The fear of being dragged to the International Criminal Court has been the reason insurgency and banditry are dragging out, and the military effort constrained in Nigeria.
Kaduna Governor Nasir el-Rufai said this during the weekly ministerial the Presidential Communications Team at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Thursday.
Former military chiefs, including COAS Tukur Buratai and others came under the radar of the ICC while they were in office, and the court investigators conducted its prelim investigation, and invited the military chiefs.
No heeded the invitation, though.
But El- Rufai insisted a rigorous military campaign maters.
According to him, while he had campaigned for the bandits to be classified as terrorists, there were some pushbacks on the ground that they do not have a recognized leadership structure.
The governor has been advocating carpet-bombing the bandits in the northwest once and for all.
He said the locations of the terrorists has never been a mystery, insisting that they must be wiped out at once rather than the present piecemeal approach if the problem must be solved.
El- Rufai and other governors in the northwest collaborated in financing and providing logistics for the military operation in the region, and the outcomes were positive to some degree.
But the collaboration, he said, was not sustainable, and that affected the military operation, and worsened the plight of the citizens.
Kaduna reported 937 people killed and 1,972 kidnapped by bandits in the state in 2020, while a total of 1,192 were killed and 3,348 kidnapped in 2021.