Sahara Reporters Latest News Wednesday 2nd October 2019

Sahara Reporters Latest News Wednesday 2nd October 2019

Sahara Reporters Latest News Today and headlines on some of the happenings and news trend in the Country, today 02/10/19

target=_blank>Buhari, Ramaphosa To Hold Talks On Wednesday In South Africa

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa speaks to Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari (R) at the State House in Abuja, Nigeria

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President Muhammadu Buhari will on Wednesday depart Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, for South Africa, alongside 10 state governors and ministers.
The three-day trip, which comes after recent xenophobic attacks on Nigerians in the former apartheid nation, will see Buhari and President Cyril Ramaphosa hold talks aimed at strengthening ties between both countries.
During the trip, President Buhari is expected to hold a town hall meeting with Nigerians living in South Africa, with a view to sharing in their experiences and reassuring them of the government’s commitment to protecting their lives and property and promoting peaceful co-existence.
Both leaders are expected to sign a joint communiqué at the end of their meeting.
President Buhari is to return to Abuja on Friday.

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target=_blank>Buhari Not Planning To Seek Third Term, Says Presidency

The Presidency has debunked reports that it has plans to amend the constitution regarding the two-term limit for Presidents.
Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, in a statement, said that though there had been an attempt in the past to change the constitution to allow for the-then incumbent president to stand for a third term, such attempt was wrong and unconstitutional and will not happen under the administration of Buhari.
He described President Buhari as a democrat, who respects the constitution and would never support any activity aimed at altering it.
Shehu said, “President Buhari intends to serve his full second elected term in office ending 2023 and then there shall be a general election in which he will not be a candidate.
“There is not even the faintest possibility that this will change.”

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E2%80%99t-make-any-progress-without-restructuring-%E2%80%93edwin-clark target=_blank>We Won’t Make Any Progress Without Restructuring –Edwin Clark

Edwin ClarkEdwin Clark

Edwin Clark

Today Nigeria

Elder statesman, Edwin Clark, has said that Nigeria as an entity won’t make any meaningful progress without being restructured.
Clark, who was a guest on Channels Television’s breakfast programme, Sunrise Daily, believes that restructuring the country will help address its many challenges.
He said, “Without restructuring, no meaningful progress will be achieved in this country.”
Clark faulted President Muhammadu Buhari’s Independence Day address to the country, noting that there was nothing in the speech that he had not said before.
He said that that while it was commendable that Nigerians had continued to live together over the last 59 years, a lot of issues needed to be addressed.
The elder statesman also called on the government to tackle poverty and unemployment, as well as reduce the number of out of school children in the country.

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target=_blank>Hate Speech No Longer Tolerated, Says Buhari

President Buhari Observes 59th Independence Anniversary

President Muhammadu Buhari has warned promoters of hate speech in the country to desist from such actions or get ready to face the consequences.
Buhari gave the warning on Tuesday in his Independence Day speech to the country.
Noting that his administration recognises the freedom of expression of the citizens, he insisted that they would resist the abuse of such rights, especially through the social media.
He said, “Our attention is increasingly being focused on cyber-crimes and the abuse of technology through hate speech and other divisive material being propagated on social media.
“Whilst we uphold the constitutional rights of our people to freedom of expression and association, where the purported exercise of these rights infringes on the rights of other citizens or threatens to undermine our national security, we will take firm and decisive action.”
President Buhari urged Nigerians to exercise restraint, tolerance and mutual respect in airing their grievances and frustrations.

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target=_blank>Police Arrest 15 Suspected Criminals, Recover Guns, Ammunition In Enugu

The police in Enugu State has arrested 15 suspected criminals for their alleged involvement in various crimes in the state and across the country.
The Command also recovered four locally-made guns, four live cartridges, 13 mobile phones, three vehicles, one tricycle and a sword from suspects.
Parading the suspects in Enugu on Tuesday before journalists, Commissioner of Police in the state, Mr Ahmad Abdurrahman, said the arrest of the suspects followed intelligence information and collaboration with other security agencies.
Abdurrahman noted that the command made the arrest within three weeks in various locations within and outside the state.
He said that within the period under review, the command through painstaking intelligence was able to bust a seven-man armed robbery gang in the country.
He said, “This group, whose members were arrested in Lagos, Port Harcourt, FCT, Aba and Enugu, had been terrorising and snatching vehicles all along within the state and move them to other parts of the country for sales.
“The Command through its intelligence operatives travelled to most parts of the country to round-up this network of criminals.”
The commissioner said that three suspects were also arrested for conspiracy and armed robbery as well as disturbing the peace of Umuebi community in Udi Local Government Area of Enugu, according to the News Agency of Nigeria.

