Bomba Dauda
As the President of Atyap Community Development Association, ACDA, I, alongside my team will leave no stone unturned in searching for ways to bring development to our community.
With the support of all stakeholders, we believe we will rewrite history and make our lands enviable as a result of progress we envisage in the nearest future.
The President of ACDA, Comrade Dr. Silas Adamu who doubles as the Secretary General of Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria, MHWUN, made the remarks at a reception organised in his honour by friends and associates over the weekend.
He further stated, Although as a socio-cultural group, we are non-religious and non-political, we want to draw the attention of our people that the time has come for ACDA to have more than just a passing interest in the political activities surrounding our collective will for progress and development.
While we will not involve ACDA in the murky waters of party politics, we shall work together with politicians who are saddled with constitutional powers to bring peace, unity and development to our people.
We shall interrogate what their positions have brought to the table of our collective patrimony, be they Atyap, Hausa or Fulani and any other ethnic group in our land.
He added, If we mobilise and sensitise our people to go with only people that were there for them when they needed peace and security, people who wiped their tears when they were hungry; political parties that provided food when they were hungry, a government that provided justice to them when they were emasculated, groups that provided succour to them when they became homeless, even religious organisations that did not only sympathise with them in their hour of need by praying for God’s intervention for them but also empathised with them by practically providing basic needs for them as an injunction of God, and we knock on their doors and ask our people to vote for them or pray for them and mobilise in their favour and you call it politics or religion, then we are ready to change the narratives along this line.
We shall no longer abandon our people to the ruberics of selfish and and self serving pseudo political and religious bigots but shall encourage them to question the basis of the representation of our people at a every level of human endeavour.
If we don’t engage in the decision making of our future, someone else will do it and decide how we live, how we sleep and what should be ours and not what is really ours on the basis of social justice. The result is where we find ourselves today.
Accordingly, we call on all our peaple to be citizens. Citizens and not spectators. Citizens and not subjects. Responsible citizens building communities of service and a state and nation of character. Though our challenges are fearsome, so is our stregth. Our people are restless but we are hopeful and expectant as we need to bring into our task today the vision and will of those who came before us.
And the vision and will of our ancestors is what will build a very strong community where every Atyap, Hausa, Fulani and other ethnic groups in our land shall live peacefully and secure their future, where justice shall reign supreme.
And we believe this is achievable coming on the heels of our consultation with the three major ethnic groupings, viz a viz, Atyap, Hausa and Fulani, which we started yesterday and continued this morning.
There is a general desire within these groups to return to peaceful coexistence. We also discovered a general and unanimous resolution that a return to peace is desirable but that true and genuine peace can only be achieived when those directly involved in the conflict are allowed to talk to themselves first in order to fashion a way out of this connundrum.
We have agreed that we shall meet in the near future to talk to ourselves before we invite other stakeholders and government to inform them of our peace formula which will require the blessings of all the stakeholders and government.
And except the conflict merchants are on the prowl, all we expect from those looking for genuine peace is to allow ACDA to probe through this onerous task and come up with what will be interrogated by all patriotic people searching for solutions to our imbroglio.
Adamu hailed the services rendered and sacrifices of the men of the security. Apparatuses in the move to forestall insecurity in Atyapland.
“We also raise our hats in honour of security agents which have helped in descalation of violence and bringing an atmosphere that is good enough for consultation and discussion of our problems.
“So when we talk to ourselves, listen to ourselves, we shall unravel the Pandora’s box which will give us peace and secure us economically, socially, agriculturally infrastructurally et-al and bring about the 3r(s) of true reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction of all those affected in the crisis.”
