Clashes
By Emmanuel Mogbede
Abuja, June 14, 2018 (NAN) The Yoruba Ronu Leadership Forum has urged Nigerians to support Federal Government `for solutions to Boko Haram insurgency and recurrent herdsmen and farmers’ clashes “through quality contributions rather than abuses’’.
In a statement by Mr Akin Malaolu, its Secretary-General, in Abuja on Thursday, the group said recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari had recently said that the fulani herdsmen-farmers’ clashes were sociological.
´´Recently, when President Buhari spoke in London on the crises between fulani herdsmen and farmers and on their spasms of communal blood-lettings, not many well-meaning and knowledgeable people knew much about the meaning to his statement.
´´They were not patient enough, particularly about his findings that the crises are sociological, because what the President got in return for his efforts was a plenitude of abuse and vitriolic attacks.
´It is our considered view as a forum that Buhari is right, and very right when he pointed out his findings to his August visitor, the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury,’’ it said.
It stated that this was especially so, because the president was in the best position to know the real situation from the various security reports before him.
It added that it was also a truism as stated by the president that the clashes were century-old and should therefore, be seen as sociological in nature.
The forum pointed out that if Buhari decided to go the whole hog, a sociological inquiry was inevitable to give more intelligence from its findings and what the conflicts consisted of.
´´Nigerians should know by now, except we want to play politics with everything, that the Sahel region of Africa provided the bulk of Libya’s military, which also contributed immensely to the greatness of late Muammar Gadaffi of Libya.
´´Gadaffi´s demise equally threw the entire Sahel region into despair and turmoil.
“This was because those he trained and armed for his military superiority in his home state and against perceived enemies fled with their arms to Sahel from where they originally came from, including Nigeria.’’
It noted that recent arrests made by security agencies showed that some Nigerians had formed themselves into militias and their arrest confirmed them mostly to be of other tribes.
The group said that 80 per cent of those arrested were Christians “and not only Fulani herdsmen that were often tagged as dangerous outsiders.
´´Other people found by a team of sociologists within the cattle-grazing routes are Fulani hunters, Tuaregs and some other foreign nationals who came from poverty-stricken and water-starved countries,´´ it said. (NAN)
EEM/OPI