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target=_blank>Rape: Present Yourself Before Court, Dakolo Urges Pastor Fatoyinbo

Busola, wife of musician, Timi Dakolo, has called on the Founder of the Commonwealth of Zion Assembly, Pastor Biodun Fatoyinbo, to present himself to the court for the sake of justice.
Dakolo urged the FCT High Court in Abuja to discountenance preliminary objection filed against her case by Fatoyinbo.
She made the plea while responding to the preliminary objection by Fatoyinbo, insisting that she sued the pastor because of the continued emotional injuries she suffered as a result of the rape he committed against her.
According to the News Agency of Nigeria, Mrs Dakolo took Fatoyinbo before the FCT High Court for allegedly raping her on different occasions when she was a teenager about 20 years ago.
The court in a writ of summons dated September 6 had ordered the pastor to appear before it within 14 days of the service or judgment may be given in his absence.
However, Fatoyinbo through his lawyer, Mr Alex Izinyon (SAN), tried to discharge the suite by filing a preliminary objection dated September 20, saying that the case was filed out of time and the court cannot hear the matter again.
But responding to that objection, Dakolo, through her Lawyer, Mr Pelumi Olajengbesi, argued that the action was not statute-barred (filed out of time) and that it is predicated on continuous injury which is an exception to the statute of limitation.
She said, “My cause of action is predicated on a continuing injury which I have continued to suffer over a long period of time.”
Dakolo urged the court not to allow the defendant run away from justice by hiding under the cloak of statute of limitation, noting that emotional distress is a tort that cannot be quantified by time.

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target=_blank>Letter To My Five-year-old Self By Hannatu Musawa

