Insecurity: Pastors, Families In Southern Kaduna Paid N420 Million In Ransom In 2019, Says SOKAPU President

President of the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union (SOKAPU), Luka Binniyat, said pastors and their families who sleep in the world paid up to N420m as a ransom to Fulani herdsmen in 2019.

Binniyat said that there is a government-sponsored displacement drive within the local governments that make up Southern Kaduna, contrary to President Muhammadu Buhari 's argument that the killing of Christians might be a cultural thing.

He said SOKAPU had 80,000 registered refugees in four local governments, displaced from 109 villages.

According to him, of these communities are settled on by persons of Fulani extraction, who are now farming on the seized lands.

While addressing his cabinet at a ministerial retreat on September 8, Buhari said he assured the American president "that there is nothing to try to do with race or faith, killing Christians". It’s a cultural thing, which the respective leadership was failing the state .”

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Binniyat wondered when ransom collection became a neighborhood of the cultures

“It is either Buhari is deprived of information, or he's displaying his notorious incompetence in handling matters of security,” Binniyat said. “In 2019, in four rural communities in the Chikun and Kauru local governments alone, N420 m was paid to Fulani kidnappers and robbers by pastors, their families and Christians.

Our Southern Kaduna experience is that Muslim Fulani people are killing, plundering and driving people out of their communities and live in these communities now. What sort of culture says you ought to displace and kill people?”

Between 1980 and 2011, when individuals described as supporters of the new president by the Sheikh Ahmed Lemu Panel went on a killing spree to protest his defeat, everyone went to protest his defeat. ethnoreligious violence in Kaduna has always had an identifiable root cause, the literature on the topic shows.

Since 2013, however, attacks became more consistent, intensifying in 2015.

Binniyat said the present reality may be a recurring pattern of kidnapping and killing targeted at Christians.

He said, “The violence is targeted at Christians. In some areas, in Chikun, there are not any churches again. The survivors of those attacks say the attackers shouted ‘Allahu Akbar – God is greatest’.

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“We have consistently cried that as at today, 109 communities of Southern Kaduna in four government areas are seized by the Fulanis who are occupying them. If the president isn't in-tuned with this reality, then it's a shame.”

Binniyat said while the bandits killed people, state and federal actors enhanced the displacement drive through policy moves.

“These Fulani bandits are encouraged by the statements of Nasir El-Rufai within the case of Southern Kaduna and therefore the complicit silence of General Buhari. they'll be attacking Hausas in Sokoto, Jigawa, Katsina and other places; they're not occupying their lands like they're in Southern Kaduna.

“The plan isn't only within the use of arms; it's also within the use of state policy. there's an area called Kachia grazing reserve. It is 33,000 hectares in size. He confiscated land and increased it by 74,000 hectares for the exclusive use of Fulanis when El-Rufai came into power. One hectare is like one and a half football fields.”

“The only federal project in Southern Kaduna is found in Laduga, a Fulani settlement and Southern Kaduna is quite half Kaduna,” he added.

While evidence exists that points to the ethno-religious nature of the attacks, a source said that the control of those brute invaders also affected peaceful Fulani communities.

The source, who preferred to remain anonymous, said the federal government paid lobbyists inside the United States government to downplay the severity of the Fulani bandits' murder and maiming.

“Every time you report about what's happening in Nigeria, there's a United States government official which will go and counter it; paid by the Nigerian government,” the source said.

“We try to collect incontrovertible data on killings across the country that the Nigerian government cannot argue against in order that we will get the American government to send an envoy,” the source said.

For two years now, a gaggle within the US, Save the Persecuted Christians, has gathered signatures from quite 100 organisations, asking the United States government to send a fact-finding diplomat to research targeted killings in Nigeria and Lake Chad .

The United States government , on March 9, announced plans to send an envoy to research militant attacks within the Sahel region, which incorporates Nigeria.

The terms of reference for the appointed diplomat doesn't include bandit attacks within the North-West and North-Central.

“It is obvious that these bandits have some agenda type backing,” the source said. “The way these Fulani herdsmen come, a helicopter re-supplies them once they are shooting, a helicopter takes their wounded and drops fresh attackers. they can't buy the guns they are available with.”

The source said the president was either genuinely unaware of the interior security situation in his country or was masterminding the masterplan and playing dumb.