Ortom visits US, blames Buhari for insecurity

Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, has called on the United States Government and the international community to hold the President Muhammadu Buhari  accountable for the spate of violence in Nigeria.

In a statement made by his Senior Special Assistant on Diaspora Affairs, Rev Peter Ichull, Ortom also said that the All Progressives Congress-led government must be held responsible if anything happens to him.

Ortom made the call at the State Department, Washington DC, while interacting with its officials.

Ortom, who left the shore of Nigeria penultimate Sunday to the United Kingdom and later moved to the US, cited a series of threats he had been receiving and the attempt made on his life in March 2021 as signals that the “Presidency and its conspirators” were after him.

He pointed out that to date, those who attacked him were yet to be prosecuted.

He stated that he was at the State Department to present the traumatized Nigerian victims’ side of the story after discovering that “wrong narratives were being circulated across the globe by the government of Buhari to shield itself from complicity”.

The governor said the false narrative of “herder-farmer clashes” was deliberately crafted to delay “farmers’ doomsday 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 being threatened”.

Ortom alerted the international community not to take the insecurity in Nigeria as a distant problem, stressing that the outbreak of war in any country will cause migration problems to America and Britain due to their friendly immigration policies.

He said in the last seven years, the Buhari administration has seen children rendered as orphans, farmers being displaced, schools, hospitals and social services disrupted, without doing anything to restore normalcy, stating that the federal government’s punitive neglect has led to increasing number of internally displaced persons in Benue State which now stands at more than 1.5 million.

He however called on the United States of America and the rest of the international community to take concrete steps to end the spate of violence in the country, especially in Benue state.

He asked the International community to “demand accountability from Buhari’s government on the deaths of innocent citizens and that a special envoy to Nigeria to deal with the flashpoint of the violence be appointed”.

Similarly, the governor tasked the international community to fund the IDPs in Benue, the epicentre of the current violence as well as Plateau, Kaduna, Niger, Zamfara and other states affected by terrorists’ attacks in the country and also encourage the establishment of state police in Nigeria.

Responding, the US State Department officials headed by the Under Secretary, Africa and Middle East, Padgett Douglas, said, “the US government was aware of random terrorism, weaponization of religion and importation of violence in Nigeria”.

He added that since the security of the political system was paramount to the US government, it has set up a conflict bureau to fund IDPs in Nigeria.

He assured that he would 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 the governor. (The PUNCH)