President Muhammadu Buhari promised Nigerians that his administration is doing everything in its power to crush the perpetrators of the recent Plateau state unrest In a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, on Sunday in Abuja, the president maintained that to achieve success, communities must unite against these horrible senseless attacks. Mr. President challenged religious, traditional, and other community leaders on the need to preach peace and not to allow the use of their spaces for the propagation of violence and incitement to violence. He assured that the troubled communities of Plateau state are being reinforced with security presence to protect lives and property in the state “Attempts to simplify the reasons into a basic narrative may help raise donor-dollars for international NGOs, fill pages of overseas newspapers, and burnish foreign politicians’ faith credentials; but this does not increase understanding, nor offer solutions.
“If anything, simplistic theorising and finger-pointing make the situation worse.
“It is important both for Nigerians and the international community to appreciate that there is a multitude of factors attendant to these troubles.”
“While international voices and some Nigerian politicians who seek selfish personal gains from division declare the herder-farmer clashes a matter of religion, for those involved, it is entirely a matter of access to water and land.
“Herders have moved their cattle into contact with farmers for millennia.
“But increasingly, due to population pressure, escalating aridity of northern states, and climate change, they are forced to travel further south to find grazing lands,” the president said.
On the activities of IPOB, the President said, “Then, further afield in the South-East, IPOB is not struggling for freedom when they attack police stations and property, but rather committing acts of terrorism in order to steal money.
“They are equally not defending Christians, as their highly paid foreign lobbyists claim, but because the lobbyists for IPOB have duped them, some misguided foreign media and politicians believe so.
“As for Nigerians, what we need is to come together. And we must do this firstly by casting asunder those who seek to cause a division for their own financial and political gain.”