Hannatu Musawa

My dearest five-year-old Nigeria,
I’m writing you this letter fully knowing that you’re going to think everything I’m about to tell you is complete rubbish, because at the stage you are now, you’re a nation with so much promise and hope; a nation that is out to conquer the world. Okay, right off the bat, I will tell you that your plans to conquer the world are not going to happen.
Today, October 1, 2019, I am 59 years old and you are five years old and I’m writing you this as a warning of things to come. For you, it has been five years since your illustrious children such as Herbert Macaulay, Ahmadu Bello and Nnamdi Azikiwe helped gain independence for you from the British colonial masters. And even though that journey was riddled with several road blocks, on October 1, 1960 when you were granted independence, you came out of it in the end with a hope for a very bright future. Oh what a time, what a time! I, myself, remember very fondly the pride on the faces of my young children back then, the hope in their hearts, the beauty that lay across your breadth, the envy of the world at the promise you held…Behold the giant of Africa; behold Nigeria!
But as you read this letter, very shortly a chain of events will occur that will have such a disastrous and far reaching effect and give way to the circumstance that propels me to write you this warning letter today.
These chain of events will start on January 15, 1966 in a military coup. I wish I could tell you everything to stop your children making the same mistakes mine did, but I can only say a few. The rest you have to figure out yourself. There is so much you need to know about the things you will be going through very shortly. Some of this won’t make sense for a long time. And some of it will go against everything you know about yourself. But it needs to be said by me to you.
I know it may sound ludicrous to you now, Nigeria at five, but there is so many hard truths to tell. You are going to be a nation that is reviled and mocked the world over and your children are going to harbour such a deep and innate hatred for each other, the likes of which created such catastrophe and pain during Hitler’s Holocaust and the sectarian massacres in Rwanda.
Extremism will run so deep in the veins of some of your offspring that they would commit the most monstrous of acts against one another. Bigotry will eat at the heart of your very own that their spirit and soul will only exist in the dark corridors of loathing and hatred. Those of your decedents, whom you bequeath the mantle to lead your kingdom will betray you in the worst of ways; they will bastardise their position and loot your treasures dry. Selfishness, greed, corruption, pain, poverty, suffering will come to define your children as a people and you as an entity. Your children will kidnap each other, commit crimes against each other and render your land with the most dire of security situations. They will be scared to go out of their homes or even be in their homes because of this insecurity.
One day, you will be a 59-year-old, who will be immature and have no sense of direction. Your many years will be marked by nothing apart from nonsense, lawlessness, crumbling infrastructure and little power infrastructure. All you will be able to boast of at 59 will be dilapidated schools and glorified universities where strikes, violence and cult reign supreme. At 59, you will have an epileptic election system and an elite force that cares little about the mass population in your space.
As I write this to you, I can only boast of a few major achievements other than terrorism, kidnappings, armed robbery, stealing of public funds, political instability and 419. Today, you are one of the poorest countries in the world despite the huge human and natural resources you have had at your disposal.
You will be seen as a tragic love story, looked upon as a pathetic entity and as a reprehensible excuse for a nation. As big and populated as you are, you will feel minute and unworthy whenever you face those that should not even square up to you and those, who have not had the opportunities and resources that you have been endowed with. Africa and other nations on our continent will be suspicious of you. Your fellow Africans will carry out senseless xenophobic attacks against you. And if you look past what you may consider to be a cruel assessment by your continental siblings and by myself, lives a hard truth that you must come to terms with before you can make right what is wrong within you.
When you look at your existence since 1914, you will see many of the mistakes you could have avoided and many of the bad choices that you made. As I stand here at the age of 59 writing to you at the age of five, to my five-year old self, I don’t think either of us could have imagined we would be living a nightmare at the age of 59.
When you get to where I am now, you will recall all the incidents that led you to where you are and you will regret that each incident wasn’t addressed and tackled there and then.
In 1964, when we were doing well, we ignored the eruption of several crises such as the fractionalisation of the Action Group Party in the Western Region, the census crisis, the electoral crisis, Tiv crisis and the agitation by minority people for greater autonomy and we swept those troubles under the carpet ignoring the fire they would ignite.
As I reflect, I remember the mess created by the toppling of the civilian government of Sir Abubukar Tafawa Balewa on January 15, 1966 in a military coup that was led by Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu.
When the Prime Minister, the Premiers of the Northern and Western regions, Sir Ahmadu Bello and Chief Akintola were all killed, it was inevitable that the embers of ethnic nationalism and regionalism would be inflamed but we did nothing to mediate between our children then. A lot of damage control could have been done then.
Then there was the civil war. Yes, the civil war! Believe it or not, your children will go to war against each other, be cruel to each other and massacre each other. After the war when it was announced that there would be ‘No victor and no vanquished,’ we knew that the proclamation was complete rubbish. After all, how can groups of people go to war in which one group is decimated and they be expected to feel like a victor and not the vanquished? Again we did nothing to settle our children’s minds.
