baba-Ahmed claimed that the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s associates had attempted to recruit militants across Africa to defend his regime before his death, and that parts of that network later contributed to Nigeria’s security crisis during the President Goodluck Jonathan regime.

“The truth is that somebody had gone to North Africa negotiating with Gaddafi. Gaddafi was an international terrorist,” Baba-Ahmed alleged. “He said, ‘I will help you like I have been doing. I heard that there are plans to kill Gaddafi through an uprising. If it fails and you become president, I will retire to your country.’ Right now, he wanted to create a buffer, so he sent Saif al-Islam to Niger with millions of dollars in his boot to recruit terrorists to go and fight in Libya. He sent his former general to Mali while he still had security there.”

According to him, a portion of Gaddafi’s resources found their way into Nigeria through intermediaries allegedly tasked with recruiting fighters to assist the Libyan regime.

“In Nigeria, they gave crazy amounts of money to a young man, ‘go and help these people’ with the intention of bringing them to fight in Libya,” he said. “When Gaddafi died, they sat on the money. They kept him with the recurrent until mentioning the name and then they stopped sending the money. Now, all these things are linked—they wanted Nigeria to burn if Buhari did not become president in 2015.”

Baba-Ahmed, who said he contested for the Senate when the late General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd) contested for the presidency in 2011, accused the former president and his allies of inflaming tensions with incendiary rhetoric during that period.

“I contested alongside Buhari for Senate in 2011; you have it on YouTube. He said, ‘soaked in blood, the baboon and the dog.’ Ever since he made that comment, I refused to campaign for Buhari. It didn’t matter if I lost the Senate seat; I won it eventually,” he stated.

The senator blamed the 2011 post-election violence in Kaduna State and other parts of northern Nigeria on political manipulation and external recruitment of fighters from neighbouring countries.

“For a former president to say ‘soaked in blood’… Kaduna is my state. There was serious violence there; many houses were burnt simply because of that statement. They went to bring people from neighbouring countries in readiness to remove Jonathan from office by all means,” he claimed. “So the desperation to get Jonathan out of power caused insecurity in Nigeria.”

He further revealed that his family’s experience with bandits during a kidnapping incident last year corroborated his suspicions about the origins and motivations behind current insecurity.

“Last year around this time, we were negotiating the release of our nephew, and when he came out, what he said was no different from what Nasir El-Rufai is saying,” Baba-Ahmed disclosed. “They are not making much money relying on handouts from the government; instead, they go out to operate and ask for money.”

“My grudge with Nasir’s statement is that he was part and parcel of APC from 2013, he was one of the architects of it all,” he said. “All of a sudden, to come and absolve himself and call others out, no. Nasir is part and parcel of all that has been going on. We suffered; we are victims of Nasir’s misrule in Zaria.”

Baba-Ahmed also revisited the December 2015 Zaria massacre, in which hundreds of members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) were killed during a confrontation with the Nigerian Army. He alleged the event was deliberately orchestrated to suppress momentum against the government.

“Go back to December 2015, when a war was supposed to have been won in the North-East—what business does a military chief have to come to Zaria for a convocation, not NDA graduation of recruits?” he asked. 

“They chose to follow the route where the Shi’ites were holding. All these things were orchestrated. They knew the exact hour, the exact minute that he was coming to pass because they had the technology. About 800 people were killed because they wanted to tone down the tempo that was building up. These things were carefully doctored and orchestrated.”

He maintained that his nephew, who was abducted and later released, is alive and “can come for an interview” to corroborate his claims.

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