Shehu Sani To Buhari: Stop Calling A Spade A Spoon, ‘Herdsmen Are Terrorists’

Senator Shehu Sani of Kaduna Central Senatorial District has urged the President Muhammadu Buhari government to call herdsmen the “terrorists” that they are and stop calling “a spade a spoon”.

“Herdsmen who commit massacre in Benue and Taraba and ‘Bandits’ who commit massacre in Zamfara and Birnin Gwari in Kaduna state, are nothing but terrorists; except if we want to call a spade a pestle or a spoon,” Senator Sani said in a tweet on Monday.

President Buhari, it would be recalled, had exenterated Fulani herdsmen from the incessant killings going on in the country during his visit to the White House in the United States.

“The problem of herders in Nigeria is a very long historical thing. The Nigerian herders don’t carry anything more than a stick and occasionally a matchet to cut down foliage and give it to their animals, these ones are carrying AK-47,” Buhari told President Donald Trump of the United States.

Buhari had said, “So, people should not underrate what happened in Libya. 43 years of Ghaddaffi, people were recruited from Sahel and trained to shoot and kill. With the demise of Ghaddaffi, they moved to other countries and region and carried the experience with them.”

But Senator Sani urged the president to stop trying to give another name to the marauding herdsmen other than calling them terrorists.

The federal lawmaker pledged to help Buhari push for the release of more funds to security agencies with a view of finding a lasting solution to the herdsmen killings.

Shehu said, “I will support the President on the floor of the Senate to fund and equip the DSS, Police and Civil Defence, as he did to the Military so that we can bring an end to all the excuses now ‘produced daily in an industrial-scale.’

“The indifference of the ruling political establishment to end the ceaseless violence and killings in the country is based on the fact that the victims are the poor and the peasants in rural areas.

“Again and again, I will continue to raise the tragic situation of Birnin Gwari on the floor of the Senate until it touches the conscience of those responsible for its security to prioritize human lives over 2019 politics.Mass Burial has become ‘a daily ritual’ in Birnin Gwari.We must admit the fact that the police and the army have nothing much to work with to enable them confront the danger and the superior fire power of the armed bandits,” he said.