During the course of our development, when the military was playing Russian roulette with the leadership of the country by overthrowing each other, we never tried to heal the deep scars that the nation carried within the psyche of the individuals that participated in this macabre dance. Up until now, that dance is still being played with the same actors still actively participating and sabotaging each other in politics.
When the military promised to give way to civilian rule, yet annulled the freest and fairest elections we have ever seen, it was amazing that it never occurred to us how much the course of our route would be changed. The military danced with your future and made a mockery of the proposed democracy on our land.
When we eventually had a constitution, which was to guide our new democratic dispensation and within that constitution, no state was allowed to adopt any religion as the state law, many thought it was because we wanted to protect the country against the rise of religious extremism. Yet when some of our children went ahead to develop religion as a state law, we did nothing to remind them that civil aspects of religious law was already part of the state law because the Penal Code included civil parts of Shari’a law. Out of fear, we watched as some governors used religion to gain political favour and we kept silent when that seed grew to a point where people are justifying the mass murder and decapitation of fellow Nigerians in a misrepresented interpretation of faith.
When we drowned out the fighting and drama between our own children, in our own home, we gave way to the negativity of the few bad spawn within our midst. And this is what has shaped what I am and what will, in due course, shape who you will become.
I am giving you the chance that I never had. I am telling you that you have no choice, Nigeria at the age of five, but to make yourself right, to battle your demons and heal yourself from within. To give your coming generations a fighting chance, you must desperately fight to escape what I represent today. I need you to realise the effect that my grown-up actions and the actions of our children will have on the next generation of Nigerians, who watch and learn from the bad example I have set.
I know that you cannot get everything right and you cannot be perfection, but what is important is for you to try to be better than I am. You have got to get it together and fight for your future my dearest Nigeria at five.
I understand that some of our children and even you sometimes think that the problem of Nigeria lies in the creation of Nigeria in itself. There is no doubt that the underlying objective for the fusion of the colonies and protectorates that eventually made you a nation was purely economic from the point of view of the British colonialists. This has led to the view that Nigeria is a failure because she was cobbled in such a manner. But even as some describe us as ‘a mere geographical expression,’ we should never subscribe to that view. After all, there are so many countries with great industrial, military, economic and political powers that were artificially created in the same manner. That has never been and will never be an excuse.
That is just the tip of the iceberg Nigeria at five. Like I earlier mentioned, I felt the need to write this to you because in 54 years’ time, you will find yourself in the middle of confusion, which may be the precipice of your existence. This should be your wake-up call. See the beauty and virtue of your differences and diversity and you will realise that your cup is half full, not half empty.
My failures leave you with many valuable life lessons. Use this to your advantage in order to make sure that your greatest weakness actually turns out to be your greatest strength. I know it’s a tough one to swallow, but it will only be upon that realisation that you will be able to start turning things around. Even if the differences that represent us are not going to go away, once we learn to harness it, it will lead us from a rather self-destructive path to a highly productive one.
You must not let anything distract you and blind you to what’s really in front of you. And what really is in front of you Nigeria at five? Do you know? Well, I think that…You are! You are young and you don’t even know yourself yet. You think you know and you want to assert that you do, now that you’re a certain age, but you don’t. What’s in front of you is a whole world of mistakes and bad choices beyond your imagination. And my warning to you is to tread with caution as you move ahead, Nigeria at five.
Put yourself, and your growth and development first, grab the unity that you promised your children who were the forefathers. Unity…Yes unity! That is the key. If you dissect your innermost problems Nigeria, you will find that in the core of each and every one of your problems and mistakes lays the lack of unity and the religious, ethnic, tribal and regional dichotomy that drives your children and drives a wedge in our necessity of that unity.
You must teach your children that the unity of you, as the nation, Nigeria at five, must come before the unity of any tribe or region. It is only then that you and they will be able to objectively separate the good from the bad and ostracise the bad and uphold the good in the interest of the nation. It is only then that you can see facts clearly through clear vision not through bigoted and jaundiced eyes.
Everything you do, every thought you have, every choice you make creates a legacy that you will hold within your entity and that will come to define your history. It’s imprinted on you as a nation and on generations of your children and it affects you all in the most subtle ways; ways that you may never be aware of.
I am at a place now that I can only describe as the tipping point. Those leading my children are putting together a ‘Next Level’ agenda that has the potential to turn my fortunes around, to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty. Will that happen? Only time will tell. Only those at the helm of affairs have the power to steer us clear from more mayhem and put us back on the course of development. Will and can they do it? Only time will tell if they can and will.
With all that in mind Nigeria at five, please be very conscious, be very careful, be very God fearing, be very just, be very honest and be very smart. God’s speed little brother. I wish you the best for the next 54 years when we shall hopefully merge again as one. I will be watching with high hopes for you.
Sincerely and forever with you always,
From Nigeria at 59.
I invite you to: Follow me on Twitter: @hanneymusawa

