Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom has called on the international community to come to assist the farming populations in Nigeria who he said are under siege and are being decimated, while agriculture is gradually dying and food security is being threatened.
The governor who raised the alarm during his visit to the State Department, Washington DC, while interacting with its officials also called on the United States of America and the rest of the international community to take the following steps to end the spate of violence in the country, especially in Benue state.
In a statement issued by the senior special assistant to the governor on diaspora affairs Rev. Peter Ichull on Diaspora quoted the governor as saying that in last seven years, the president Muhammadu Buhari led administration has seen children rendered as orphans, farmers being displaced, schools, hospitals and social services disrupted, without doing anything to restore normalcy.
He stated that he was at the State Department to present the traumatized Nigerian victims’ side of the story after discovering that wrong narratives were being circulated across the globe by the government of Buhari to shield itself from complicity.
The governor said the false narrative of “herder-farmer clashes” was deliberately crafted to delay farmers’ doomsday until they were gradually wiped out and their ancestral lands confiscated.
Governor Ortom alerted the international community not to take the insecurity in Nigeria as a distant problem, stressing that the outbreak of war in any country will cause migration problems to America and Britain due to their friendly immigration policies.
According to him, “the federal government’s punitive neglect has led to increasing number of internally displaced persons in Benue State which now stands at more than 1.5 million”
He asked the international community to demand accountability from Buhari’s government on the deaths of innocent citizens and said that a special envoy to Nigeria to deal with the flashpoint of the violence be appointed.
Similarly, the governor tasked the international community to fund the IDPs in Benue State, the epicentre of the current violence as well as Plateau, Kaduna, Niger, Zamfara and other states affected by terrorists’ attacks in the country and also encourage the establishment of state Police in Nigeria.
Responding, the US State Department officials headed by the Under Secretary, Africa and Middle East, Padgett Douglas said “the US government was aware of random terrorism, weaponization of religion and importation of violence in Nigeria”.
He added that since the security of the political system was paramount to the US government, it has set up a conflict bureau to fund IDPs in Nigeria and assured that he would ensure that such funding does not go to the wrong channels, while promising to make a case for the Benue IDPs and investigate other issues raised by Governor Ortom.