Northern elders, on Thursday, broke their silence on the slamming of
state of emergency on three states, describing the action of President
Goodluck Jonathan as an indirect declaration of war on Northern Nigeria.
The President’s action, which took the northern elders by surprise,
came barely three weeks after Jonathan accepted a roadmap from the
Northern Elders Forum, NEF, on how to end the Boko Haram insurgency.
The elders had successfully impressed upon the Presidency to raise
the Boko Haram committee to dialogue with the sect to restore elusive
peace to the region. Jonathan, who met with the NEF leadership in Abuja in April,
subsequently inaugurated the Turaki-led committee with a mandate to
broker peace with the sect and compensate their victims within a
two-month time frame.
However, after inaugurating the panel, the sect leadership rejected
the amnesty offer, saying that it was the government that should seek
amnesty for having killed its Muslim brothers. But irked by continuous bloodletting in several parts of the north,
President Jonathan on Tuesday called on the armed forces to move into the states of Borno, Yobo and Adamawa, arrest suspected terrorists and
restore peace in those places.
Many reports indicated that soldiers armed with armored tank were
already on the ground in the affected states preparatory to take out
terrorists from their strongholds scattered in the North Eastern part of
the country.
But a spokesman for the NEF, Prof Ango Abdullahi, who relayed the
position of the group, told Vanguard that they were disappointed by the
sudden change of tactic by Jonathan on how to resolve the crisis in the
north.
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