Security Concerns More Pressing than 2023 Elections, Olawepo Hashim tells FG

An All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential aspirant, Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, has counselled the federal government to take the prevailing security concerns hovering over the country seriously than the 2023 elections.

Olawepo-Hashim in a statement from his media office in Abuja on Wednesday, explained that the political leadership of the country must not concentrate only on permutations on the 2023 elections to the detriment of urgent National Security concerns, adding that “we must have a Nation first before election and our people must be alive and safe first to be able to vote.”

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He averred that “Our Republic is under threat, our tested ways of life pluralism, democracy, State secularism, are about to be imperiled. The clock is ticking, time is running out, the forces of evil are set to take the capital.”

Part of the statement also said a report by Beacon Consulting said banditry and terrorist attacks have escalated across Nigeria, leading to the death of 7,222 persons and abduction of 3,823 others in the past seven months.

Olawepo-Hashim, a former Presidential candidate of the People’s Trust in the 2019 election maintained that “in the past two years we have spoken on the Nation’s security challenges and offered concrete suggestions on how to confront them, but all suggestions have been ignored.

Olawepo-Hashim maintained that for the sacrifices and efforts of our gallant soldiers not to be in vain, “it is time for the nation to construct a new Defence and Security Architecture to permanently destroy the seed of terror and uproot banditry/kidnapping across the country.”

He added that with all manners of armed groups within two-hour drive to Abuja, (the nation’s seat of power), from Niger and Kaduna, the government should not downplay the alarm raised by Governor Zulum of Borno on the growing number of ISWAP fighters in the country.”