The Southeast Governors’ Forum Thursday appealed to secessionists in the zone to give it six months to negotiate solutions to their grievances with the Federal Government.
The chairman of the forum, Dave Umahi, made the plea at the Presidential Villa in Abuja yesterday while featuring on the regular Ministerial Press Briefing organised by the Presidential Communications Team.
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He said he, alongside his colleagues in the zone, had asked the youths to present their demands “in prints and hand over to us.”
He said the failure of past governments to properly deal with the issue of marginalization gave rise to the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) and the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB).
Umahi said the southeast would not secede from Nigeria.
He said: “Let’s see your demands, let’s see your grievances and give us six months to engage the Federal Government to address all these because I believe in dialogue.
“I’ve done stakeholders meeting in the 13 local government areas, I’ve done several days’ prayers. I’ve deployed the widows to fast and pray, I’ve deployed the elders’ council to go round and talk to our people, I’ve deployed founding fathers to go and talk. We’re getting result. Some of the bad boys are pulling out and surrounded it to us and they’re giving us information. “But my position is that these people are our children, it pleases me not. I’m trying to let them know that what they’re agitating for can be solved through dialogue.
“We’re calling on our youths to submit their demands to us, we’ll come to the centre and submit. If in the next six months we’ve not substantially addressed it, we can join you in the agitation. But right now, we don’t support you to insult the president, leaders of southeast and other leaders. That’s not agitation, that’s foolishness.
“So, we’ve to tell ourselves the truth, if we want to address marginalization and exclusion from the affairs of the nation, we’ve to apply wisdom. We shouldn’t go by the way of violence and allow people to hijack peaceful demands of our people. This is our position.”
Umahi said herders violently trained with AK-47 rifles from Libya and other West African nations had infiltrated Nigeria via the southeast and the north section.
“These are the people that now initiated a different dimension of herders-farmers’ crisis. That’s where they began to kill people, rape women and then the people began to react to them. When some of them were arrested, they don’t speak our language and even the security agencies even at the federal level have attested to the fact that most of these things are perpetrated by these people.”
