The National Secretary of the Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, Saleh Alhassan, has accused Governor Samuel Ortorm of Benue State of fuelling herders/farmers crisis in the state.
Alhassan who made this claim in a statement on Wednesday, stated that herdsmen are also victims of banditry, kidnapping and terrorism but their attacks are mostly ignored by the media.
He insisted that the clashes between farmers and herders were often blown out of proportion for political reasons cited the Benue State governor as a culprit of such.
“After Governor Ortom used that farmers/herders clashes to do that parade of corpses with 70% of them being empty caskets and the security know, at the end after he won his election, he came and said it is the bandits and Jukun that have been killing Benue people,” he said
The Fulani socio-cultural group further pleaded with the public to stop attributing cases of kidnapping and banditry to herders, adding that the Laziness of security agencies had contributed to the profiling of herders as most of the investigations carried out have exonerated herdsmen from criminality.
“The bandits who have taken over the ungoverned spaces in Nigeria, should be separated from herdsmen. Most of the time, lazy security agencies and investigators classify them as one because the herders do their business in the forest.
“The bandits, after committing atrocities, retreat into the forest. So, it is the duty of the government to provide security for rural areas in the country.
“It is wrong to classify herdsmen who do their businesses in the rural areas as bandits. The herdsmen are the first victim of bandits and kidnappers because their wealth are in the open,” Alhassan added.
