About 3,000
persons were killed in Zamfara State by bandits in the last two years,
with over N1.2 billion paid as ransom to secure the release of residents
abducted during the period.
This was disclosed by a former
Senator Sa’idu Dansadau during a press conference in Abuja yesterday. He
said the killings took place between June 2016 and June 2018.
He said 682 villages and towns were
sacked by the bandits causing residents to flee to neighbouring states
of Katsina and Kebbi. The former lawmaker said 2,706 farms were also
destroyed, just as 13,838 cattle, and 11,088 sheep and goats were
looted.
Reeling out the statistics of the
banditry, Dansadau said of the 682 villages and towns destroyed and
deserted, residents were only able to return to 374 of them because of
the intensity of the crimes. He said the bandits during the period under
review stole motorcycles totalling 2,244.
Dansadau, who urged President
Muhammadu Buhari to come to the aid of the residents of the state, said
he arrived at these figures by multiplying the figures obtained from
Dansadau state constituency by 22 other constituencies affected by
banditry.
He said of the 25 state
constituencies in Zamfara, only three had not suffered from similar or
worse losses occasioned by the activities of the bandits.
During the briefing, the former
senator provided documents containing the names and villages of people
killed, names of people abducted and the ransom paid, as well the list
of villages destroyed, at least that the Dansadau state constituency.
He urged former Head of State
retired General Yakubu Gowon to lead other members of the Council of
State to plead with President Buhari to declare an emergency rule in
Zamfara state.
“Any remedial measure taken by the
federal government short of declaring an emergency will not produce any
positive result,” the former lawmaker said.
He said the military operation in
Zamfara State is not yielding result because a section of the most
senior functionaries of the Abdulaziz Yari-led government are
“informants of the criminals.” Dansadau didn’t provide any evidence to
back up this claim.
He said the fact that Governor Yari
had since resigned as chief security officer of the state “depicts his
incapacity, unsuitability, and impropriety to continue to function as
governor and expect people of Zamfara State to be safe from the
criminalities of these terrorists.”
The former lawmaker said he’s aware
of the Supreme Court judgment that said the president can’t remove
elected governors and their deputies excerpt as provided in Sections 143
and 144 and Sections 188 and 189 of the 1999 Constitution (as
amended).
“We are not requesting President
Buhari to remove Abdulaziz Yari from office by declaring state of
emergency but to suspend all elected public officers in the stare for
six months to enable Major General Abubakar Maikobi, the Force Commander
of Operation Whirl Stroke II with operational Headquarters in Gusau,
Zamfara State, consult widely in executing the military operation which
Governor Yari refused to do “in spite of all entreaties from different
quarters.
In a letter addressed to Buhari,
dated June 18, 2018, entitled “Re-request to take extraordinary measures
in accordance with the constitution to halt the high level of mass
killings in Zamfara State,” Dansadau said emergency rule in the state is
inevitable because of Yari’s inability unlike his counterparts in
Katsina, Kaduna, Kebbi, Niger states “who brought the situation under
control” in their states because of their proactive approach.
Daily Trust reports that this letter
is a reminder to an earlier one with the same subject dated June 14,
2016, written to Buhari by Dansadau.
He said the governors of these
states with borders with Zamfara substantially reduced the banditry in
their states “they (governors) reside in and work from their states,
consult with their elders, and traditional institutions.”
He, however, lamented that Zamfara’s
situation “has gone out of control because the governor would do none
of those things.” He said the inability of the police to safeguard the
people of Zamfara may be linked to the “disconnect” between them and the
governor “who is rarely in Zamfara to provide leadership as the chief
security of the state.
The former lawmaker renewed his
appeal to the president to “invoke his powers under Section 305 (3) (c)
(d) and (f) & (5) of the Constitution and declare State of Emergency
in Zamfara state to deal with the rampant, horrific, indiscriminate and
daily killings and violations of innocent people of Zamfara by an
emboldened band of criminals in order to restore normalcy.”
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