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ISIS, not herdsmen responsible for killings – Doyin Okupe

Published

8 years ago

April 26, 2018

An aide to former president Goodluck Jonathan, Doyin Okupe has exonerated herdsmen from the various killings in the middle belt and Northeastern part of Nigeria.

Okupe, who made his position known in a Facebook post declared that the terrorist group, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), is responsible for the killings in Nigeria.

“For God’s sake, Benue killings not by herdsmen. These are ISIS terrorists. Armed local vigilante backed by police or army is the solution,” Okupe wrote.

Okupe, a well-known outspoken personality is a politician who is believed in some quarters to enjoy controversies.

In 2017, while announcing his defection from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), he famously said in a statement: “I want to belong to a political party that will be able to publicly state its position on troubling national issues like, requests for self-determination by a section of the country, resource control, federalism and restructuring, religious intolerance, atrocities of Fulani Herdsman, unequal standards in national university admission policy, and many more.

“Any political party that does not have an openly stated position on these issues is a mere association of elites coming together only to feather their own nests.”

He had once described the ruling All Progressives Congress and the Peoples’ Democratic Party as dead parties that belong to the graveyard.

Recall that the PDP in Okupe’s home state had once accused the politician of seeking the downfall of the PDP, describing his exit as a good thing.