The leader of Ilana Oodua, Professor Bamji Akintoye has urged President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the International community to stem the tide of kidnapping and killings in the South-western states.
Professor Akintoye had in a statement made available to the newsmen decried the spate of kidnapping and killings in the region by a particular ethnic group in the past eight years.
He berated the immediate past administration for not proffering panacea to the killings that had made thousands of women widows and children orphans.
He, however, reposed confidence in the Tinubu-led administration, arguing that he would bring his wealth of experience to bear in his new assignment.
Professor Akintoye noted after the swearing in of Tinubu as President, the spate of killings continues unabated which is pointing to the fact this particular does not meant well for the Country.
The statement reads in part, ”Following the 2023 Nigerian presidential election and the election of a non-Fulani as president of Nigeria, we hoped that the Fulani genocidal atrocities would end, but they have continued.
‘The killings, destruction, rape, kidnapping,etc, are currently intensifying in all states of our homeland but most particularly in our Kwara State, Kogi State, Oyo State, Ogun State, Ekiti State and Ondo State. Even many of our most urban communities are being subjected to serious violence too.
“We observe with great pain that while international agencies, even the United Nations, normally pay attention dutifully to serious acts of violence in other parts of the world, they have generally ignored the massive killings going on in Nigeria for over eight years.
“There are no official statistics for the number of people who have been killed in the past eight years because the Nigerian government has been suppressing the information about the horrendous happenings in Nigeria, but our own unofficial statistics put the number of our people killed as 29,000.
“The United Nations has significantly kept silent about these horrors. The only important statement made by the United Nations about the same time as the church killings was to warn Nigerians against ‘hate speech’ in Nigeria so as not to jeopardize the approaching Nigerian elections.
“In contrast, when a terrorist group attacked a High School in Uganda on June 18 this year, the United Nations Secretary General was quick to issue sharp condemnation.
“We Nigerian peoples who are experiencing genocide by the Fulani are wondering why the United Nations is treating us differently.
We Yoruba repeat our alarm to Nigeria now and to the international community . We will not continue to suffer the genocidal outrages.”
