Southern, Middle Belt leaders accuse Buhari of indifference to carnage

The Southern, Middle Belt Leaders Forum has accused President Muhammadu Buhari and his ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) administration of indifference to the deadly activities of herdsmen nationwide.

Recalling the recent mayhem in Plateau State where scores were murdered in cold blood, the body said besides the “clear failure of leadership in a country that withdraws $1 billion not appropriated to buy fighter jets but whose president asks citizens to pray to God to come and do the job of its commander-in-chief, we are full of rage over the official irresponsibility the presidency has displayed over this carnage.”

In a statement yesterday by their spokesmen, Mr. Yinka Odumakin (South West), Senator Henshaw Bassey (South-South) and others, the leaders decried the president’s reaction that dead bodies were still being counted as noxious.

They equally faulted the claim that the killings may have been caused by the missing of 100 cows, querying the “deaths of hundreds of our citizens whose lives would appear to be inferior to those of cows in the estimation of highest authorities in the land.”

The statement reads in part: “The follow-up to this ranking insensitivity was the declaration in Jos by Mr. President that the number of deaths in Zamfara State are more than Benue and Plateau states put together, making Nigerians to wonder if he was the statistician general of deaths and not the commander-in-chief who should ensure deaths do not occur at all.

“To cap the festival of mockery of the deaths in the land, the presidency issued another statement saying there were more deaths under the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) administrations.

What a morbid sense of insensitive comparison. Are we to award some medals to the government in power for keeping the number of deaths in three years lower than what occurred in 16 years? We hope we do not see this in the book of achievements of this government.