President Muhammadu Buhari has called off calm on the current unrest in Plateau state, assuring citizens that his administration is on top of the events and is moving ahead with security agencies to bring the perpetrators to book.
This was disclosed in a statement by senior special assistant to the president (media and publicity), Garba Shehu, stating that in other to achieve this, Nigerians must unite against these attacks.
The president maintained that retributive violence is not the answer, and urged religious, traditional and other community leaders nor to allow the use of their spaces for the propagation of violence and incitement to violence.
According to him, 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 theorizing and finger-pointing make the situation worse.
President Buhari noted that there are multitude of factors attendant to these troubles, which includes: Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorism, kidnappings, herder-farmer clashes and IPOB.
He explained that kidnappings for ransom, which was transformed by some misinformed global media in a Muslim-on-Christain threat, had no religious connotations at all but it was a primary purpose to extract money.
Speaking on the herder-farmer clashes, the president noted that the clashes was a matter of access to water and land, as the herders had moved their cattle into contact with farmers for millennia, but due to increasing population pressure in northern states, the farmers were forced to travel further south to find grazing lands.
On IPOB, President Buhari stated that the agitators weren't struggling for freedom when they attacked police stations and property, but rather committing acts of terrorism in order to steal money.
He further stated that IPOB wasn't defending chrisitains – 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.
President Buhari mentioned that for the country to come out of this crisis situations, Nigerians need to come together by casting aside those who seek to divide the country for their own nefarious financial and political gains.
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