Hannatu Musawa

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target=_blank>Okowa Suspends Aide For Posting N3.5bn Grant To Delta First Lady On Social Media

Governor of Delta State, Ifeanyi Okowa has suspended his Special Assistant on Special Duties, Ovie Ossai, without salary for two months.
Our correspondent reliably gathered that the suspension of the governor’s aide was not unconnected with statements he made on his Facebookpage re-echoing a grant of N3.5bn given to the wife of the state governor, Mrs Edith Okowa.
It would be recalled that few days ago, a United States based non-profit organisation, the Initiative for Global Development, had through its Chief Executive Officer, Leila Ndiaye, at a sickle cell sensitisation forum organised by 05 Initiative in New York announced a donation of $10m in support of Mrs Okowa’s pet project, 05 Initiative, for the management of sickle cell disease in Delta State.
Confiding in SaharaReporters, a top government official revealed that Ossai’s sin was that he issued a statement on his Facebook page amplifying the $10m grant to Mrs Okowa.
The News Agency of Nigeria had reported the grant story but the annoyance of the governor was that his aide made the news more prominent through his post.
The source said, “After the statement was posted on Ossai’s Facebook page, one of the governor’s daughters, who was not happy with the publicity being given to the grant her mother received, she confronted him over the issue and expressed disappointment.
“All efforts by Ossai to explain his motive fell on deaf ears, and she promised that he will be dealt with by her father.
“Barely 24 hours after the confrontation, the governor invited Ossai over the issue where he explained things to the governor and the governor asked him to leave.
“Shockingly, Ossai got a suspension letter signed by the Secretary to the State Government, Chiedu Ebie, for two months without salary.”
When contacted over the issue, Commissioner for Information in the state, Charles Aniagwu, said, “I have not gotten the details of Ossai’s suspension.”

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E2%80%99s-ruga-settlement-project-lie-fadama-akinyemi-muhammed target=_blank>Could A Vital Lesson For The President’s RUGA Settlement Project Lie In Fadama? By Akinyemi Muhammed

Grazing cows

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The controversial Rural Grazing Area project created by the President Muhammadu Buhari administration has numerous layers of positives and negatives that could only be understood with a critical dissection. The program seeks to settle pastoral families in new communities where they would be provided with social amenities and sufficient grazing fields.
Although RUGA was anticipated to cost around ?2.2bn, the government believes it is an investment that could reduce farmers-herdsmen conflict, increase food production, and help improve the country’s GDP. But not everyone is as positive as the government.
This is because the Fulani herdsmen the presidency is trying to relocate are associated with a series of violent attacks on farmers across the country, which have killed over 3,600 people since 2016. Some commentators, including former President Olusegun Obasanjo, believe that these attacks are a form of Fulani domination—and ‘colonialisation’ of the rest of the country. Although, 11 states have backed the RUGA project, others are protesting its establishment in their states.
Such reservations are premised on how the President has soft-pedalled justice against the accused Fulani herdsmen, especially considering Buhari is also ethnically Fulani.
Although the presidency might not be properly communicating its settlement’s benefits, scrapping RUGA and doing nothing about the ongoing herdsmen-farmers crisis could further negatively affect the agricultural industry. With Nigeria’s poverty index at 44.2 per cent and food insecurity on the rise, RUGA might be the solution still.
The economic, political, and inter-ethnic value in RUGA could be great, especially as Nigeria has experimented with a similar project (NFDP, also known as Fadama) in the past.
A cue from the Fadama project
The National Fadama Development Project was modelled to directly and foundationally tackle extreme poverty and food insecurity. Although it costs around $450m, it did help raise the income of rural farmers by 63 per cent.
It also made significant contributions in important areas including rural infrastructure and service delivery, social integration among different ethnicities, and propelled rural development. If properly implemented and centred on poverty reduction and food security instead of co-habitation, RUGA could work.
Niger State, for instance, has the largest landmass in Nigeria with about the size of 10 other states combined. It is also home to many Fulani herdsmen. If the promotion of grass farming is promoted in collaboration with neighbouring Northern states, that alone will accommodate a substantial number or herdsmen.
Besides, the establishment of a national grazing reserve in Niger State would encourage the creation of social infrastructures that state urgently needs.
This would keep herders off roads and many southern states, averting conflicts in the process. It would also help the government save money as private investors could provide some of these social amenities through private-public-partnerships.
By properly establishing these settlements, crop farmers would enjoy more freedom without the need to bother about Fulani herdsmen encroachments of their farmland. The herdsmen would also control their own grazing space.
RUGA should utilise the strength of each region and not force them to accommodate herders. The Fadama project leaves us with many valuable lessons on how to package and structure a plan like RUGA. It should be consulted.
Akinyemi Muhammed is a writing fellow at African Liberty and a graduate of Law. He tweets @theprincelyx

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Spiritual ‘Warfare’ And Counter Terrorism By Emmanuel Onwubiko

