Governor Nasir Ahmed El-Rufai of Kaduna State has finally opened up on the Southern Kaduna crises: “As a government, we take responsibility for whatever is happening, but people must stop making it look like the crisis only started about two years ago, when I became governor. And they must stop giving it a religious or ethnic colouration.”
“These people are bandits. We’ve arrested over 300 of them, for cattle rustling, for kidnapping and robbery. They are in custody. In one week, they killed 155 people in Zamfara state; they killed their fellow Fulani men in Zamfara. How can you take what these criminals are doing and give it an ethnic colouration? They are all over. They are rustling cattle in Katsina state; they are killing people in Kaduna state. They are bandits and we are dealing with them.”
“Some of the people instigating crises in Kaduna are conflict entrepreneurs and businessmen. The masterminds of the Southern Kaduna crises are dangerous. They are bent on making these crises fester so that they profit from it. The whole agenda is that, no one, who is not, originally from there should be there. Now, what does that mean? We are all migrants; it only depends on how far you go. Many of the tribes in Southern Kaduna came from somewhere. They are not indigenous to the place. So, it depends on how you go, to determine indigeneship. That’s why this indigene/settler issue is absolute nonsense. We should just abolish it. Anyone that lives in a place belongs to that place.”
“Our desire is to first stabilise the place. The second is prosecution. Peace is not possible without justice. The first foundation is justice. So, we are prosecuting those involved. We are arresting the masterminds of the crises and we will prosecute them. Once we have advanced in that, we will begin the peace building process.”
“In a week or two, we are going to release a comprehensive history, from 1980, to the present day, of conflicts in Southern Kaduna, which will also identify all the numbers of those killed as well as classify them across religious and ethnic divides. First, some people think this is an event in Southern Kaduna but, it is a crisis, that has been going on since 1980 and many people don’t know this. So, we want to put things in perspective; before you can understand the current one, you have to understand what happened in the past. There are people claiming there’s genocide going on in Southern Kaduna. There’s no genocide going on in Southern Kaduna. That document we will release, will answer that. At the end, we are going to show numbers and they vary. Each government agency has its own figures.”
“On the 2011 post-election violence, for instance, the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC, has its own number, the Nigerian Army has its own number, and the Nigeria Police Force has its own. We will publish the figures online because we want the whole world to read and understand.”
“There are also those that are already campaigning for 2019 and they know my stand; I am in APC because I was in the defunct Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, because I believed in what the CPC stood for and I believe in Buhari and, I won’t change; there are others who will consider me a problem, some say I’m a strategist; they give me a larger-than-life profile I don’t deserve.”