Newspaper Columnist and political activist, Akin Osuntokun, has hit back at the Presidency, which on Thursday accused him of spreading lies about a fictitious Sallah day bomb blast due to his purported hatred for President Muhammadu Buhari and his administration.

Mr. Osuntokun, in a statement issued on Friday, a copy of which was made available to News Express, denied being the source of the information, quoting international news agency Reuters as the source. He lambasted the Presidency, accusing it and Presidential Spokesman Femi Adesina as of being purveyors of lies.

According to Osuntokun, “The irony of the statement from the presidency calling me a liar started with a lie against me: ‘Akin Osuntokun made the false claim that a bomb blast had gone off earlier in the day’.

Setting the record straight, he said: “I had called the Channels Television to confirm the veracity of this scandalous attribution. Of course, it was an outright fiction conjured by the Presidential Spokesman to embellish his narrative of a fundamental slander of the Buhari government. There was nowhere in the television discussion I spoke of a bomb blast.

“Wedded to this lie, Mr Adesina went on to crow that ‘Sallah day had passed quietly and peacefully without even a firecracker going off, let alone bomb blast’. Yet according to Reuters report, 63 people were reportedly killed and villages burnt in terrorist attack in Maimalari village in Borno State the previous day. This is the idea of a peaceful Sallah day the President of Nigeria is boasting about.”

Not yet done, Osuntokun said: “This reaction from the Presidency is a perfect illustration of how the incumbent Nigerian Government has trivialised and made mockery of governance. It is consistent with the fraudulent trademark assertion two years ago of the Minister of Information that Boko Haram has been technically defeated.

“You will imagine that a government with so much disastrous scorecard on security will be more modest in advertising itself on security governance competence. You will think that it is not the same government whom a former Army Chief of Staff accused of complicity in the genocidal Fulani militia crisis.

“A couple of weeks ago, Professor Wole Soyinka went to the extent of seeking international intervention in the face of the abject failure of the Buhari administration to stem the tide of the genocidal bloodletting that has enveloped the country. Billions of dollars down the drain on supposed containment of the security crisis, you will recall that this government has gone ahead to recently requesting for another billion dollars to address the same security situation it claimed to have brought under control. Domiciled in Nigeria is the escalating Fulani militia terror that the United Nations has rated the deadliest terrorist group in the whole world.”