A former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, on Saturday, urged President Bola Tinubu to rise to stop perpetrators of violence in parts of the country.
He urged him not to toe the path of his predecessors who only mourned victims of killings in press statements, thereby reducing themselves to mourners-in-chief instead of taking responsibility as commanders-in-chief.
Dogara spoke in Jos, Plateau State, on Saturday, when he led some serving and former members of the House of Representatives on a condolence visit to the Plateau State Governor, Caleb Mutfwang, following the recent massacre of about 200 people in Bokkos, Mangu and Barkin Ladi local Government Areas by terrorists.
He urged the President to rise to the occasion and use every available means to locate the perpetrators and sponsors of violence across the country and bring them to justice.
Dogara maintained that those responsible for the genocide and orgy of violence are all out to end the ways of life of Nigerians and must be stopped.
He said, “The perpetrators of this violence are not just crazy but are very dangerous, and the truth is that they won’t just stop until we stop them. We must stop them. Who has the responsibility to stop them? It is the Commander-in-Chief, but previously, they reduced themselves to mourners-in-chief instead.
“It means using whatever coercive security apparatus we have as a nation to locate where these perpetrators are and their sponsors wherever they are littered in the ungoverned spaces that we have in Nigeria, whether in Plateau, Nasarawa, Benue, Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto or in southern Kaduna or in the South, we must locate them and after locating them, the Commander-in-Chief must take justice to them or bring them to justice.”
Dogara added that the “failure to either take justice to them or bring them to justice has always been the bane of the fight against terrorism and violence in Nigeria because it emboldens them. If they will kill on the Plateau and go scot-free, why won’t they kill in any other state in the North and in the South?
“Failure to act at that level is more or less an incentive for them to continue to deploy this unbridled violence on the people. So, my call, therefore, is to the President to rise up and for him to know that condolences at this moment, whether on the Plateau or elsewhere in the country, are better given in form of decisive action against the perpetrators of these violence and not by mere words.”
He, however, exonerated the state governor of blame, saying he does not control any troops.
He stated, “I read some commentaries of people who were trying to allude to politics which sought to lay the blame on the corridors of this State House, but we all know that although you are the Chief Security Officer of the state, you do not command or control any troops. Except for those who don’t know how the Federation of Nigeria is structured.”
