The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III has urged the Federal Government to prosecute killer Fulani herdsmen, describing them as criminals who should be treated as such. The Sultan, a Fulani man, further said Nigerians should stop mistaking the devilish act of a few killer herdsmen as being the script of the Fulani or Muslim community in the country.
The monarch, who disclosed this yesterday in Kaduna during a two-day Annual Pan-Northern Groups Summit on Security, Socio-Economic and Political Development,” however, noted that the clashes between farmers and the herdsmen in some communities across the country were purely economic in nature and not ethnoreligious as insinuated in some quarters.
He said: “There are some terrible herdsmen, who kill people, but they are acting on their own; they are criminals and they must be treated as criminals.
Therefore, the Federal Government should prosecute them. “It is disheartening to hear when people say Fulani herdsmen want to Islamize Nigeria and that is why they are killing.
Any Fulani herdsman, who kills is not acting the script of Fulani community in Nigeria, neither is he working for the Muslim community.” Speaking on the state of the north, the Sultan said that its unity was non-negotiable if the region must develop with a common front, even as he lamented that the North of today was not the North that Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello left behind.
While adding that, there was ethnic awareness among northerners now than ever before, the Sultan insisted that “the question is why the sudden consciousness in ethnicity and religion?”
On state of infrastructural decay in the north, the Sultan charged Northern governors to build roads, instead of using N28 billion to build airport, adding that common people will feel their impact more on roads than in building airport.
