Buhari: No amnesty for bandits, insurgents — we’ll DEAL with them
President Muhammadu Buhari says his administration will continue to deal with insurgents, bandits, kidnappers and other criminals who constitute a threat to innocent citizens across the country.
Speaking on Thursday during the joint security meeting of Northern State Governors’ Forum and traditional rulers, Buhari said the country is battling with different dimensions of security challenges, adding that he has asked the new service chiefs to devise new strategies that will end the ugly situation.
Represented by Ibrahim Gambari, his chief of staff, Buhari said criminality should be handled without resorting to ethnic profiling.
“I must appreciate the efforts of the 19 Northern States Governors’ Forum for their contribution towards national growth and development, especially in this challenging period in our nation’s being where certain fundamental corporate existence need to be frankly deliberated upon and actionable resolutions reached,” Buhari said.
“This meeting is coming at a time when the nation is making steady progress in addressing the many challenges impeding developmental and progress. We are providing critical infrastructure such as roads, railways, airports among others which are critical to economic prosperity of our people as well as opening up economic opportunities for our citizens to pursue legitimate aspirations that grow the economy.
“At the same time, we are confronting the various dimensions of security challenges that continue to slow down the emancipation of our people from poverty and economic deprivation. The Government shall continue to deal with insurgents, bandits, kidnappers and other criminals who constitute a threat to innocent citizens across the country.
“Criminals are criminals and should be dealt with accordingly, without resorting to ethnic profiling. I have already tasked the new Service Chiefs to devise new strategies that will end this ugly situation where the lives of our people continue to be threatened by hoodlums and criminals.
“I expect that at this meeting, your Forum will also discuss and devise ways of building stronger collaboration with the security architecture and the people in defeating criminality across the region and the nation at large.”
Note to Buhari: First of all, thank you for having at least agreed to comment on these most pressing matters of life and death for Nigerians and for Nigeria. There is nothing new to devise. You know the problem. You most likely know its source. Resolve it. Stop passing the buck. The buck should stop with you!
As for your repeated efforts to deny the Fulani dimension of this problem, you think you are talking to ignorant people, right? The problems are multidimensional, alright, but they ALL have a common denominator: “Fulani.” This does not mean that anyone should support ethnic profiling, but if an ethnicity is causing so much of the various security challenges, then that fact should be clearly and unequivocally acknowledged (no matter whose cattle is gored), if ever any effective solution is to be found.
President Buhari, you recently said that you will not go back to sleep – your chosen metaphor for the comatose pose with which you chose to observe for months, while Nigeria burned. With all due respect, your excellency, you appear to be still very much asleep, since you do not seem to have realized how very much aware most Nigerians are, of the centrality of Fulani involvement in most of the most serious security challenges that are threatening to push Nigeria over the edge of the sort of precipice that the now-defunct Federal Republic of Yugoslavia fell over.
Please, really rub your eyes again, Mr. President. Things are so much more dire than you evince awareness of, in the quotes attributed to you in this article to which I am responding.
May Heaven bless those who properly lead Nigeria, and may Heaven look askance at those who fail to demonstrate good faith, conscientousness, and neutrality in leading Nigeria away from these treacherous minefields of ethnic and religious violence masquerading as a thousand other acts of “criminality.” Disaster, by whatever euphemism, is still disaster! Treachery, hidden under whatever rock, is still treachery!
The FG and northern government should talk with sincerity not just rhetorics. They should know that the southern are accommodating. They should be the one to change their orientation thinking people who accommodate them are fO O ls. Or they think they have more violent tendency more than the others or think that they can use state or federal machinery against others.
What is seen now is years of grooming illiterates just giving birth without proper planning to educate them but keeping them for election purpose thinking the north population is large having bunch of uneducated people to will election.
Also year of thinking and relying on national cake without developing the human population with right knowledge and skills.
FG Take action. The southern government should not be intimidated no nobody is against peaceful Fulani or Hausa people in the south. In fact the south is harmony with them. It those people in north who are feeding in terrorism that are sounding like one.