Buhari urges Plateau communities to unite against attacks

President Muhammadu Buhari on Sunday urged communities in Jos, Plateau State, to unite against attacks by bandits, herdsmen and others.

President Buhari in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Shehu Garba, assured Nigerans that the government under his leadership is on top of the insecurity crisis in the country and is working towards ending the various forms of violent uprisings in Nigeria. The president further explained that the violence ravaging the country by the various groups, which include bandits, Boko Karam, and ISWAP terrorists, IPOB, then the kidnappers, has nothing to do with religion but criminal acts for money making.

According to the presidential statement: “The Presidency wishes to assure all citizens that as a government, the administration is on top of events and is moving ahead with force to crush the perpetrators of the recent incidents of unrest in Plateau State.

“But to achieve success, our communities must unite against these horrific attacks. Retributive violence is not the answer.

“While these troubled communities are being reinforced with security personnel, our religious, traditional, and other community leaders must not allow the use of their spaces for the propagation of violence and incitement to violence.”

President Buhari further declared: “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.

“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 primate purpose of these acts is to extract money.

“Then the herder-farmer clashes. While international voices and some Nigerian politicians who seek personal gain 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 and into contact with farmers for millennia.

“But, increasingly, due to population pressure, the increased aridity of northern states, and climate change they are forced to travel further south to find grazing lands.

“Then, further afield in the South-East, IPOB is 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 the states they terrorize is uniformly Christian.

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

“As for Nigerians, what we need is to come together. And we must do this first 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.”