By George Mgbeleke <\/p>\n
Even as the Minister for Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, made a sensational and bombastic claim that over 13,000 terrorists have been killed, with 17,000 others arrested since the inauguration of the President Bola Tinubu administration, the government is told straight to its face by the HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA) that the tissues of lies and PROPAGANDA are no longer believable given the availability of provable evidence of the presence of hundreds of armed and sophisticated Islamic and Fulani terrorists threatening to overrun states such as Niger, Kwara, Borno and Kebbi states in recent times. <\/p>\n
HURIWA reminded the information minister that in these days of widespread information technology, the possibility of this analogue government convincingly spreading half-truths and unsubstantiated tales by moonlight on a theme as straightforward as the practical attacks by terrorists targeting civilian and military persons is no longer workable.<\/p>\n
The Rights group said the only way to convince Nigerians that government is winning the war on terror is to give Nigerians overwhelming evidence that the thousands of Fulani terrorists now moving around and about freely in Katsina, Kebbi, Zamfara, Niger and Kwara have all or at least substantially degraded, decimated and crushed decisively by the combined forces of the military, police and armed vigilantes. <\/p>\n
“Anything less than this demand for data and verifiable evidence is not acceptable just as Nigerians have become too sophisticated to believe those empty rhetorical tales by moonlight that emanate from the desk of the information minister of Nigeria. Can this minister of information and national Orientation tell Nigerians who in the Nigeria Army ordered the military troops to withdraw by 3 am from the government Girls boarding school in Kebbi State just few hours before the terrorists struck and abducted 25 girls and killed the Vice Principal? Is this minister not aware that the Kebbi State governor said the Army troops stationed in the affected school was surreptitiously withdrawn only two or one hour before the terrorists struck at the school even when the state government provided hard-core intelligence about the plot of the terrorists to invade and attack the schoolgirls to the hierarchy of the armed forces of Nigeria? <\/p>\n
However, the information minister Alhaji Idris gave the figures on Friday evening, during an interview on Channels Television\u2019s Politics Today.
\n\u201cI think sometimes, we forget about some of the successes that we have recorded in the fight against these bandits, criminals, and some of these jihadists.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve had a lot of progress in that direction. From May of 2023 to date, over 13,500 of these criminals \u2013 these are figures from the security agencies \u2013 have been neutralised, or taken out of our society.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver 17,000 have been apprehended. Many of them, even as we speak today, some of them have had their days in court, some of them have been sentenced,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The minister further argued that the President was \u201cdeeply saddened\u201d by the killings in the country, adding that no one should lose their lives regardless of their faith.<\/p>\n
HURIWA counters the unverifiable and untrue claims by the information minister by citing the dozen cases of attacks by terrorists and mass abductions of students in a Catholic school in Niger state, a government Girls boarding school in Kebbi State, the deadly terrorists attack on the Christ Apostolic Church in Kwara state, the attack by terrorists on soldiers mobilised to rescue the kidnapped Kebbi schoolgirls and the slaughter of a General of the Nigeria Army by Islamic terrorists in Borno State. All these dastardly attacks and horrendous crimes against by the terrorists happened with the past week. <\/p>\n
“What does this minister of information and national Orientation take Nigerians for? Does he think we are zombies who lack wisdom and discernment that we are not aware that even the federal government is in a panicky fear of the terrorists to the cowardly extent that it shut down all the federal Unity Colleges all across Nigeria? <\/p>\n
“Is there no limit to spreading brazen falsehoods and outright lies by government officials? Does government officials think that they can just spread misinformation as the official narrative regarding the widening spectres of terrorism in Nigeria? Why are states in the North shutting down schools? These states are doing so because nobody believes that the federal government has the capacity or political will to confront terrorists and eliminate these monsters and blood cuddling mass killers who are embraced by government by way of rehabilitation and reintegration of the so-called repentant terrorists. <\/p>\n
HURIWA is once more asking President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to resign immediately if he can’t protect schoolgirls and school children from terrorists. The constitutional duty of the president and governors is to protect lives and property of the citizens and if these office holders have continuously failed to discharge this constitutional obligation on them, why hang on in offices that you have failed and the country is rapidly becoming a failed state? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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