20 May 2013

You‘ve Declared War On Northern Nigeria - NEF To President Jonathan

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.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Comment here