Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai has said that he does not share the call by Sheikh Ahmad Gumi for amnesty and compensation to bandits as a way of ending the insecurity in parts of the North.
Dateline Nigeria reports that Gumi, an Islamic scholar based in Kaduna, has been visiting Fulani settlements in an effort to end the rising cases of cattle rustling and banditry in several northern communities.
However, El-Rufai, in an interview with the BBC Hausa service, said “I don’t share that (Gumi’s) opinion. Which compensation? For which offence? How can those who killed people and razed their houses be the ones asking for compensation?
“[Sheikh] Ahmad Gumi is my friend and we have talked. I told him that most of these Fulani herders have no religion. That’s what we talked about. But I don’t share his idea of forgiving the bandits because no wrong was done to them.”
The Kaduna governor also disagreed with some of his colleagues in the North West who are pushing for a peace deal with the bandits as the best way of ending banditry.
“Some of us want us to negotiate a peace deal, some of us said no, we should fight them. That is the problem. The fact is a herder used to getting between N10,000 and N100,000 in a year after selling his cow, and is now getting N1million, he will not stop. Whoever tells me that the Fulani man that started kidnapping and receiving millions, will agree to go back to his old ways, is only deceiving himself,” El-Rufai said.
He also lamented the absence of synergy among the most affected states. “Some of the governors believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and forgive them and they will stop the attacks. The governor of Zamfara State, for instance, thinks if we sit with the terrorists we can get them to stop the attacks, so there is no synergy among us. We don’t share this belief.”
El-Rufai said “If we [the affected states] fail to team up, and the federal government refuses to give us air and ground troops as well as the police to enter the bushes and kill all these terrorists at once, the menace will continue.”
He however said Kaduna and Niger states are working together in synergy. “Every day, our commissioner communicates with them, the governor calls me from time to time and we compare notes. But that is not happening with the other states.”
