BENUE State Governor, Samuel Ortom, has called on the American government and the international community to hold President Buhari accountable for the spate of violence in Nigeria.
In a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Diaspora Affairs, Rev. Peter Ichull, Ortom said the All Progressives Congress-led government should be held responsible if anything happened to him.
He made the call at the State Department, Washington DC, United States, while interacting with American officials.
Ortom, who left the shores of Nigeria penultimate Sunday for the United Kingdom and later moved to the US, cited a series of threats he received and the attempt made on his life in March 2021, as signals that the Presidency was after him.
He pointed out that to date, those who attacked him had yet to be prosecuted.
The governor stated that he was at the State Department to present the traumatised Nigerian victims’ side of the story after discovering that wrong narratives were being circulated across the globe by the government of Buhari to shield itself from complicity.
He said the narrative of “herder-farmer clashes” was deliberately crafted to delay farmers’ doomsday until they were gradually wiped out and their ancestral lands confiscated.
“The truth is that the farming population in Nigeria is under siege and farmers are being decimated; agriculture is gradually dying and food security is being threatened,” he added.
Ortom alerted the international community not to take the insecurity in Nigeria with levity, stressing that the outbreak of war in any country would cause migration problems for America and Britain due to their friendly immigration policies.
He said in the last seven years, the Buhari administration had seen children rendered orphans, farmers displaced, and schools, hospitals and social services disrupted, without doing anything to restore normalcy, stating that the federal government’s punitive neglect had led to an increasing number of internally displaced persons in Benue State, which stood at more than 1.5 million.
He, however, called on the US and the rest of the international community to take serious steps to end the spate of violence in the country, especially in Benue State.
He asked the international community to demand accountability from Buhari’s government for the deaths of innocent citizens, suggesting that a special envoy to Nigeria to deal with the flashpoint of violence be appointed.
Responding, the US State Department officials, headed by the Under Secretary, Africa, and Middle East, Padgett Douglas, said, “The US government is aware of the random terrorism, weaponization of religion and importation of violence in Nigeria.”
He added that since the security of the political system was paramount to the US government, it had set up a conflict bureau to fund IDPs in Nigeria and assured that he would ensure that such funding did not go to the wrong channels.
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