By Abdullahi Alhassan Kaduna
The National Institute of Public Relations has concluded a one-day security meeting and executive member selection in Kaduna state by urging Nigerians not to negotiate or pay ransom to armed bandits who are carrying out attacks and kidnapping victims for ransom across the country.
Retired Group Captain Sadiq Garba Shehu, a first paper discussant at a meeting with the theme “insecurity in Northern Nigeria, Implications for the Nation’s Economy,” expressed this viewpoint. Individuals and governments should stop negotiating with bandits, according to the security expert, because the money they spend on arms is used to carry out attacks and kidnap innocent people.
The Chairman of the National Institute of Public Relations, NIPR, Mallam Bashir Chedi, said in his welcome address that “insecurity and its damning consequences to the economy the growing climate of uncertainty imposed by the current challenge of insecurity have generally raised concerns, particularly about social exclusion, poverty, and hunger in northern Nigeria.”
“Faced with a pervasive threat to socio-economic life for more than a decade, acute food insecurity now poses a greater threat to an already traumatized northern Nigeria economy strangled by banditry and perennial farmer-herder clashes, among other predicaments,” he said.
The Occasion’s special guest speaker “The banditry that has gained momentum in the past few years evolved from the activities of cattle rustlers who expanded their scope and resorted to other forms of criminality, notably kidnapping citizens for ransom,” said Kaduna state Governor Mallam Nasiru Ahmed Elrufai, represented by Honorable Commissioner of Security and Home Affairs, Mr. Samuel Aruwan.
The state government will not engage in dialogue with bandits or pay ransoms to kidnappers; paying ransom only feeds the problem and puts more people at risk; rather than profiting from their crimes, criminals should face the state’s coercive instruments and face justice.
Banditry has also led to the near-total collapse of the local economy, which is primarily supported by crop and livestock farming activities of bandits in these areas have deprive residents of their primary source of sustenance and disrupted the operation of the usually dynamic weekly markets.
Aside from cattle rustling, the previously mentioned targeting of farmers by bandits has eroded the economic viability of rural communities, precipitating a food crisis, resulting in billions of naira in losses to the rural economy.
” Am appealing to those carrying this attacks, what have the innocent People do to them? If they have any complain meet the government for resolving the issues not attacking innocent people who are carrying out their legitimate business”.