By Adadareporters.com
The American government and international community should hold the government of President Muhammadu Buhari accountable for the spate of violence in Nigeria.
This was disclosed by Benue State governor Samuel Ortom at the State Department, Washington DC, while interacting with its officials.
A statement issued by Rev Peter Ichull, Ortom’s special assistant on diaspora affairs, on Saturday, said Ortom travelled to the US to relate ‘the true story of violence in Nigeria’, and the need for US intervention.
He cited series of threats he has been receiving and the attempt made on his life in March last year as signals that the Presidency and its conspirators were after him.
He regretted that till date, those who attacked him had not been prosecuted.
He said 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’.
Governor Ortom said, “The truth is that farming populations in Nigeria are under siege and are being decimated; agriculture is gradually dying and food security is being threatened.”
Governor Ortom told 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’.
He said in the last seven years, the Buhari administration had seen ‘children rendered as orphans, farmers being displaced, schools, hospitals and social services disrupted, without doing anything to restore normalcy’.
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’.
The governor tasked the international community to fund the IDPs in Benue State, which he described as ‘the epicentre of the current violence as well as Plateau, Kaduna, Niger, Zamfara and other states affected by terrorists’ attacks in the country’.
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 said since the security of the political system was paramount to the US government, it had set up a conflict bureau to fund IDPs in Nigeria, and assured that he would ensure that such funding did not go to the wrong channels.
