Bomba Dauda
The Kaduna State Peace Commission, KAPECOM, in concert with House of Kaduna organized an interfaith prayer season to seek the face of God for the restoration of peace in the state, Monday, in Kaduna. The Chairman of Kaduna State Peace Commission, Archbishop Idowu Josiah Feron, said, the basis of the House of Kaduna Family constitute of Christians and Muslims because the Bible and the Quran encourages Christians and Muslims to engage with one another, to work together for righteousness and piety.
“This is because we want the ugly things going on in Kaduna State to stop and God can stop it that’s why we came together as Christians and Muslims and prayed. Gov. Nasiru El-rufai of Kaduna State encouraged us, he facilitated it,” Feron added.
Sheik Ahmed Abubakar Gumi, co-Chairman of House of Kaduna observed that, “if Clerics have been admonishing their congregations, this situation wouldn’t have reached this level. Both Muslims and Christian Clerics must preach to their followers to shun any form of violence, if they have any grievances they should channel it through their clerics or through the constituted authorities.”
Gumi went further, the crisis can be narrowed to three basic things: ignorance, there is widespread ignorance in the society, especially amongst youth. So, anything that will elevate the educational level in the society will do well. Secondly poverty, it has ravaged the psyche of the common Nigerian. What we see as crime before we don’t see it as a crime now. Until when poverty is solved, we will continue to have problems. Third is governance, governance is to correct maladies and not to complain. So, if we have good governance, proactive governance that will involve stakeholders I think the problem will be overcome.
Expressing his views, Apostle Emmanuel Kure of the Throne Room Ministry described the insurgency in Nigeria as “a complex thing.” Adding that, the insurgency is not straight forward, so, it means Clerics will need to be very careful before jumping into any conclusion or making some decisions or remarks that will increase the crisis. We need to be a little bit more careful to our approach and response to it.
It is our business to solve the problem that created or made them criminals. Unemployment, hunger, inflation are some of the challenges pushing up the scale of crime. Even if you are employed your salary is not enough to meet your basic needs. There are other circumstantial factors that turned people into bandits and if we put our efforts to deal with the circumstances that bring about this insurgency in the first place we would have been able to solve the problem by now. The Government is like one way traffic, they don’t look for innovative ways of solving the problem. The government is supposed to come up with more initiative, I’m not very comfortable with the initiative that the government has taken apart from brute force or they won’t compromise, they will not negotiate and that by itself will not solve our problem in this country. Let us try to bring solutions to the problem. The government needs to use the Carrot and Stick approach, to try to solve this problem but, the government is not carrying out any initiative at all, it is not innovative.
