el-Rufai stated on the 6th of December, 2016, when addressing reporters in his office as governor, stated that most of the armed herdsmen come from Niger, Cameroun, Chad, Mali and Senegal to perpetrate the dastardly acts, had been located and paid them compensation.
Governor Nasir El-Rufai Southern Kaduna Peoples Union (SOKAPU), have accused Governor Nasir El-Rufai of paying Fulani herdsmen to k*ll people of the region.
The people alleged that the governor empowered foreign herdsmen with funds to perpetrated k**lings in southern part of the State, calling for the interrogation of three others they said since the emergence of el-Rufai as governor in 2015, Adara people “and indeed Southern Kaduna communities have suffered the greatest social disruptions, economic deprivations and sustained insecurity of their lifetime.”
According to them, government of the day is neither heard nor practically seen to be genuinely interested in peaceful coexistence or security of lives and properties of the citizens of southern Kaduna.
These were contained in a memorandum submitted by Southern Kaduna Peoples Union, SOKAPU, to the judicial commission of inquiry set up by the state government to look into the incessant crises in Kachia, Kajuru, Chikun Local Government Areas and surrounding communities.
The union added that “on the contrary, the actions and pronouncements of el-Rufai’s administration have institutionalised open discrimination, political and administrative exclusion and biases and full scale subjugation of the indigenous people of Kachia, Kajuru and Chikun Local Government Areas, and indeed the whole of southern Kaduna, which have destroyed peace and security and instituted a regime of violence and crises in the communities.”
SOKAPU further stated that “el-Rufai stated on the 6th of December, 2016, when addressing reporters in his office as governor, stated that most of the armed herdsmen come from Niger, Cameroun, Chad, Mali and Senegal to perpetrate the dastardly acts, had been located and paid them compensation.
“Governor el-Rufai on Friday, 15th February, 2019, said during a press briefing at Sir Kashim Ibrahim House that ‘just yesterday, I got a report of the k**ling of 66 Fulanis at Maro in Kajuru Local Government.’ The governor later changed this to 130 Fulanis k*lled. This we believe is deliberately designed to cause a reprisal and destabilise the local government during elections.
“Over the years, violence has been imported into the communities specified in the commission’s TORs by external forces, especially Hausa Fulani intent on imposing Sharia and Political suppression of Southern Kaduna. These at**cks and acts of violence are not herder/farmer conflicts.”
The natives explained that the Muslim Fulani herdsmen at**ck on the Southern Kaduna people began in Kidache in Chawai Chiefdom, Kauru Local Government Area, in 2010 as a spill-over of the Muslim Fulani Herdsmen at**cks in Plateau State, adding, “Since then, the terror at**cks by the Fulani have become generalized and an out-and-out war on the communities of Southern Kaduna.”
SOKAPU further lamented that “previously, the conflicts with herdsmen were over grazing and water sources for livestock. These conflicts have drastically changed due to an increasing quest by Fulani to take up land belonging to agrarian communities, and to settle and become agro-pastoralists. Climate change and environmental degradation have combined to push the Fulani from their traditional northern habitats to the Middle Belt region.
“Hausa Fulani governments in the north have failed to develop pasture resources for migratory cattle rearers who happen to be almost entirely Fulani. The earlier efforts to create grazing reserves by the defunct Northern Regional Government have not been continued by the successive northern state governments. On the contrary, there are now efforts to encourage and support Fulani herdsmen to take over the land of indigenous and autochthonous communities in the Middle Belt by force if possible, by supporting them in inter-communal conflicts in the name of religion.
“The National Assembly even entertained a bill for setting up grazing reserves, which proposes to take over land in any place in Nigeria to give to Fulani from any part of Africa, in the name of creating grazing reserves. Since southern Nigerian communities do not recognize and operate the Land Use Act, and since the northern Hausa communities will not give their land to the Fulani cattle rearers, only lands belonging to Middle Belt communities are the target for such patently ethnocentric policies,” they said.
