The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity , Garba Shehu, on Sunday evening said President Muhammadu Buhari has promised that his regime will not allow any ethnic or religious group to stoke up hatred and violence against other groups. Shehu disclosed this in a statement titled “ President Buhari condemns reported cases of ethnic violence in the country. ” The statement came at a time there was reported case of ethnic violence in Shasa, in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital. The statement read , “ President Muhammadu Buhari has vowed that his government will protect all religious and ethnic groups, whether majority or minority in line with its responsibility under the constitution. “ In a reaction to reports of breakout of violence in some parts of the country by some ethnic and sectional groups , President Buhari warned that the government will not allow any ethnic or religious group to stoke up hatred and violence against other groups . “ The President condemned such violence and gave assurance that his government will act decisively to stop the spread of any such violence. “ He appealed to religious and traditional leaders as well governors and other elected leaders across the country to join hands with the Federal Government to ensure that communities in their domain are not splintered along ethnic and other primordial lines. ”

Ahmad Gumi, a prominent Islamic cleric, says herdsmen had to take up arms to defend themselves against brutality, since the government neglected them. The cleric had described bandits as very shy people, who are only interested in their cows. Speaking when he featured on Politics on Sunday, a programme on TVC, he also blamed Nigerians for contributing to insecurity. Gumi was responding to a question on whether political leaders could be blamed for refusing to address the complaints of bandits about extrajudicial killings by law enforcement agents, as witnessed during the #EndSARS protests, which kicked against police harassment. “I blame everybody, from the President to you, the man speaking. I blame everybody. It is a combination of small, small issues here and there that produced this monster. Everybody is at fault. I don’t want any Nigerian to exonerate himself,” Gumi said. “The media plays a part by polarising the nation. Even journalists helped in stirring this ethnic chauvinism we see all over the country. Government has neglected these people all along and they were using a hammer to kill a fly. “To the southern Nigerians, #EndSARS is not a reason to understand why these herdsmen took up weapons. They were brutalised by the military, not only the police, for a lot of time, and not only in this regime. We should not be surprised.”

Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed has reacted to critics of his statement purportedly supporting Fulani herders to carry AK47 rifle, saying that his statement was not intended to support criminality but to put the herders sufferings in perspective. The Senior Special Assistant on media, Muhktar Gidado made this known on Sunday in a press release he sent to Vanguard. According to him, the primary objective of the governor was to avert the dangerous prospect of nationwide backlash as tempers were flaring up, and given that the phenomenon of inter-ethnic migration is a national pastime involving all ethnic groups in Nigeria. “First, at no time did the Governor set out to justify criminality by anyone, no matter the person’s ethnic nationality. Rather, he admonished us, in the interest of national unity, to avoid wholesale branding of any ethnic group as it is inconceivable that any one group can be made up of only criminals. By extension, the Governor made it abundantly clear that it will be inappropriate to label any one tribe based on the crimes of a few members of the ethnic group. “Second, to the extent that not every herdsman is a criminal, the Governor’s reference to AK47 was simply to put in perspective, the predicament and desperation of those law-abiding Fulani herdsmen who, while carrying out their legitimate cow-rearing business, have become serial victims of cattle rustling, banditry, kidnapping and assassination…….As a constitutionalist which he has proved over time, all through his political career, Governor Bala Mohammed will be the last person to advocate a subversion of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He did not do so in the past; he will not do so today. “Third, Governor Bala Mohammed’s description of forests, as “no man’s land”, (please read as gift of nature), is a carry-over from his own geo-political environment where a pastoralist could set up camp, in any forest, for a few weeks without causing any uproar or opposition. To interpret such a temporary stay as a form of ‘land grab’ by the Fulani herdsmen is completely incorrect. Bala Mohammed is very familiar with the Land Use Act, including the criteria for land acquisition and cannot therefore seek to undermine the statute which, as Governor, he has sworn to uphold. “Fourth, the Governor would want it placed on record that his statement was intended to caution all stakeholders to guard against escalating the tension, just as many patriotic stakeholders, particularly from the North, have ben working round the clock to avert reprisal actions that could throw the entire country into a cauldron of unimaginable proportions,” the statement reads. The governor further called for reasoned circumspection in handling inter-ethnic hostility of the nature that the ejection of herdsmen from parts of the country is degenerating into. “It is his fervent wish that, together, all stakeholders will work towards re-establishing inter-ethnic trust and harmony that has been so badly dented, within the past few weeks or months,” the statement adds.

The national secretary of Fulani socio-cultural group, Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, Alhaji Saleh Alhassan, has vowed that the group is ready to retaliate the killing of Fulani herders in any part of the country. In an interview with The Punch, Alhassan also said the group would resist any attempt to forceful eviction of herders out of the south-west region. According to him, “Nobody has the right to evict herdsmen. If you say you are going to evict us, we will resist eviction. We have been surviving in harsh environments. If we do not resist, we will be wiped out of the planet. “If you kill a herder, don’t go and sleep, we will revisit you, and it’s not because we hate your tribe. People attack herders, and in one way or the other, herders have found a way to retaliate,” Alhassan said. He added that “All those who travelled to the Benin Republic and others are coming back home. All those saying they will bar foreign herders from entering Nigeria are just playing to the gallery because if they are aware of the ECOWAS Protocols, they would know they cannot chase them away. That is why the position of the Bauchi State Governor is the true position. You have no right to evict anybody from any part of the country. “Our number has increased recently because of the tension in Ghana and Benin Republics. The ones in Benin Republic have integrated with the Yoruba in such a way that they speak the language. They were initially living in the South-West, and they are coming back. “They expected a reaction from us, maybe by way of attacking other ethnic nationalities. But that is wrong because the herders they are attacking are the innocent herders. Are the criminals representing anybody? They are doing their criminal enterprise. Our own pain is that the people who are supposed to know are pretending as if they don’t know” he added.