Southern Kaduna: Are we having a systemic ethnic extermination?

The perennial blood bath in Southern Kaduna has unfortunately resurfaced again with seven people killed on 23, July, 2020 after unknown gunmen staged a fresh attack on Agwala Doka in Kajuru Local Government Area of the state. The killing in Agwala Doka in less than a week has spread to three other LGAs of Kaura, Zagon Kataf, and Kauru with not less than 43 people killed in the LGAs.

The Governor of the state, Nasir El-Rufai, reacting to the sad development said the insecurity challenge was being perpetrated by criminal elements who engage in killing, kidnapping and rustling cattle in the entire North West, who hide under the umbrella of ethnicity and region to create communal tensions amongst people who ordinarily peacefully cohabit.

According to a statement by his spokesman, Muyiwa Adekeye, the El-Rufai administration had “taken major steps to secure the area, including ensuring that a military base was opened in Southern Kaduna along with two mobile police squadrons, answering a decades-long demand for enhanced security presence in the area.”

He said what has escalated the insecurity challenge are the reprisal attacks that youths from the affected communities inflicted on Fulani communities in the area on the basis of the fact that the presumed bandits share the same ethnicity with them.

But various groups and persons have accused the Kaduna State government of not doing enough to protect lives and properties of the people of the southern Kaduna.

A security expert, Col. Hassan Stan-Labo (rtd), who was on a live television programme monitored by IMPACT NEWS, said the Governor of the state is complicit in the security issues in Southern Kaduna, “ I have taken a personal review of the situation in Kaduna state and I regret to say that el-Rufai, His Excellency is complicit. The government of Kaduna State is complicit. If we say that a curfew is imposed, how come with our security agents on ground, the same attackers came again in the night to complete their unfinished business?”

He said the El-Rufai’s government appears to have taken side in the indiscriminate killing and insecurity in Southern Kaduna. “If the government on ground is not objective enough, if the government’s action indicates that it has already taken side or has its own intention which what is ongoing fits into, we cannot make any headway.”

He lamented that security agencies and government of the state only arrest youths of the affected communities who had stood their ground to defend their communities from further attacks. “It is only when the youths want to stand up to protect their communities that you see them to arrest. A good number of these youth are in all sorts of cells all over Kaduna state. How many of these so called herders have been arrested? Whenever they are arrested they are just meant to be paraded before television. After that, it ends there.”

Also reacting to a statement released by a spokesperson of the President, Mallam Garba Shehu, who said the killings in Southern Kaduna is a manifestation of “evil combination of politically-motivated banditry, revenge killings and mutual violence by criminal gangs on ethnic and religious ground”, the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union said the statement was a deliberate plot to justify the genocide in that part of the state.

Luka Binniyat, an executive member of the union said the statement is a deliberate twist of facts on the killings in the Southern Kaduna. With the current state of insecurity in that part of the state, it is important and expedient for the Federal and state government and stakeholders in the Southern Kaduna find a lasting solution to the indiscriminate loss of lives and properties in that part of the state.

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