Tinubu visits Kaduna governor, donates N50m to train attack victims

USOSA flays attack, demands prosecution of culprits

Former governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu, has visited Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State to commiserate with him over the recent train attack by bandits, which claimed eight lives.

Tinubu, who was received by El-Rufai along with Senators Uba Sani (Kaduna Central) and Suleiman Abdu-Kwari (Kaduna North) at Sir Kashim Ibrahim House, described the attack as a national disaster.

The presidential aspirant, who was accompanied by former governor of Borno State, Sen. Kashim Shettima; former speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara and Sen. Abu Ibrahim (Katsina South), announced a donation of N50 million to victims of the attack.

He said that killings by bandits are no longer acceptable and must stop, urging general concern about the deadly attacks in Kaduna in recent times.

Responding, El-Rufai expressed gratitude to Tinubu for the visit, adding that it preempted his plan to visit Lagos to thank the All Progressives Congress (APC) national leader for honouring the people of Kaduna by cancelling his 70th birthday on the day of the tragedy.

SIMILARLY, Unity Schools Old Students Association (USOSA) has condemned the gruesome attack on an Abuja-Kaduna train by bandits, which affected members of the association.

The association demanded that the culprits and their sponsors be fished out immediately and prosecuted. In a statement, yesterday, the President-General of USOSA, Lawrence Wilbert, said the association considered the recent security breaches too many in a thread of demonic assaults on the national psyche, peace, tranquility and socio-political and economic development.

His words: “We decry the fact that the police, armed forces and other security agencies are evidently transfixed and confounded by the macabre antics of the evil merchants of death who, to all intents and purposes, have seized the nation by the jugular, making nonsense of our sovereignty and laying waste the lives of our people and our immemorial commonwealth.”

Noting that the intelligence gathering components of the country’s security apparatus appear non-existent, he added: “Every Nigeria’s life is sacred; it is the responsibility of the government to secure our lives. The fact that insecurity pervades the land is no news; the increasing frequency of the attacks, their ever widening geographical spread and the mounting casualty figures are. Nigerians are also very familiar with the causes of the malaise, chief among which are massive bare-faced corruption and gross incompetence in the government and the higher echelons of the security agencies, and an increasingly greater premium on ethno-religious and other sectional sentiments rather than our collective patriotic quotient.”