Group alleges genocide against Southern Kaduna Christians

A group in Kaduna State under the aegis of Southern Kaduna Leadership Council (SKLC) on Monday, accused former state Governor Nasir El-Rufai of plots to Islamise the state when he was at the helm of affairs.

The Chairman of SKLC, Ishaya Dary Akau, in a statement issued after a press conference in Kaduna, said the system of “governance by exclusion” which El-Rufai practiced in the state was deliberately against the people of Southern Kaduna.

In the statement titled “Nasir El-Rufai’s Viral Video and His Eight Years of Misrule in Kaduna State”, the group alleged that the incessant killings and maiming of children, women and youth, and the burning of their homes and destruction of villages and communities in Southern Kaduna from 2015 to 2023 was part of a strategy for Islamic dominance orchestrated by the erstwhile government of El-Rufai.

“The Southern Kaduna Leadership Council (SKLC) held its regular meeting on the 17th June, 2023, and considered several important matters, including the speech by Mal. Nasir El-Rufai, the immediate past governor of Kaduna State, delivered to some religious clerics,” the group said.

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“The SKLC noted that the video of Nasir El-Rufai’s speech has gone viral and has made public certain issues that have hitherto remained in the domain of conjecture and hypothesis among Nigerians generally, but which we the victims of El-Rufai’s actions have lived and experienced over a period of eight years.

“That Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai set out deliberately to misinform the Nigerian public and the world, and waged false propaganda amongst certain religious circles, to the effect that the people of Southern Kaduna who are mainly Christians did not vote for the APC.

“That El-Rufai picked a Muslim deputy from Southern Kaduna to spite the Christian majority for not supporting the APC and theme most insidious aspect of this El-Rufai Islamist agenda was his claim that he extended such a Muslim-Muslim system to the presidential election in order to extend the scope of “Islamic subjugation” across the length and breadth of Nigeria within twenty years.

“The impoverishment of our people arising from the total neglect of the area in 8 years, and the deliberate destruction of farmlands, crops, plantations and forests, harvests and food stocks, in an orgy of terrorist violence were deliberate actions in pursuit of subordination of the people of Southern Kaduna to El-Rufai’s implementation of jihadism in Kaduna State.

“That the incessant killings and maiming of our children, women and youth, and the burning of our homes and destruction of our villages and communities from 2015 to 2023 was part of a strategy for Islamic dominance by the government of Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai in Kaduna State.

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“That the assassinations, murders, kidnappings, arrests and imprisonment, and removal of indigenous Southern Kaduna traditional rulers, and the balkanization of our chiefdoms to create emirates out of districts under our traditional leaders, was part of an undeclared jihadist campaign being surreptitiously waged by Nasir El-Rufai as Governor of Kaduna State.

“We hereby wish to let the nation and international community know of the heinous plans and to draw the attention of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to the 2014 National Constitutional Conference where it was agreed to create Gurara State from the present Kaduna State and to invite the President to activate the demand which has gone through the constitutional process of obtaining the consent of two thirds of the 36 Houses of Assembly in the Federation.