South West rejects military occupation

Thu, Jul 25, 2019
By publisher
2 MIN READ

Politics

THE Yoruba Summit Group is constrained to express its profound dissatisfaction with the proposed measures by the Federal authorities in response to the deteriorating security situation in the South-West.

A statement by Mogaji Gboyega Adejumo, Publicity Secretary, Yoruba Summit Group, noted that the deployment of soldiers along the major inter-state motorways, as is being proposed in certain quarters, is unlikely to be any more effective for reasons that are not dissimilar to those that have rendered the army’s earlier intervention ineffective in the killing fields of the central Nigerian States of Plateau, Benue, Taraba, etc.

Worse still, the Yoruba Summit Group is shocked at the reports of the appearance on major motorways of the South-West of Miyetti Allah-affiliated Fulani vigilante groups.

The reports indicate that these Fulani vigilante groups were introduced with the view to assisting in the maintenance of security in the South-West.

The Yoruba Summit Group views the reported deployment of Fulani vigilante groups in the South-West as an insult and provocation by the same authorities, who have steadfastly, and for so long, opposed to the establishment of state police force.

This hare-brained scheme of deploying an organisation, whose members are deeply complicit in the depredations taking place across swathes of Southern and Central Nigeria, as arbiters of law and order in these same regions of the country is akin to employing the fox to guard the hen house.

Objective observers of the unfolding events in South-Western Nigeria cannot but come to the conclusion that these arrangements were deliberately put in place to humiliate the people of the South-West, or,worse, as a Trojan Horse for the attainment of yet undisclosed goals.

The Yoruba nation categorically rejects army of occupation in any part of her land.

The Yoruba Summit Group solemnly advises the Federal Government of Nigeria that the only way out of the evolving crisis is to revisit the proposals contained in the 2014 Report of the National Conference, with a view to returning the country to a decentralised federal system of government, which is the only constitutional arrangement that can facilitate – by safeguarding the interests of each ethnic nationality – the emergence of a harmonious and progressive union of our disparate ethnic nationalities, and thereby create a sustainable basis for Nigerian unity.

– July 25, 2019 10:35 GMT

Tags: