The letter, dated April 17, 2024, reads, “We send this letter most respectfully to Your Excellency as a follow-up to our earlier letter, dated August 06, 2022, which we delivered to your predecessor, President Muhammadu Buhari, in his exalted position then as President of Nigeria.”
Introduction
On Saturday, March 20, 2021, Samuel Ioraer Ortom, politician, farmer, former Minister of State for Trade and Investment, and now Governor of Benue escaped death by whiskers when assailants suspected to be herders waylaid him on his way back from his farm. According to Ortom, about 15 herders who were dressed in black outfits ambushed him and his security personnel. In his words “…. I went to my farm along Gboko road. And, on our way back, we started hearing some gunshots and we discovered people who were dressed in black, and from experience, we now discovered that these are Fulani militias and I did not want to take things for granted because, few days ago, the media were awash with statements from MACBAN who met in Yola, the same place they met in 2016 where they decided that they will take Nigeria, and that every other person is a slave; that was when they started infiltrating the entire country”.
Punch Newspapers
Sections
Sunday Aborisade, Abuja
Published 1:50 am
The Governor of Benue State, Samuel Orton, has advised the Federal Government to embrace ranching if it is genuinely interested in tackling insecurity.
Ortom stated this on Thursday at a lecture organised by the Correspondent Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, FCT Council.
He spoke on the topic, “Insecurity in Nigeria: Restoring peace, unity and progress.”
The governor insisted that the major cause of banditry, kidnapping, and other forms of criminality in Nigeria was because the Federal Government took no step to end open grazing.
He also accused the regime of the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), of encouraging the herdsmen menace by canvassing the Ruga system instead of advocating the modern system of livestock management.