The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed has called on Nigeria’s international partners to designate the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) a terrorist organisation.
This is coming on the heels of the conviction and sentencing of 45 Boko Haram members to between 3 and 31 years in jail, following the conclusion of the first phase of the trial in Niger State.
The minister made the call for the designation of IPOB as a terrorist organisation in an article, entitled ”Thwarting Terrorism in Nigeria”, which appeared in the United States Washington Times newspaper yesterday.
Mohammed argued that IPOB’s actions qualified the group as a terrorist organization in most jurisdictions.
“The terror lays bare their opportunism. They masquerade as a separatist movement, yet they endanger the very people they claim to represent. In reality, IPOB cares about IPOB and nothing more,” Alhaji Mohammed said.
Using the words of IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu, such as “If they fail to give us Biafra, Somalia will look like a paradise compared to what will happen to that ‘zoo’ (Nigeria).” “I don’t want peaceful actualisation of Biafra”; “We need guns and we need bullets”; “If they don’t give us Biafra, they will die,” the minister explained that IPOB is a terrorist organization like ETA in Spain, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the PKK is in Turkey, all of whom are proscribed by the U.S. State Department.
Mohammed stated that the Buhari administration would not make the same mistake as the previous government “by allowing terrorists to capture land.”
“The government reiterates its appeal to its international partners to proscribe the organisation, and in doing so, starve it of the funds which gives it sustenance. Nigeria has just defeated one preventable terrorist insurgency. This one must not be given the chance to get a foothold,” the minister writes.
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