News

President Buhari Vows To Crush Perpetrators Of Unrest In Plateau

President Muhammadu Buhari has reassured Nigerians that his administration is on top of things and is investigating the perpetrators of recent attacks in Plateau with force.

On Sunday in Abuja, the president offered the guarantee in a statement by Malam Garba Shehu, his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity.

Buhari, on the other hand, insisted that in order to succeed, communities must join together in the face of these horrific crimes, claiming that revenge violence was not the answer.

He encouraged religious, traditional, and other community leaders to preach peace and not allow the spread of violence and incitement to violence to take place in their areas.

According to him, security officers are being deployed to volatile Plateau villages in order to protect lives and property in the state.

The president said: ”Attempts to simplify the reasons into a basic narrative may help raise donor-dollars for international NGOs, fill pages of overseas newspapers and burnish foreign politicians’ faith credentials; but this does not increase understanding, nor offer solutions.

“If anything, simplistic theorising and finger-pointing make the situation worse.

“It is important both for Nigerians and the international community to appreciate that there are a multitude of factors attendant to these troubles.”

According to Buhari, there is the Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorism, as well as the spate of kidnappings for ransom, transformed by some misinformed global media into a Muslim-on-Christian threat.

“Yet, in reality there are no religious connotations at all when the primary purpose of these acts is to extract money.

“Then the herder-farmer clashes. While international voices and some Nigerian politicians who seek personal gains from division declare this a matter of religion, for those involved, it is almost entirely a matter of access to water and land.

“Herders have moved their cattle into contact with farmers for millennia.

“’But increasingly, due to population pressure, escalating aridity of northern states and climate change, they are forced to travel further south to find grazing lands,” he said.

On the activities of IPOB, the president said: ”Then, further afield in the South-East, IPOB are not struggling for freedom when they attack police stations and property, but rather committing acts of terrorism in order to steal money.

“IPOB is not defending Christians, as their highly paid foreign lobbyists claim, when almost every citizen of those states they terrorize is uniformly Christian.

“’Yet mistakenly and because the lobbyists for IPOB have duped them, some misguided foreign media and politicians believe so.

“As for Nigerians, what we need is to come together. And we must do this firstly and for the most part by our own hands, by casting asunder those who seek to divide us for their own nefarious financial and political gain.”

Show More

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button