President Bola Tinubu has declared that individuals involved in despicable crimes such as kidnapping must be treated as terrorists.
The President made the declaration on Tuesday at a Ramadan dinner with members of the Federal judiciary led by the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Olukayode Ariwoola.
Reiterating the government’s resolve to defeat banditry, the President said those who resort to kidnapping children are cowards, incapable of confronting the might of the Nigerian Armed Forces.
”We must treat kidnappers as terrorists,” the President said, according to a statement by his spokesman, Ajuri Ngelale.
“They are cowardly. They have been degraded. They look for soft targets. They go to schools and kidnap children and cause disaffection. We must treat them equally as terrorists in order to get rid of them, and I promise you we will get rid of them,” the President said at the dinner attended by serving and retired judicial officers, including two former CJNs, Justice Mahmud Mohammed and Justice Walter Onnoghen.
Nigeria is facing increasing security challenges majorly terrorism, banditry, kidnapping and oil theft. The North-West and North-East geopolitical zones have recorded the highest number of insurgent and bandit attacks in the last decade, with terror gangs sprawled across forests in the zones, killing and kidnapping thousands of residents, travellers, and soft targets including women and children.
The Tinubu government has maintained that it won’t negotiate with bandits, even as the marauders continue to make kidnapping-for-ransom an enterprise, abducting hundreds of schoolchildren and residents, with the most recent mass abduction being that of 137 schoolchildren from Kuriga in Kaduna State.
Some pupils and staff members of Apostolic Faith School in Ekiti State were also abducted on January 29, 2024, from their school bus. They were heading to Emure-Ekiti when assailants intercepted them at Eporo-Ekiti. They later regained freedom about a week later but the driver of the bus was found dead.
The abduction of the Kuriga pupils was not the first in the series of mass kidnappings of schoolchildren in the country. From Chibok to Dapchi, Kankara, Kagara, and many others in Kaduna, Katsina, and Niger states, terrorists have in the last years seized thousands of schoolchildren in mass kidnappings that attracted global outrage. While some of the students eventually regained freedom, others have been perpetually detained in the enclaves of their abductors and sexual abusers.
