Boko Haram: Umar faults calls on southerners to return home

Posted by admin Boko Haram, Latest Politics Sunday, February 5th, 2012

Former military governor of Kaduna State and Chairman of the Movement for Unity and Progress, Colonel Abubakar Umar (retd)

The former military governor of Kaduna State and Chairman of the Movement for Unity and Progress, Colonel Abubakar Umar (retd) on Saturday faulted the calls by southern leaders on their kinsmen resident in the North to leave the region due to the incessant attacks on them by the militant Islamic sect, the Boko Haram.

Umar, in a three-page statement made available to newsmen in Kaduna, warned that any mass exodus of Nigerians from their places of residence in the southern and northern parts of the country to their places of origin was tantamount to giving in to the Boko Haram threat.

“Boko Haram’s ambition of creating a climate of fear, terror and panic ahead of their plan to re-invent Nigeria, seems close to reality,” he said.

The activist however appealed to religious leaders, leaders of ethnic or regional groups and politicians at all levels to “ponder on the role they wittingly or unwittingly have played in the successes Boko Haram has recorded in its bloody campaign to destabilise Nigeria.”

“One particularly unhelpful reaction came from certain Igbo leaders who advised their kinsmen in the wake of the onslaught by Boko Haram to move out of Northern Nigeria and return to their ancestral homes in the east.

“Clearly, such advice, apart from playing into the hands of the insurgents, is a wanton infringement of the civic and legal rights of the people.

“This is a right our constitution has prescribed; a right no one, not even temporary difficulties, should take away. Besides, certain situations make such ideas utterly anachronistic if not entirely illogical.

“Over 200 people were reportedly killed and over a thousand others injured with many more displaced when two long feuding communities in Ezillo council area of Ebonyi state clashed towards the end of last year.

“Where were the survivors advised to re-locate to? Truth is, Nigeria is currently in the grip of unprecedented crisis of insecurity.”

He added that Nigerians must remain unflinching in their support and cooperation to keep Nigeria as one.

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