Nigeria declared security emergency after a recent spate of mass abductions of students and Christian worshipers that forced the West African nation to shut down some schools.
Security agencies have been authorised to recruit thousands of more personnel as part of the emergency measures, while nomadic herders have been ordered to surrender illegal weapons, President Bola Tinubu said in a statement on Wednesday.
“There will be no more hiding places for agents of evil,” Tinubu said, who also asked the secret police to deploy guards “to flush out the terrorists and bandits” lurking in forests.
Nearly 400 people, including primary and secondary school students were abducted in the last two weeks in a series of attacks that forced the president to cancel a planned trip to the G20 summit in South Africa, and an African Union meeting in Angola. While some of the victims have since been released, more than 250 students and their teachers remain in captivity after they were seized from a Catholic school on Nov. 22.
The abductions happened at a time Tinubu was facing strong criticism from Nigerians and US President Donald Trump over his handling of the nation’s security, which has deteriorated under his tenure.
Trump made exaggerated claims that Christians are being deliberately attacked in Nigeria, and lawmakers from his conservative base have pointed to herders in Nigeria’s middlebelt region, who are mostly Fulani Muslims, as being responsible for violence against farmers.
Tinubu has now called on all herder associations to end open grazing and surrender illegal weapons, urging them to approach a new livestock ministry to address their challenges.
“Ranching is now the path forward for sustainable livestock farming and national harmony,” he said in the statement. The government will work with them to “solve this problem, once and for all.”
He called on the National Assembly to begin reviewing laws to allow state governments that require local policing to establish them. For long, that has been a thorny issue in Nigeria where a centralised police system has been partly blamed for being unable to tackle the nation’s widespread insecurity.
