Fulani youths tells FG to declare state of emergency in Benue

By YUSUFU IDEGU, Jos

A Fulani socio-cultural organization, the Jonde Jam Fulani Youths Association of Nigeria (JAFYAN), has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to declare a state of emergency in Benue State.

The group said the call has become necessary in view of the leadership failure of the state government.

The national president of the organisation, Alhaji Saidu Maikano, who made the call in a press conference in Jos, the Plateau state capital on Thursday said: “The governor of Benue state, Samuel Ortom, has completely failed to manage the state in view of his (inability) to unite the ethnic nationalities in the state.

“Governor Ortom has shown his hatred for Fulani ethnic group in several ways by stigmatising them in negative light thereby painting them black in the eyes of other ethnic groups in the country.

“Ortom particularly enacted anti-grazing laws particularly to drive Fulani cattle breeders out of his state in flagrant abuse of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

“As if that is not enough, he set up a special task force to go after Fulani herders, including those that are just passing through Benue state to another destination outside the state.

“The task force now go to the boundary with Nasarawa state to arrest Fulani herders, force them into Benue state territory so as to criminalise them using the anti-open grazing law even when it is obvious there is no single Fulani herder in Benue State.

“We discovered of recent that the Benue state task force has taken interest in extorting Fulani herders by forcing them to pay in millions of naira on a mere allegation of having encroached on the territory of Benue State. This is to a level that the task force can go to the bush to hunt for Fulani herders in neighboring states just to extort money from them under the guise of enforcing anti-open grazing law.

“We consider the anti-open grazing law in Benue state as an abuse of human rights because it touches on the freedom of the Fulani ethnic extraction.

“How on earth will a governor be allowed to make a law for a particular ethnic group? And even as the governor has succeeded in driving herders away from his state, he often accused Fulani of any crime in Benue state. He recently stage-manage an assassination attempt just to malign the Fulani and also instigate other Nigerians to hate the Fulani.

“From these open hatred for the Fulani herders, Ortom has, rather than help in uniting ethnic nationalities in his state has painted the Fulani black and he has been hanging them.

“The Fulani are not safe in Nigeria as long as Ortom remains as the governor of Benue state. We therefore call on President Buhari to declare a state of emergency in the state so as to bring somebody that will govern the state in accordance to the dictates of the constitution of the federal republic of Nigeria.

“It is glaring from the recent utterances of Gov Ortom, and the activities of his task force, that he is about to set the country ablaze and jeopardise the unity of the country which President Buhari has been laboring to build.

“We also called on the international community to compelled Gov Ortom to repeal his anti-open grazing law and stop his national show of hatred for Fulani ethnic extraction,” the group said.