The Presidency has described as untrue allegation that President Muhammadu Buhari’s cashless policy was an attempt to heat up the polity with a view to truncating democracy and impose interim government on Nigerians. Recall that the governor of Kaduna state, Nasir el-Rufai, had alleged that the President insistence on imposing the naira swap and cashless policy on the people was a ploy to generate crisis by making life unbearable for the people so that the next week general elections may not hold. He equally alleged that the cashless policy was to incite the people against the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) ahead of the polls so that it could lose the general elections.
Apparently responding to these allegations, a Senior Special Assistant to the President on media and publicity, Malam Garba Shehu, in a statement yesterday said it would be inconceivable for anyone to accuse President Muhammadu Buhari of planning to jeopardize democracy in the country. While insisting that elections would hold as scheduled beginning from next week, the Presidential spokesman maintained that the APC Presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, was solidly in support of the controversial cashless policy and Naira swap. The statement read: “Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda Chief of Adolf Hitler said ‘‘Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth’’.
This was in the 1930s, before the internet was birthed. “Let us clearly, specifically and emphatically state that there is absolutely no truth to the claim that President Muhammadu Buhari is working towards an interim government or even worse, the truncation of democracy- democracy that he has helped to keep alive not only here at home, in West Africa but throughout the continent.
The talk of interim government and truncation of democracy is way off the mark. Those who peddle it stand to gain nothing- nothing at all -but the creation of panic and the incitement of the public against the federal government. “It is another dangerous dimension by people who are afraid that they may lose their elections. *Everybody is aware that there is a lot of pressure on everyone- all of us- the party, its elected officials, its candidates and law enforcement agencies following the way the currency swap has gone but the way to go is not to panic”.