Southern, Middle Belt leaders petition Tinubu on restructuring

Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum has petitioned President Bola Tinubu on urgent steps to restructure Nigeria for true federalism.

The body stated that it has become expedient and instructive to legitimise multi-level policing for states and communities to provide security for their people.

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The letter, jointly signed by Edwin Clark, Ayo Adebanjo, Dr Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, Dr Pogu Bitrus and Emmanuel Ibok-Essien, insisted that only restructuring could stop the bloodletting on the Plateau.

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The correspondence reads in part: “The joy expressed by you in your New Year message in welcoming your compatriots to this brand new year 2024 cannot be understood or shared by several millions of our countrymen and women, particularly the people of Mangu, Bokkos, Barkin-Ladi Local Government Areas of Plateau State, where over 200 innocent villagers were killed by terrorists, with more than 300 persons injured, several properties destroyed and thousands of people displaced, between Christmas Eve, Friday 24th and Monday, 26th December 2023.

“The SMBLF, moved by the patriotic desire for the corporate continuity of Nigeria and the peaceful and mutually respectful co-existence of its diverse nationalities, strongly urges that you, Mr President, considers the following:

“Your government holds an honest and truthful security inquiry to determine communities wherein the original inhabitants have been displaced in the last two decades and enforce the immediate return and resettlement of the people in their ancestral homes.

“Further to the above, the government should, in no distant future, close all IDP camps to end the shameful and sinful policy of building such refugee camps for the indigenous peoples while their ancestral homes are allowed to be occupied by security agencies, including the police, Civil Defence Corps and others, be specially trained and equipped to rise to the challenges, as Nigeria is fast becoming a banana or pariah state of its kid-gloves treatment of terrorism.”