Governor Babagana Zulum of Borno, Northeast Nigeria, has said that insurgency in the State has reduced significantly by 80 percent due to Boko Haram militants that have surrendered.
Gatekeepers News reports that Zulum stated this while speaking with State House correspondents at the Aso Rock villa on Thursday. According to him, “social cohesion” is one of the measures needed to achieve stability in the northeast region.
“I think those that are saying this are not aware of what is going on in Borno state. In Borno state, these people voluntarily surrendered by themselves,” he said.
“There is no provision, nor any law in the whole world, which states that those that have voluntarily surrendered shall be killed. And because of this surrender, amongst others, the insurgency situation in Borno state has been reduced by about 80 percent.
“We also became resilient enough to fight them. Involvement of civilian JTF, community resilience, enhancing peace building, social cohesion and stability are some of the things that we need to do in order to reduce insurgency.”
The Borno Governor further expressed optimism that the operations of the multinational joint task force (MNJTF) would curb the activities of the insurgents around the Lake Chad region.
On his part, Bello Matawalle, Zamfara governor, said his administration has been collaborating with the Nigerien authorities to fight gunmen destabilising the north-western region of Nigeria.
“We need to have a joint task force between the Nigerian and Nigerien security, and we will provide some logistics for them in order to ease their operations,” Matawalle said.
“What we are doing is that if we have any information about bandits that are coming from Niger, then we are going to reach them from Nigeria and alert the Nigerien security to monitor and push them so that we can collectively fight these criminals.”
Gatekeepers News reports that over 15,000 Boko Haram insurgents and their family members had surrendered to troops as of November 2021.
