Dr. Isuwa Dogo, Public Relations Officer of Middle Belt Forum (MBF), in this interview with JOY ANIGBOGU speaks on the state of insecurity in the nation, former president Olusegun Obasanjo’s letter, and what the Federal Government should do to restore peace. Excerpts:
What is your view about the suspensions of the Ruga programme by the federal government few days ago because we know that your organization Middle Belt form, PANDEF, Afenifere and Ohaneze have actually opposed the project?
We do not want the name suspension because if you use the name suspension it means that you have plan of resurrecting it with the same name or substituting it with something else. We are not talking of suspension but we are talking about abandoning the idea completely, not to mention it, nor use any name, method or in whatever style. We are not going to accept it because it is not in congress with what we want. Our views have been stated as what should be done. It is an aspect of neocolonialism, that kind of hegemony, that aspect of domination. It is a situation where you want to take peoples land by force, without regard to how they would survive. We will not sit down and simply allow that to happen to our people. The government is planning, total annihilation and extermination of the ethnic nationalities of these areas, to forcefully acquire their lands.
As I am talking to you mow, a lot of the peoples land have been taken and they are not taken by Fulanis and as far as we are concerned these are terrorists. They killed a lot of people in Benue, Kaduna, Adamawa, Taraba, Plateau, Borno and other places. They are not herdsmen and you cannot call them what does not exist. There is nothing like farmers/herders clash and I can stand on mountain top to denounce that. There is no single iota of truth to say you want to resolve farmers/ herders clash and you want to provide a soft landing for the herdsmen.
Where are the farms that they go to trample upon and farmers engage them and they have disagreement. These are terrorists and they know it. They came with their sophisticated weapons, kill our people, take over their lands, rape our women, cut pregnant women stomach open, take the fetus and divide it into pieces and someone will call it Fulani herdsmen/farmers clash. The government knows them, they see them. Nobody has been arrested, tried or put in prison. The first thing that we want government t do is to get rid of these people from our land, arrest them, jail them or even try them.
It is then that we would know the government wants to do something. We die in thousands on a regular basis; we cannot go to our farms anymore. We cannot walk around freely. It is only when there is a massive killing that the government talks about or the media carry it. We want government to wipe out terrorists from our land. It is not issue of middle belt, it is a national issue.
Government said it did not force any State to get involved that the 12 States that it wanted to pilot actually requested for it. What is your view?
When there is no communication, or civilized communication there could be hidden agenda. The issue of ranching is not new. There was this proposal of ranching even under Jonathan, and the ranching as that time meant that there would be a chain or multiplier effect, where you can have both forward and backward linkages. You have massive land; you have local and foreign investors. It is simple for any business man to want to invest.
It is not something that you wake you and want to impose on people. The investors would do their feasibility studies. It would also be beneficial to the country at large. It would give employment opportunities and people will have good meat to eat. There will be adequate manure to cultivate other crops. This aspect of roaming about with the cattle make them emaciate that you don’t get adequate meat from it. In the developed world you don’t see people roam about with cattle.
Ranching is good. If the local people want to sell their land for ranching, they would be adequately compensated and if they want to get involved as partners they can be accommodated. It is not the business of government. Government is only required to provide enabling atmosphere and laws to enable local and foreign inventors get involved, and that is exactly what Benue and Taraba States have done and the laws are there. Saying it was optional did not even make sense.
The States that they want to use did they contact the locals to know if they are interested.
Is government supposed to be sponsoring private business and sinking billions of naira of tax payers’ money to assist anyone? We have lived with Fulanis for years and the local Fulanis do not have any of these attitudes. These people are terrorists and it beats my imagination that government would encourage terrorism and has refused to arrest them or deter them in any form from taking over this country.
What do you think is the solution to the insecurity in the country?
The solution is to arrest all the people that have occupied our land and restore the local people back to their lands, compensate them, accommodate them, beef up security around them, arrest the terrorists and drive them out of Nigeria. Government should ensure that our boarders are adequately policed with immigration, and people don’t just enter the country without proper entry permit. People are smuggling sophisticated weapons into the country and inflicting damage on the citizenry and they still have the audacity to sit in radio and television stations, claiming that they must be protected.
Where were they all these years? Does government need a Doctor of Philosophy (PHD) to tell them that these people are killers? Settle our people flush out the terrorists and come out with programmes for investment in ranching and all of us would be winners. Now that farmers cannot go to farms, only God knows the level of famine that would catch up with us.
What is your position on the comment of President Muhammadu Buhari, that those who have criticized his government for inability to curb insecurity are unpatriotic?
Nigerians should be thanking former President Olusegun Obasanjo for that letter. In fact that letter was the most important letter that he has ever written. He was very courageous to have written that letter and it is because he was concerned that he wrote. Anyone who saw anything wrong with that letter is the one that should be called unpatriotic. We cannot continue to pretend in this country that all is well.
Nigeria is drifting into a state of anarchy and it is high time we told ourselves the truth. This country should as a matter of urgency go back to the 2014 Constitutional Conference, and look at the content. The 2014 confab is very important for us as a nation to consider the things that we must do for a continued co-existence.
Nigerians are dying every day and it is just inhumane for anyone to want to trivialize that, and that is why I said earlier that the letter from Obasanjo came from a concerned Nigeria, someone who desired our continued unity and diversities.
The post Insecurity: Nigerians Should Thank Obasanjo For Speaking Out –Dogo appeared first on Independent Newspapers Nigeria.
Source: Independent
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