The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, has posited that the North is the worst place to live in the country.
The Sultan, who stated this at the fourth quarterly meeting of the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council in Abuja, said bandits were fast overrunning the North as residents slept with their eyes open.
The sultan’s comments came about the same time governors of the six northeastern states met in Yola, Adamawa State where they lamented the security challenges bedevilling the region and also sort for power to prosecute Boko Haram suspects.
Speaking at the meeting themed ‘Questioning for peace in the challenges of insecurity and COVID-19’, the sultan described the North as the worst place to live, noting that bandits had become daring.
Sultan Abubakar who is also co-chairman of the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council lamented on the rising cost of living, saying, the common man is at the receiving end things are gradually becoming beyond his reach.
According to him: “Now north is not secure at all. In fact, it is the worst place to be in this country because bandits go about in the villages with their AK-47 and nobody talks to them.
“They stop at the markets and buy things and even collect change with their weapons.
“We have security problems in the country, bandits now go into people’s houses to kidnap, not on the highway anymore.
“Of recent in the last couple of days, they are going into institutions, in Zaria; ABU, the Polytechnic and took away people,” the Sultan said.
He went on to lament that people in the North West don’t sleep with their eyes closed, adding that a village was razed down in Sokoto on Wednesday but nobody heard about it.
“The insecurity in the north is so high that people are even afraid of travelling from Funtua to Zaria, a journey of about 48 or 50 miles; not to talk of Sokoto to Abuja or to Kano.
“We know what we are going through. We are so insecure in the North that people are losing hope. People keep things in the house so that when the bandits come, they would let them be free.
“A couple of weeks ago, 76 people were killed in Sokoto by bandits in a day. It is not a story because I went there with the governor in the eastern part of Sokoto, but you don’t hear these stories because it happened in the North.
“And we don’t have media that is strong enough to bring out these atrocities about the bandits so people think that the North is secure.”
He also said, “Food prices are on the increase and we need to do something about it. The cost of onion is too high and beyond the reach of many people.
“A hungry man is an angry man. The rising cost of foodstuff in the markets is an issue. The amount an onion costs in Nigeria today is an insight into the current economic hardship in the country.
“I think we really need to sit down and look at these issues because a hungry man is an angry man. We do not lack recommendations and solutions to our problems.
“What we lack is implementation and that sense of purpose to do the right thing, but we don’t like doing the right thing, we always want to cut corners.”
In his own submission, the President, Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and co-chairman of NIREC, Dr Samson Olasupo Ayokunle, while thanking God for saving the nation from the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to other countries, urged the government to always tackle problems before they degenerate.
