Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom has called on the
American government and the rest of the international community to hold the
government of Muhammadu Buhari accountable for the spate of violence in
Nigeria.
He made the call at the State Department, Washington DC,
while interacting with its officials.
Governor Ortom also said President Buhari and his government
should be held responsible if anything happens to him, citing the series of
threats he has been receiving and the attempt made on his life in March last
year as signals that the Presidency and its conspirators are after him.
He pointed out that till date, those who attacked him have
not been prosecuted.
He stated that he was at the State Department to present the
traumatized Nigerian victims’ side of the story after discovering that wrong
narratives were being circulated across the globe by the government of Buhari
to shield itself from complicity.
The Governor said the false narrative of “herder-farmer
clashes” was deliberately crafted to delay farmers’ doomsday until they were
gradually wiped out and their ancestral lands confiscated, saying “the truth is
that farming populations in Nigeria are under siege and are being decimated;
agriculture is gradually dying and food security is being threatened”.
Governor Ortom alerted the international community not to
take the insecurity in Nigeria as a distant problem, stressing that the
outbreak of war in any country will cause migration problems to America and
Britain due to their friendly immigration policies.
He said in the last seven years, the Buhari administration
has seen children rendered as orphans, farmers being displaced, schools,
hospitals and social services disrupted, without doing anything to restore
normalcy, stating that the federal government’s punitive neglect has led to
increasing number of internally displaced persons in Benue State which now
stands at 1.5 million.
The Governor therefore called on the United States of
America and the rest of the international community to take the following steps
to end the spate of violence in the country, especially in Benue state:
Demand accountability from Buhari’s government on the deaths
of innocent citizens.
Appoint a special envoy to Nigeria to deal with the
flashpoint of the violence,
Ensure that international funding of IDPs gets to Benue
State, the epicentre of the current violence as well as Plateau, Kaduna, Niger,
Zamfara and other states affected by terrorists’ attacks in the country,
Encourage the establishment of state police in Nigeria.
Responding, the US State Department officials headed by the
Under Secretary, Africa and Middle East, Padgett Douglas said “the US
government was aware of random terrorism, weaponization of religion and
importation of violence in Nigeria”, adding that since the security of the
political system was paramount to the US government, it has set up a conflict
bureau to fund IDPs in Nigeria, but he would ensure that such funding does not
go to the wrong channels, while promising to make a case for the Benue IDPs and
investigate other issues raised by Governor Ortom.
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Permanent solution is required. The solution that he is preferring is temporary.
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