There are two different issues that have just cropped up in the public domain and have constituted the discussion points for most commentators observing the trajectories of the counter terror war being waged by the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. I must say that everyone who is somebody in the world of scholarship is involved in the observation of the goings on in the war on terror in the North-East of Nigeria.
These two issues are the just announced national training exercises by the Nigerian Army to cover all parts of Nigeria and secondly but not the least is the talking point on the statement credited to Nigeria’s Army Chief, Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, that combats are not enough to overcome the terror threats in Nigeria but that there is the essential element of the spiritual dimension or what I have chosen to call the ‘spiritual warfare’.
Beginning from the angle of the arguments and debates that are beginning to dominate the social media space, which is the issue of the need for a spiritual dimension to the fight on terror, I will state categorically that the statement by the Army Chief has been misinterpreted and misunderstood by some of these prominent commentators and agenda setters, who have unleashed a wave of criticisms condemning the statement and painting a graphic picture of a military chief, who no longer has any winning strategy to combat the terrible but formidable threats that armed Boko Haram terrorists pose to the corporate existence of Nigeria.
This misinterpretation could have been avoided if those making the remarks had taken their time to read through the published speech made by the Army Chief and if these observers had found the intellectual presence of mind to conduct only three hours research on the thematic area of what in the West is termed Islamic terrorism.
Before I delve into citations of authorities to show that what the Army Chief of Staff said is the correct statement of facts all over the contemporary world, I will state straightaway that there can be no terrorism without distorted religious and ideological belief system spread by some radicalised elements found in almost all religious groups and nationalities.
So, I admit that terrorism is not an exclusive preserve of bad Muslims but even white supremacists, who have on many occasions engaged in mass shootings in New Zealand, United States and Australia are not Muslims.
The best way forward as a strategy for winning the hearts and minds of the people of the territorial space whereby the war on terror is waged, is to accept the reality that it will take intensive spiritual and theological reorientation by the real and genuine scholars of Islam for instance, who should normally be expected and requested to play significant roles to change the wrong mindset of the younger elements, who are rapidly been radicalised and wrongly indoctrinated by the hierarchy of Boko Haram terrorists.
I will return to this point and back it up with contemporary but profound research findings. Terrorism is a very developing speciality with trailer load of scholarly works developed or about to be fully developed. By the last count, I have read about two dozen newly published academic findings on the different dimensions of the global war on terror which intensified since September 11, 2001 when the world saw the coordinated attacks by the Islamic terrorists group al-Qaeda against the United States of America on the morning September 11, 2001, which snowballed into a global incident.
But let me remind these critics, who I must admit mean well for Nigeria that the Chief of Army Staff did not call for the abdication of combats by the professional soldiers, neither did he advocate that the soldiers, who are fighting in the war or flashpoints of war on terror should abandon their professional callings to embrace spiritual exercises in churches and mosques. Far from it.
Rather, Buratai said that terrorism and terrorist groups could not be eliminated alone by the military unless religious bodies and organisations in the country come to the “forefront of this spiritual battle”.
He noted that the focus must be religious groups interfacing on addressing the ideologies, which fuelled the Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists.
Buratai stated these on Monday in Abuja at a spiritual warfare seminar at the Nigerian Army Resource Centre with the theme, “countering insurgency and violent extremism in Nigeria through spiritual warfare.”
He urged Islamic and Christian clerics across the army formations to join the fight against terrorism, and reorient the people against negative ideologies.
Buratai said, “It is easier to defeat Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists than their ideology because while we degrade the terrorists and their havens, the narrative of the ideology grows the group.
“Therefore, communities, families, and groups should join in the fight and narratives to reject and prevent the ideologies of the terrorists and extremist groups.
“Religious bodies and organisations in particular who interface regularly with the grassroots should be at the forefront of this spiritual battle and fashion out ways of stepping up their roles.
“The fight against terrorism, Boko Haram and ISWAP, as well as other security threats, cannot be left to the troops in the battlefield alone. Yes, we will do our duties but the need to tackle groups through spiritual warfare and re-orientating the followers against the ideology is also a necessity.
