Group asks Ogun to probe ‘beating of residents by soldiers protecting herders’

The Yoruba Leadership and Peace Initiative (TYLPI) has called on the Ogun state government to probe the alleged harassment of some residents who clashed with herders. 

Soldiers had allegedly backed the herders and started flogging the residents.

Olusegun Ahmadu and Olufemi Adefemiwa, president and general-secretary of TYLPI, in a statement said the soldiers molested traditional rulers and indigenes of some communities in Ketu area of the state.

“The group therefore demanded that the Ogun state government should immediately constitute a public judicial inquiry into what it said would amount to treason if it emerged that truly, Nigerian troops, wearing army uniforms and bearing arms procured with tax payers’ money, openly took sides against a group of law abiding Nigerians on their ancestral land,” the statement said.

The group said a judicial probe is needed to establish the truth in the reports, warning that “the Yoruba will not accept anything short of that as many police and administrative investigations into similar incidents in the past yielded no tangible outcomes”.

The group also decried what it called the “deafening silence of top Yoruba leaders over the prolonged collapse of law and order in the Ibarapa area of Oyo state , resulting in kidnapping, rape and killing of hapless citizens, particularly in Igangan and its adjoining communities”.

The group said it is worried that no Yoruba politician of note raised a voice while the crisis raged.

TYLPI, however, praised Rotimi Akeredolu, governor of Ondo state, whom it said displayed courage and forthrightness in providing leadership on the issue.

The group also commended Sunday Adeyemo, better known as Sunday Igboho, a youth leader “for taking the bold initiative to fill the leadership gap created by politicians and state actors who, rather than support and defend the people of Ibarapa, who were being kidnapped and killed with impunity by herders, opted to keep silent in a futile bid to protect  what they considered to be their immediate political interests”.

The group appealed to the federal government to engage superior technology such as drones in order to locate the hideouts of kidnappers and insurgents across the country and take them out.