The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has called for results-driven security intervention to tackle the nation’s rising security challenges.
The party is reacting to the killing of a mathematics teacher, one of those abducted from three schools in Oyo State, and regrets that under the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration, the kidnapping of students has become a norm rather than an exception.
“Sadly, the government’s response has been, at best, half-hearted and disparate,” PDP said in a statement issued by the National Publicity Secretary of the Interim National Working Committee (INWC), Ini Emembong.
The party stated that the government should move beyond its performative assurances of bringing culprits to book, to “deploy practical, sustained, and results-driven security interventions.”
PDP stated that the targeting of schools is not incidental but a direct assault on Nigeria’s future.
It noted that for a country with one of the highest out-of-school child populations in the world, every attack on a school deepens a crisis that was already at emergency levels.
The party warned that if the attack is not checked, it would inevitably result in a drop in school attendance and lower literacy penetration nationwide.
“The long-term cost to national development is a burden no future administration should be left to inherit,” the party said.
It called on President Bola Tinubu to deploy “even if of the energy, tact, and strategies he and his team invest in constricting the political space against the opposition, toward building a security architecture that protects lives.”
According to the PDP, a whole-of-society approach to security, backed by genuine political will, community engagement, and institutional coordination, could deliver the sustainable results that Nigerians have been promised and denied for too long.
“The government must choose between taking on security headlong or owning up to its failure,” the party stated.
