Group promotes peace building in Nigeria

The West African Networking for Peace building (WANEP) has said that identifying issues that hinder peace and stability in the country is a way forward to promoting national peace building.

Coordinator, WANEP, North-West, Yunus Zakari Ya’u said this during the group’s book presentation titled, ‘Networking for Peace: Assessment of WANEP and other CSO peace building networks’ interventions in peace works in Nigeria (1999-2014) which covered all six geo political zones in the country and evaluated the effectiveness of collaboration amongst peace building organisations and institutions.

The study highlights contributions, policy and practice change on peace and security issues in Nigeria. It also seeks to unravel effectiveness of initiatives of WANEP and the other selected peace-building networks in addressing past and current challenges.

It also identified good practices, challenges and gaps in WANEP’s interventions, including emerging peace and security issues. He said peace building is a collective responsibility and knowledge about what others are doing is necessary. Ya’u added that communication should be addressed, as there is an increasing resort to hate speech, which tends to divide communities rather than bring them together.

On predicting security challenges, Ya’u added that even though the study is not about conflicts but on activities of organizations to addressing conflicts, any reasonable government would foresee more crisis coming, looking at the pattern over the years.