The Benue Youth Forum (BYF) has reacted to plans by Miyetti Allah to establish vigilante groups across the country, describing it as a very curious situation.
Hassan Saleh, the National Secretary of Miyetti Allah, had, in an interview with International Center for Investigative Reporting, ICIR threatened that “the Fulani communities are mobilising their security outfits and that their people will not be in thousands, but in millions” apparently to challenge the conventional security outfits.
But the BYF, in a statement on Thursday by Terrence Kuanum, its president, described the plan as a clear call to war against ethnic nationalities by the Fulanis who are using their proximity to power in Nigeria to dispossess other tribes of their ancestral lands.
“This is one of the reasons that have persistently made Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, keep calling for the arrest and prosecution of the leaders of Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore for their avowed complicity in the invasion of Benue communities and gruesome murder of over 5000 unarmed people, as well as the destruction of properties worth billions of naira and displacement of millions of people, thereby creating a crunch humanitarian crisis,” Kuanum said.
“This is a reminder of a similar threat by Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore in 2017, who vowed that blood would flow in Benue State if the state did not scrap the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law. What followed thereafter was the killing of over 70 innocent persons in their sleep in January 2018. These killings have continued ever since.”
“The Benue Youth Forum sees this open declaration to establish private Vigilante Group across the country as another affront to the sensibilities of the Nigerian State.”
The Forum called on the Federal Government not to allow the group to have its way, stressing that “Miyetti Allah as a tribal association has no legal rights to establish vigilante groups when their members don’t have the definite location”.
