Obasanjo, Fulani Community Leaders Dialogue For Peace

By Raymond Osho

Former President Olusegun Obasanj has on Saturday August 3, 2019 dialogue with Fulani community leaders from the South West States of the country, including Kwara and Kogi States on the challenges facing the nation.

The community, under the auspices of the Gan Allah Fulani Development Association met the former President with a view to ending the current crisis in the country.

At the meeting, held at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) in Abeokuta, the State capital, Obasanjo maintained that Nigeria as  a nation has a peculiar problem that must be tackled urgently.

The problem, he said was bothered on criminality and insecurity.

Obasanjo said; “There is criminality, there is insecurity and it has not been like that before. If this is what we have, what we want to do at this meeting is find solutions to stop it.

“We want to have peace, we want to have security, we want to have harmony, we want to have wholesomeness, we want to have progress, how can we have these? We want to move Nigeria forward, irrespective of tribe, religion, ethnicity, trade, profession, where I come from, where you come from.

“How can we together move Nigeria forward? And there nobody else who will do all these for us, it is you, we, all of us here and all our brothers and sisters wherever they may be in Nigeria.

“It is not one man’s job or one person’s job or one group’s job, it a job for all of us, all Nigerians and unless and until we see it that way, we should stop passing blame, everybody is wrong and everybody is right. Let us take what is right in one group and join it with what is right in other group and throw away what is wrong in all the groups, then we will move forward.

“Our brothers and sisters in West Africa are worried about our situation. They are wondering if Nigeria cannot manage her security, if Nigeria’s security is endangered, how can they look up to Nigeria who they normally see as big brother, that can be called upon to come and help them if they are in any type of condrum so they are worried and we are here to assure them, to assuage their worry to be able to say yes, we are Nigerians, we can deal and we will deal with our security problem and any other problem that we need to deal with.

“We will have positive measures that are measurable which we will put timeline to and which will be actions by individuals and groups and which we can follow and see what progress we are making and maybe before long, we can then have what I will call progress meeting to discuss what we have achieved, what is left to be achieved, where do we move to next? But we must have taken away that will work for us, individually and collectively.

“We don’t want what used to be Nigeria before again. We want to discuss and we want to have realistic solutions to our problems.”

Alhaji Sale Bayeri however urged Nigerians to identify criminal Fulani herdsmen and non-herdsmen and expose them for the full wrath of the law to take its place, saying same treatment must apply to other criminals from other ethnic groups.

Participants at the meeting therefore agreed to meet within three months to review the progress of implementation of the recommendations.

Present at the meeting are; Yinka Odumakin, the Publicity Secretary of Afenifere, Dayo Adewole, survival of recent kidnapped incidence and son of the immediate past Health Minister, Saleh Bayeri, the National Chairman of GAFDAN.