Bomba Dauda
Following the incessant violent conflicts bedeviling Kajuru Local Government Area of Kaduna State, the Kaduna State Peace Commission, KDPEACECOM, in partnership with Mercy Corps Nigeria have organised an Interest-Based Negotiation and Mediation Training for members of the Kajuru Truth Peace and Reconciliation Committee.
Speaking on the workshop, the Chief Executive Officer of KDPEACECOM, Priscilla Ankut, Esq, said, “The value of capacity building, training and building more skills in conflict management, in mediation, in peace building and negotiation can never be de-emphasised.”
Adding, “And anytime we engage people in training, we try to go a step higher than the previous one. At the previous workshops we held we focused at conflict analysis and peace building.
“Today, we are at an advanced course which is centred on negotiation and mediation. We are doing this because we found out that the conflicts are reoccurring not only in Kajuru but, in other places and as conflicts occurred some of them are just not limited to inter-communal tensions, they are not longer limited to the usual fault lines that we talk about: religion, ethnicity and politics.
“We’re also noticing an increase in criminality. Crimes are changing in scope and are changing in intensity but, what happens is when these crimes occurs they interact with the existing conflict context. In some of these areas that we working like Kajuru they kind of fit into this context and people will begin to suspect each other for those act of crimes and rather than managing the situation together as a community to fight the crime but, they tend to accuse each other, take on each other for being responsible for those act.”
Ankut tasked the trainees to take the training serious and apply the various skills they will acquire to work for peace development in Kajuru.
The lead facilitator, Mallam Sani Suleiman of Mercy Corps Nigeria who doubles as the Deputy Chief of Party for Community Initiative to Promote Peace (CIPP), told members of the committee to know that they are the critical mass representing others, working for the peace of Kajuru.
