Redirect your operations to Benue, Plateau, others, Fayose tells military

• Army to storm Lake Chad for Boko Haram terrorists

Governor Ayodele Fayose yesterday called on the military to redirect its operations Python Dance and Crocodile Smile to the North Central states of Benue, Plateau as well as Taraba and Adamawa in North East where herdsmen have reportedly been killing Nigerians and destroying farmlands worth billions of naira.

The governor, who described as reckless the remarks credited to the Miyeitti Allah Kautal Hore, a splinter group of Miyeitti Allah Cattle Breeders Association over the Benue State’s anti-open grazing law, said the silence of the President Muhammadu Buhari government was complicit.

In a statement in Ado Ekiti by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, the governor said: “If the Federal Government does not want to be seen as protecting the herdsmen, the attention of the army’s python that is dancing in the Southeast and crocodile that is smiling in the Southwest and South South should be focused on the killer herdsmen.”

He said the alarm raised by Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue over alleged plan by the association to launch fresh attacks on the state, should disturb peace-loving citizens, adding: “The moment a state governor begins to raise alarm as done by Governor Ortom, those playing ostrich to the herdsmen’s menace should know that they can no longer pretend that all is well.”

However, troops of the Operation Crocodile Smile II in the Niger Delta are to be redeployed in the Lake Chad to flush out the remnants of Boko Haram terrorists.

The Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant-General Tukur Yusuf Buratai, said the decision was to reduce to the barest minimum the prevailing security challenges, including illegal oil bunkering, militancy, kidnapping, cultism and pipeline vandalism among other vices in the oil-rich region.

Speaking at the closing of the military exercise in Port Harcourt, attended yesterday by representatives of the governors of Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta and Akwa Ibom states, the military chief said the routine activity was to combat emerging threats in the area.

His words: “I want to assure you that most of the troops that have excelled in the operations across the region will be redeployed on the Lake Chad waters to flush out the remnants of the Boko Haram terrorists.”