The Presidency says members of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB are ‘Thieves’ who terrorize Christians to steal money.
This is contained in a statement signed by President Muhammadu Buhari’s spokesperson, Garba Shehu.
The statement, made available to ABN TV, alleged that members of IPOB are focused on stealing money and do not defend Christianity as they claim.
The statement read in part; “It is important both for Nigerians and the international community to appreciate that there are a multitude of factors attendant to these troubles.”
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“There is the Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorism, as well as the spate of kidnappings for ransom, transformed by some misinformed global media into a Muslim-on-Christian threat. Yet, in reality, there are no religious connotations at all when the primary purpose of these acts is to extract money.”
“Then the herder-farmer clashes. While international voices and some Nigerian politicians who seek personal gain from division declare this a matter of religion, for those involved, it is almost entirely a matter of access to water and land. Herders have moved their cattle into contact with farmers for millennia. But, increasingly, due to population pressure, escalating aridity of northern states, and climate change, they are forced to travel further south to find grazing lands.”
“Then, further afield in the South-east, IPOB are not struggling for freedom when they attack police stations and property, but rather committing acts of terrorism in order to steal money. IPOB is not defending Christians – as their highly-paid foreign lobbyists claim – when almost every citizen of those states they terrorize is uniformly Christian. Yet mistakenly, and because the lobbyists for IPOB have duped them, some misguided foreign media and politicians believe so.”
