Lai: FG won’t pay ransom to abductors of Kagara schoolchildren, staff

Lai Mohammed, minister of information and culture, says the federal government will not pay ransom to secure the release of the abducted students and members of staff of Government Science College, Kagara, Niger state.

The minister said this on Saturday, while featuring on Sunrise Daily, a Channels TV programme, monitored by TheCable.

On Wednesday, gunmen suspected to be bandits stormed the school, and kidnapped several students, members of staff, and some members of their families.

Abubakar Bello, governor of the state, had said 27 students, three staff and 12 family members were kidnapped from the school.

The minister said the federal government will not allow any form of criminal activities in any parts of the country, noting that the government has a duty to look at the underlining causes of some of these criminalities in other to address them.

“The government has put in place, all along, various strategies to contain banditry, to fight insurgency, to fight kidnapping. Some of these measures are kinetic, some are not kinetic. We didn’t get here overnight and that is why it is difficult to get out one day,” he said.

“Bandits all over the world work with psychology of people. Deliberately, they target women and children because this is what will attract a lot of global outcry. That is exactly what bandits do all over the world.

“And that’s what happened during the Daptchi girls abduction and the Kangara school boys abduction. But the question is what does government do?

“When I say we didn’t get here overnight, what I meant is that be it farmer-herders crisis, be it banditry, be it kidnapping, it crept up gradually over many years and there are certain factors which are beyond the human capacity that led us here.

“Whatever you see that is causing the farmer-herders crisis is largely a scramble for dwindling resources, for water, for grazing land.”