A pan-Yoruba socio-cultural organisation, Yoruba World Congress (YWC), says subsuming the Amotekun Corps in the South-West under the Nigeria Police Force would weaken the corps and defeat its purpose.
The YWC stated this in a Sunday statement signed by its President-General, Prof. Banji Akintoye.
The group hailed Ondo and Oyo state governors, Rotimi Akeredolu and Seyi Makinde respectively, for resisting calls to subsume the corps under the police.
This is just as it called for all Yoruba people home and abroad to resist any attempt to derail the regional security outfit by bringing it under police control.
YWC statement read, “Amotekun, as rightly posited by the governors, is an independent security outfit necessitated by the clear danger of murderous herdsmen internationally accepted as terrorists, heartless bandits and sundry criminals who have turned Yorubaland into killing fields.
“It was also the failure of the existing security architecture to tackle the menace and secure life and property in the South-West region that led to the clamour for Amotekun by the generality of our people.
“It makes no sense, therefore, to put the same Amotekun under an organisation that has proved incapable and inadequate to provide the much-needed security in the first place.
“Putting Amotekun under the Nigeria Police hierarchy is a ploy to weaken it and sabotage the strident clamour of the people of the South-West for peace and security in their homeland.
“It must be noted that the entire South-West rose like one man to demand and support Amotekun and to resist all efforts to truncate its birth.
“We, therefore, see the efforts to twist the hands of Yoruba governors to whittle down Amotekun as a continuation of the same ploy to abort this regional security outfit.
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“We also call on all Yoruba sons and daughters at home and abroad to stand up in support of Amotekun and speak out against efforts or plans to muffle it.”