Foreigners seeking to acquire Quranic education responsible for Boko Haram – says Shehu of Borno

The Boko Haram insurgency terrorising the Northeast part of the country is the handiwork of foreigners who penetrated the region in the guise of seeking to acquire Quranic education, Shehu of Borno, Alhaji Abubakar Ibn Umar El-Kanemi, has said.

The traditional ruler stated this during a town hall meeting organised by Yateem Faqeer Global Foundation in Abuja on Thursday. 

He said the people of the region had suffered so much at the hands of the insurgents. He, however, commended the Federal Government for the successes recorded in the fight against terrorism; noting that the authorities have reclaimed the 17 Local Government Areas in Borno which were hitherto under the control of Boko Haram insurgents before President Muhammadu Buhari took over power in 2015.

According to him, “Borno has witnessed so many things, both good and bad. Boko Haram is something meaningless, mindless and without any sense of direction as none of the Holy Books, either Quran or the Bible, indicates that you show disrespect to others, burn and destroy their properties. And I want people to know that Boko Haram was never initiated or started by people of the Northeast Zone. It is something they just brought to us from nowhere. 

“Boko Haram insurgents came to Borno and the North-East in the guise of acquiring Quranic education while not many knew they had an ideology which was polluted as well as promoted into the minds of the youths, and created havoc in our area. Our airport had been vandalised. We were not receiving visitors; no commercial flights, no roads. The only road we had was Maiduguri – Kano road as all other roads were besieged and taken over by Boko Haram. At that time, Maiduguri was hosting over two million people as IDPs and the majority of them were women and children suffering very seriously.

“Honestly, we have suffered; the people have suffered. The palaces of our Emirs were destroyed; some of them were killed including other traditional rulers, religious leaders and district heads, and so many other people were killed. The Northeast has so many problems. But, before we had this administration, out of the 27 local governments in Borno, 17 were under the control of Boko Haram. But now, not any local government in Borno is under the control of Boko Haram.

“When these things started, we were telling people that something has to be done otherwise it will escalate to the other part of the country; they thought it was only a Borno affair, but look at it critically, everywhere today there is the problem of kidnappings, pipeline vandalism, cultism, communal clashes, and cattle rustling. So, the only permanent solution to this problem is prayer and provision of useful and credible intelligence to the security agencies.”