“It is a well-known fact that terrorism and terrorist groups cannot be totally eliminated by mainly military actions. This means focusing our efforts on the underlying narratives through ideologies that are employed by these terrorists to lure innocent citizens to their fold.
“The need to defeat the ideologies of Boko Haram and ISWAP is based on the awareness that it is the ideologies that enhance their resources and help to recruit new fighters to their fold and as such; kill their ideology and the terrorist movement withers”
At the risk of violating the seeming oath of secrecy sworn to when I enlisted as a member of a seven-man Presidential Committee on Restoration of Peace and Dialogue in Northern Nigeria, which sat for nearly three years prior to the emergence of the current administration, I will tell my readers that top Islamic clerics were part of that committee and their specific roles was to deploy their intellectual wherewithal and their iconic Islamic trainings to re-orientate members of Boko Haram terrorists whom we met in different undisclosed detention facilities all across Nigeria with the aim of deradicalising them and reintegrating them through methodical reorientation to once more embrace constructive coexistence with divergent groups of people in the larger society.
So, Buratai was correct to affirm that the war on terror can’t be conclusively and decisively won through physical means without activating the spiritual mechanisms and dimension.
Now let me quote the experts to back up my affirmations aforementioned.
In the scholarly article titled “Towards a definition of terrorist ideology” by Gary A. Ackerman and Michael Burnham, these versatile scholars and intellectuals reached a determination that to defeat terrorism you need to have a total appreciation of the underlying spiritual ideology governing these whole range of armed terrorists.
They wrote thus, “While conventional wisdom holds that the ideology espoused by a terrorist organisation is somehow related to that organisation’s actions, the precise nature of the relationship between these phenomena is hotly debated, with scholarship often yielding contrasting empirical results.”
Reminding us that we argue that one reason for this divergence in viewpoints and research findings is an inadequate understanding of what ideology actually is and how it relates to terrorism, but restated their deep conviction that it is the case as it were.
Indeed, these authors revealed that terrorism literature widely disparate uses of the concept of terrorist ideology.
In this aforementioned article, the writers endeavour to provide a common framework for approaching ideology in the context of terrorism studies by systematically building a new definition of terrorist ideology from first principles.
In so doing, they introduce a definition of terrorist ideology that is logically consistent, has robust theoretical underpinnings, and connects the study of ideology within terrorism to broader disciplinary research traditions regarding ideology.
This style, they stated, provides a conceptual foundation from which to examine terrorist ideology in an objective, systematic manner and thereby enables terrorism researchers to more productively investigate important outstanding questions, such as which aspects of an ideology are most relevant to violent behaviour.
Another study on the online caliphate: Internet usage and ISIS support in Arab world, James A. Piaza and Ahmet Guler, who are experts argued that the Internet has provided expanded opportunities for violent extremist groups to propagandise and recruit.
“The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is an exemplar in that it has heavily invested in online presence and uses online communities and social media to attract and retain supporters. Does ISIS’s online presence translate into a higher probability that individuals in its target audience will become supporters? In this study, we analyse over 6,000 individuals in six Arab countries to find out if those that use the Internet to follow political news or to express political views are more likely to support ISIS”.
The researchers states that, “We find that respondents who get their news online are significantly more likely to support ISIS than those who follow the news on television or print media. Moreover, those who use online for a political expression are also more likely to express support for ISIS.”
Indeed, they reasoned that individuals, who engage in online political discussion are more likely to support ISIS than those, who engage in conventional political activity, though less than those who engage in contentious political behaviours such as attending a political protest. We conclude with a brief discussion of the academic and policy implications of these findings.
On the fears that the forthcoming national combat exercises by the Nigerian Army will infringe on human rights if one of the components is to restrict freedom of movements enshrined in the constitution by way of demanding identification, I need to say that as a human rights campaigner with deep interests in the internal security operations in the country, we have received assurances that citizen’s human rights will not be wantonly violated since the Nigerian Army as a constitutionally created agency must comply with Chapter 4 of the Nigerian constitution and as I write Buratai has written and distributed a Green Book containing law-based guidelines on protection of human rights of all citizens by the military during combat and non-combat internal operations.
Emmanuel Onwubiko heads Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria and blogs @www.emmanuelonwubiko.com; www.huriwa@blogspot.com;www.thenigerianinsidernews.com