By Adeleye Kunle
Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom has urged the US government and the international community to hold Mohammadu Buhari’s government accountable for the recent spate of violence in Nigeria, TrackNews reports.
He made the call while interacting with officials at the State Department in Washington, DC.
In a statement issued to the Benue State Governor by Rev. Peter Ichull on Diaspora Affairs, he quoted the governor as saying that the APC government of President Buhari and his government would be held accountable if anything happened to him.
He cited a series of threats he has received and an attempt on his life in March of last year as evidence that the Presidency and its conspirators are after him, noting that those who attacked him have not been prosecuted to date.
He stated that he was at the State Department to present the traumatized Nigerian victims’ side of the story after discovering that the Buhari administration was spreading false narratives around the world in order to shield itself from complicity.
The governor claimed that the false narrative of “herder-farmer clashes” was purposefully created to postpone farmers’ extinction until they were gradually wiped out and their ancestral lands confiscated.
“The truth is that farming populations in Nigeria are under siege and are being decimated; agriculture is gradually dying, and food security is under threat,” the governor says.
Ortom warned the international community not to dismiss Nigeria’s insecurity as a distant problem, emphasizing that the outbreak of war in any country would result in migration problems to America and Britain due to their welcoming immigration policies.
He claimed that in the last seven years, the Buhari administration has seen children become orphans, farmers displaced, schools, hospitals, and social services disrupted, with no action taken to restore normalcy, and that the federal government’s punitive neglect has resulted in an increase in the number of internally displaced persons in Benue State, which now stands at more than 1.5 million.
As a result, the governor urged the United States of America and the rest of the international community to take the following steps to put an end to the country’s violence, particularly in Benue state.
He urged the international community to hold Buhari’s government accountable for the deaths of innocent citizens and to appoint a special envoy to Nigeria to deal with the flashpoint of the violence.
Similarly, the governor charged the international community with funding IDPs in Benue State, the epicenter of the current violence, as well as Plateau, Kaduna, Niger, Zamfara, and other states affected by terrorist attacks in Nigeria, and he also encouraged the establishment of state police in Nigeria.
Responding, US State Department officials led by Under Secretary for Africa and the Middle East Padgett Douglas stated that “the US government was aware of random terrorism, religious weaponization, and the importation of violence in Nigeria.”
He added that because the US government prioritizes the security of the political system, it has established a conflict bureau to fund IDPs in Nigeria, and he promised to ensure that such funding does not go to the wrong channels, while promising to make a case for the Benue IDPs and investigate other issues raised by Ortom.
