State governors who shirk in their responsibilities turn around to blame their failings on President Muhammadu Buhari, said his spokesman Femi Adesina on Thursday.

Mr Adesina said the governors deploy such methods to whip up resentment against the president and buy peoples sympathies in order to deflect attention from their inadequacies.

“Some Governors think they can be heroes by antagonizing the President (Mr Buhari). If they owe salaries and pensions, once the month is ending, they begin to abuse the President, thinking their people would forget the outstanding salaries and pensions,” Mr Adesina wrote in his weekly column on Facebook.

“When they have not built a single kilometer of road, it is Buhari. When infrastructure has decayed under them, it is Buhari. When they can’t secure the lives and property of the people they govern, it is Buhari. They play to the gallery, thinking they will receive applause from their people,” he added.

Many governors have, however, over time complained that they have no real control of the security assets in their states though they are nominally their states’ chief security officer. Extant laws vest the command and control of Nigeria’s security apparatuses, including the military, police and the paramilitary, at the centre.

Effectively, the federal government led by Mr Buhari has control over security agencies to secure the life and properties of citizens. 

Though Mr Buhari vowed to tackle insecurity during his campaign in 2015, the situation has become worse under his watch as Boko Haram, bandits and unknown gunmen continue to kill and kidnap across the country. 

Bandits in different coordinated attacks have killed and abducted citizens in hundreds across Katsina, Kaduna, Kebbi, Niger and Zamfara, forcing intermittent school closure. 

In July 2021, bandits downed a Nigerian Air Force jet, on reconnaissance mission and then raided the Nigerian Defence Academy Kaduna, killing two in August same year.  

Lamenting spate of insecurity  in the country in October 2021, Mr Adesina admitted that “life has descended into the Hobbesian state of nature; nasty, brutish and short” in the last 18 months under his principal’s control.

“We have, indeed, passed through the most challenging of times in the past 18 months: security-wise, economically, socio-politically, and in many other ways,” Mr Adesina said in an article. “Life has descended into the Hobbesian state of nature; nasty, brutish and short.”