The Presidency has dismissed calls for the impeachment of President Muhammadu Buhari as heavy-handed, saying that is only recommendable for cases where high crimes and misdemeanours have been established.
Some members of the National Assembly, especially those belonging to opposition parties have called for the impeachment of the President, premising their reasons on the worsening economic and security situations.
However, the Presidency was reacting to an Editorial piece of a national daily, The Guardian, published in its Monday, August 22, 2022, edition, titled: “Impeach Buhari for gross incompetence“, registering its observance of an alleged hatred by the editors of the media organisation towards Buhari and his administration, right from the beginning.
According to a statement by Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, the Presidency maintained that the process of impeachment of a President is not reserved for the advantage of those whose is reason is based on issues of disagreement or personal dislike.
“The Guardian newspaper, which has taken up the role of regular antagonist and political opponent of the President and his party, APC for a long time now, has surpassed itself with its latest call for the impeachment of the President.
“The newspaper editors clearly do not like the way the President is running the country and therefore they believe he should be impeached. They debase both the political discourse of our nation and public understanding of the law and constitution by doing so.
“Impeachment is a process undertaken after high crimes and misdemeanors have been proven. It’s a not a process undertaken against a leader whose politics you do not agree with, or who you personally dislike.
“It appears, impeachment has become a newly added partisan weapon in their arsenal – wielded by those who have established a track record of hatred towards the President and an attempt to remove from office one who was democratically elected by the people,” the statement reads.
It further alleged that the current wave of calls for Buhari’s impeachment had been made more intense because of the fear that the APC, is looking likely to win the 2023 presidential election, especially by those who had felt frustrated by the emergence of Buhari as President in 2015, and who also failed to stop him in 2019.
“The fact is, it should be for presidents to govern and for opposition politicians and the media to hold them to account. The circumstances of his election in 2015 – the first time a sitting president had been defeated in a re-election attempt and the first time any party save the PDP had won the presidency – was a vast shock to Nigeria’s political and sections of the media establishments. As far as they were concerned, it was not how things were meant to be.
“So, from day one, they set about attacking this president more than any other in Nigeria’s history. The fact they could not defeat him at the ballot box when he was re-elected in 2019 – and now with his APC party very likely to retain the presidency despite all their best efforts – they now turn to all and any means, no matter the political, legal, or constitutional consequences to bring him down.
“For the benefit of the ones who have forgotten, the Guardian newspaper has in the past, been worshipped as the flagship of the nation’s press; the one that had won every “Newspaper of the Year” awards. Now, they have sadly fallen from the height it once occupied as a medium that sparked intellectual thought and discourse for a fiddler of poorly scripted invective and ad hominem.
“The Guardian newspaper may never be friend or ally of President Buhari but they should know better than to support this ‘headline-grabbing stunt.”
