You Picked War over Peace, You’ve declared war on Northern Nigeria - Nothern Elders to Jonathan

According to Vanguard, Northern elders on Thursday broke their silence on the slamming of state of emergency in three of their states, describing the action of President Goodluck Jonathan as an indirect declaration of war on the Northern part of Nigeria. The President’s action, which took the northern elders by surprise, is coming barely three weeks after Jonathan accepted a roadmap from the NEF on how to end the Boko Haram insurgency in parts of the north.

The elders had successfully impressed upon the Presidency to raise the Boko Haram committee to dialogue with the sect with a view to restoring elusive peace to the region. Jonathan, who met with the NEF leadership in Abuja in April, subsequently inaugurated the Turaki-led BH committee with a mandate to broker peace with the sect and compensates their victims within a two-month timeframe.
However, shortly after inaugurating the panel, the sect leadership rejected the amnesty offer, saying that it is the government that should seek amnesty for having killed its Muslim brothers across the country.

But a spokesman for the NEF, Prof Ango Abdullahi, who relayed the position of the group on Thursday, told a source that they were disappointed by the sudden change of tactic by Jonathan on how to resolve the crisis in the north.

They also said the action had effectively ended the proposed amnesty for members of the Boko Haram sect.

In separate interviews with our correspondents, in Abuja, on Thursday, Spokesperson of the Northern Elders Forum, Prof. Ango Abdullahi and Dr. Junaid Mohammed described the President’s action as counter-productive.

Abdullahi said, “The states have always been in a state of emergency in the states that were announced the other day.

“The states have always been occupied by soldiers anyway; I think this measure is just a formality. From all indications, those areas that have been announced as coming under the emergency, except Adamawa, Yobe and Borno, have always been practically under the state of emergency.

“Our own interpretation of the crisis and amnesty or reconciliation committee, the surprise here is that the committee has not even been allowed to start serious work before their undermining because you can’t have the two together.

“You can’t have war while you are talking about peace and this is what we have on the ground now. We have this war and dialogue; I don’t know which one will succeed.”

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According to him, if allegations that members of the sect have taken over a part of Borno State are true, it is a demonstration of the failure of the state.

He said, “If it is true that this has happened it is the failure of the previous military effort against their activities. It remains to be seen whether the intensification of the military effort will succeed in an area where they failed before.

“It remains to be seen whether this is a good strategy but from all rational analysis, it is ill timed, and ill-advised because if the President was thinking of a state of emergency, he would have refrained from agreeing to set up this amnesty or reconciliation committee and concentrate on the war effort.

“To me, the work of the amnesty committee is practically terminated and we will wait for the outcome of the war.”

He explained that, “I cannot see how this will go together when you are more or less pursuing the same people that you want to come forward to discuss with you.”

Abdullahi insisted that there was no military solution to the insurgency as such dialogue remains the best option.