Members of the North East Governors’ Forum have expressed concern over a new pattern of kidnappings in the region, which they regard as worrisome.
Governor Babagana Zulum of Borno State, the forum’s Chairman, revealed this on Friday during his opening address at the governors’ meeting at the Government House in Gombe.
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“Since its inception two years ago here in Gombe, the forum has proven to be a formidable avenue for social cohesion and a rallying point for us in the North East to collectively discuss and identify our common challenges, as well as to propose pragmatic and viable ways and means of addressing these challenges,” he said.
“As we have comprehensively articulated in previous meetings, the most prominent of these daunting challenges include insecurity – largely characterised by the Boko Haram insurgency, the issue of banditry and kidnapping, which unfortunately is taking on a worrying dimension, cattle rustling and other forms of criminality, as well as endemic socio-economic issues such as youth restiveness, massive unemployment, and extreme poverty, among others.”
According to the governor of Borno, the Boko Haram threat is gradually dissipating as a result of purposeful efforts informed by credible intelligence that some of the combatants are contemplating repentance and surrender.
He added that the governors used the death of the militants’ leader, Abubakar Shakau, to implement a non-kinetic strategy to terminate the insurgency by encouraging and incentivizing repentant fighters.
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While the non-kinetic method was successful, resulting in the surrender of thousands of terrorists, the governor declared that there was a need to take the fight to the unrepentant ones.
He grieved that, after more than a decade of insurgency, the inhabitants of the region had just begun to breathe a sigh of peace, only for abduction to become the new choice of business for criminals.
“There is a compelling need for us to take a more critical look at the emergent issue of kidnapping, which has become a crime of choice for criminals, and is becoming rampant and widespread,” said Zulum.
“It is, therefore, a matter of strategic necessity to essentialise the issue of kidnapping and come up with implementable measures to deal with this element of criminality before it is too late. In this respect, we will obviously be guided by our respective attorneys-general, who should initiate the appropriate legal framework to deal with the problem.”
