Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, Wednesday, returned to Nigeria after a two-week work leave in the United Kingdom, UK, and the United States of America, USA.
The governor was received at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport by top party and State Government officials in Abuja on Wednesday morning.
Recall that Ortom had during his visit to the United States, called on the American government and other international communities to hold President Muhammadu Buhari and his government responsible for the killings in Nigeria.
The Governor, who made the call at the State Department, Washington DC, while interacting with its officials, also accused Fulani herdsmen of being used as an instrument to wipe out farmers from their ancestral lands.
Ortom also told the US authority that “farming in Nigeria is under siege and is being decimated; agriculture is gradually dying and food security is being threatened”.
The governor said the false narrative of “herder-farmer clashes” was deliberately crafted to delay farmers’ doomsday until they were gradually wiped out and their ancestral lands confiscated, saying “the truth is that farming populations in Nigeria are under siege and are being decimated; agriculture is gradually dying and food security is being threatened”.
He alerted the world not to take the insecurity in Nigeria as a distant problem, stressing that the outbreak of war in any country would cause migration problems to America and Britain due to their friendly immigration policies.
“In the last seven years, the Buhari administration has seen children rendered as orphans, farmers being displaced, schools, hospitals and social services disrupted, without doing anything to restore normalcy.
“The federal government’s punitive neglect has led to an increasing number of internally displaced persons in Benue State which now stands at 1.5 million”, Ortom revealed.
He, however, called on the USA and the rest of the international community to demand accountability from Buhari’s government for the deaths of innocent citizens. According to him, doing so would be the right step to ending the spate of violence in Nigeria, especially in Benue State.
The governor asked the US to encourage the establishment of state police, appoint a special envoy to Nigeria to deal with the flashpoint of the violence and ensure that international funding of IDPs gets to Benue State, the epicentre of the current violence as well as Plateau, Kaduna, Niger, Zamfara and other states affected by terrorists’ attacks in the country.
