PRESIDENT BUHARI VOWS TOUGHER ACTIONS AGAINST TERRORISTS
Tougher days await bandits and terrorists in the Northwest and Northcentral, President Muhammadu Buhari said yesterday.
He said a review of security operations and strategies was ongoing.
The President spoke at the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
He said: “I will like us to reflect on what the situation was before we came in. How many local government areas were under the control of terrorists in the Northeast?
“In the Southsouth, we all know what the situation was; now we have relative peace. With the resources at our disposal, we have done very well.
“People are very forgetful.
“Our main problem now is in the Northwest and Northcentral. People are killing one another in these places, what for? We are going to be very tough.”
Also yesterday, President Buhari said more Nigerians were now aware that the Boko Haram insurgency has neither religious nor ethnic underpinning.
He spoke while receiving the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karin Ahmad Khan, at Presidential Villa.
A statement by presidential spokesman Femi Adesina quotes the President as saying: “God is justice. You can’t kill innocent people, and shout; Allah Akbar (God is great). It’s either you don’t know that God at all, or you are simply being stupid.
“To say Western education is unacceptable (Haram) is very fraudulent. That is why we are fighting them, and educating the people. And we are succeeding a lot.
“We came to office when things were very bad, but we are educating the people. Education is fundamental.
“Religion and ethnicity are out of it. Some people have just made it a lifestyle to cause confusion, destruction and death.”
The ICC prosecutor said extremism was like cancer, which spreads and can also recede, noting that what Boko Haram does in collaboration with the Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP) “is the perversion of religion.”
He said the ICC believes in complementarity, “which promotes collaboration as against confrontation”.
He urged Nigeria and other Sahel/Lake Chad basin countries to get the United Nations Security Council to refer the atrocities committed by the terrorist groups operating in the region to ICC for investigation and trial.
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