A former Governor of Kaduna State, Alhaji Balarabe Musa, has said that the menace of insecurity in the North could be traced to the advent of armed robbery in post-Civil War South East geopolitical zone of the country.
He disclosed this in an interview published by Sunday Vanguard.
Musa said:
People are wasting their time talking about insecurity in the North. Immediately after the civil war, when the Federal Government obtained the instrument of surrender from the Biafrans, armed robbery started in the East. Before that time, I used to travel from Enugu to Kaduna, from Lagos to Kaduna. I would drive in the night peacefully and arrive in Kaduna. I was doing this all over the country as a civil servant and nothing happened to me. But immediately after the civil war, armed robbery started from the South-East. Most informed Nigerians were warning the Federal Government that the rebels had surrendered but there was a problem and that if government did not do something about it, the problem would get out of hand. It was not the problem of the South-East due to the civil war and not a problem we should be happy about because the Igbo had got what they asked for as a consequence of the war! It was not a national problem but we said it could spread throughout the country, and government did not listen. Years after, there was an armed robbery in every village in Nigeria.
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The same thing applies to Boko Haram when people were deceiving themselves that it was a North-East affair. Also when the herdsmen problem started, people were calling it a northern problem. But the consequence of all these is the failure of the government to meet its responsibility to the people in the areas of addressing poverty, unemployment and the get rich mentality to the level that people are engaged in kidnapping in virtually every local government and every ward in Nigeria.
In fact, someone you know is connected to someone that abducts you. As it is today, nobody is safe for anybody to travel in Nigeria, even outside your village because of the fear of being abducted for ransom. So, we are deceiving ourselves. Instead of taking national measures when issues arise, we are taking sectional measures until the whole problem overwhelms everybody. As it is, nobody is safe today! A cleaner is not safe, the President is not safe; who then is going to save Nigeria? Did you hear of the abduction of an Islamic cleric in the North whose speciality is the reading of the Quran? Why did the abductors do that? Because they believed that if they abduct such a person, even if he doesn’t have money, there are others who would pay the ransom to free him and this is exactly what happened. So, nobody is safe because the system and the leadership have produced only thieves.