President Muhammadu Buhari has described the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) as thieves promoting terrorism.
He described alleged attacks by suspected IPOB members on police stations and others as nothing but terrorist attacks and not agitation for secession.
According to a statement by presidential aide, Garba Shehu on Sunday, IPOB is not defending Christians in Southeastern Nigeria as some people have said.
The President noted that the Nnamdi Kanu-led group is not fighting for freedom, NAN reports.
The statement said the group’s actions are taken to steal money.
The statement also said โit is important both for Nigerians and the international community to appreciate that there areโ a multitude of factors responsible for the worsening insecurity in Nigeria.
โAttempts to simplify the reasons (for insecurity) into a basic narrative may help raise donor-dollars for international NGOs, fill pages of overseas newspapers and burnish foreign politiciansโ faith credentials.
โBut this does not increase understanding, nor offer solutions. If anything, simplistic theorising and finger-pointing make the situation worse.
โIn the South-East, IPOB are not struggling for freedom when they attack police stations and property, but rather committing acts of terrorismโ to steal money.
โIPOB is not defending Christians, as their highly paid foreign lobbyists claim, โwhen almost every citizen of those states they terrorize is uniformly Christian,โ it added.
The statement also said the herder-farmer crisis is nothing but a struggle for resources between the two groups.
It said, โThere are no religious connotations at all when the primary purpose of these acts is to extract money.
โThen the herder-farmer clashes. While international voices and some Nigerian politicians who seek personal gains from division declare this a matter of religion, for those involved, it is almost entirely a matter of access to water and land.
โHerders 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.โ
