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Former governor of Sokoto State, Senator Aliyu Magatakarda Wamakko, has challenged political, traditional and opinion leaders in the Southeast region of the country to break their silence and call to order irate youths causing havoc to forestall large scale retaliation.
Wamakko said the continued silence of leaders from the zone amounts to endorsement of the carnage being wrought on innocent citizens.
Wamakko said this in a statement in Abuja yesterday, titled, “A Clarion Call on Igbo Leaders: Enough is Enough.” The statement reads: “I, like all well-meaning Nigerians, have followed with disbelief, pain and disgust the happenings in the fast few months in the Southeast and parts of South-south zones of Nigeria. We have seen a disturbing snowballing of a little flame into a raging fire that is threatening the peace and stability of Nigeria as a country.
“What could have been dismissed as the action of a few ‘misguided’ youths is now clearly becoming an agenda for which there is almost a wholesome backing from those who should have cautioned their children and nip the emerging crisis in the bud. Many Northerners living peacefully in some states in the Southeast have come under undue harassment lately while a number of them have been murdered in cold blood for simply coming from a section of the country.
“Prior to the assassination of Ahmed Gulak last Sunday in Imo, tens of our people have suffered similar fate in the hands of the increasingly emboldened IPOB militants. Those killings are largely under-reported perhaps because the victims are not prominent and partly because of a deliberate culture of silence in a section of the media about what is happening.”
He further alleged: “In the past week alone, there have been three incidents of arson and looting against properties belonging to Northern traders travelling in the Southeast. Last weekend, a truck of onions with about 500 bags of the commodity was ransacked by members of the IPOB in a daylight robbery in Owerri. They sold the onions and ran away with the money before the police could save the other truck they similarly took. Around the same time, two trucks conveying palm oil from Enugu to Kano were intercepted and razed down in Nsukka, for no reason. Just yesterday, a truck delivering livestock to Anambra was burnt down along with the animals it carried in the streets of Awka.”
He however said, in spite of all these unwarranted provocations, Northern leaders have been restraining their own who have incurred incalculable and irreplaceable loss by preaching patience and peace. But noted regrettably that, “our friends and compatriots, leaders of Igbo extraction, have remained dead silent in the face of increasing assault and effort by their own people to stock a nationwide mayhem.
Hinting that Northern leaders are equally under intense pressure over the current situation, Wamakko warned that, “if leaders from the Southeast feel they can allow their own people to do what they want, we may have no choice than to stop dousing the increasing tension among our own followers. “A stitch in time saves nine!” he warned.