The Presidency said it has deployed the military and other security forces to Jos, the capital of Plateau State, to put an end to the bloody clashes that has claimed the lives of scores of Nigerians in the last few weeks.
An official reaction to the violence in a statement issued by Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, indicated that the Federal Government was “on top of the situation.”
Incidentally, the Federal Government’s reaction is coming rather behind expectation, after many have lost their lives and the crisis inflicting different levels of casualties and damages.
Shehu however, noted that for peace to return to the Plateau, the communities must unite against the horrific attacks, even as he said that retributive violence was not the answer.
“While these troubled communities are being reinforced with security personnel, our religious, traditional and other community leaders must not allow the use of their spaces for the propagation of violence and incitement to violence.
“Attempts to simplify the reasons into a basic narrative may help raise donor-dollars for international NGOs, fill pages of overseas newspapers, and burnish foreign politicians’ faith credentials: but this does not increase understanding, nor offer solutions. If anything, simplistic theorizing and finger-pointing makes the situation worse.
“It is important both for Nigerians and the international community to appreciate that there are a multitude of factors attendant to these troubles.
“There is the Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorism, as well as the spate of kidnappings for ransom, transformed by some misinformed global media into a Muslim-on-Christian threat. Yet, in reality, there are no religious connotations at all when the primate purpose of these acts is to extract money.
“Then the herder-farmer clashes. While international voices and some Nigerian politicians who seek personal gain from division declare this a matter of religion, for those involved it is almost entirely a matter of access to water and land.
“Herders have moved their cattle and into contact with farmers for millennia. But, increasingly, due to population pressure, the increased aridity of northern states, and climate change they are forced to travel further south to find grazing lands.
“Then, further afield in the south-East, IPOB are not struggling for freedom when they attack police stations and property, but rather committing acts of terrorism in order to steal money.
“IPOB is not defending Christians – as their highly-paid foreign lobbyists claim – when almost every citizen of those the states they terrorize is uniformly Christian. Yet mistakenly, and because the lobbyists for IPOB have duped them, some misguided foreign media and politicians believe it so.
“As for Nigerians, what we need is to come together. And we must do this firstly and for the most part by our own hands, by casting asunder those who seek to divide us for their own nefarious financial and political gain,” the statement reads.”
Scores have been gruesomely murdered in attacks and reprisal attacks in the city in a seemingly intractable bloodbath between local groups.
State governments, particularly from the southern states had rallied teams to rescue their students from the University of Jos as the crisis escalated resulting in the death of some students.