THE governor of Kaduna State, Uba Sani, believes that poverty, unemployment, hopelessness, and a lack of education are the primary causes of insecurity in the country’s northwest.
Sani, who spoke on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily today, stated that the issue of banditry and kidnapping in the North-West differs from that of insurgency in the Northeast.
“The North-West crisis has to do with banditry and kidnapping, it is economic problem. When you look at the situation critically, you will agree with me that most of those bandits always kidnap innocent people and ask for ransom and whenever they are given money, they will release the victims in many cases and some cases when there is a delay they end up taking the lives of those victims.
“And when you look at the situation, you also look at the problem of poverty, unemployment, hopelessness and lack of education particularly in the Northwestern part of Nigeria, that is the reason why a lot of these incidents happen,” Governor Sani said.
The governor maintained that statistics has proven that greater percentage of people living in the North-West are living below poverty line, adding that a lot of out of school children in the country are also from the North-West zone.
“The last time I checked, and you can confirm from the SDGs recent report, you would agree with me that about 80 to 90% of the people living in the Northwestern part of Nigeria are living below the poverty line and of course if you look at the statistics of out of school children, you can see that a lot of the are from the Northwestern part of Nigeria,” he said.
Governor Sani stated that apprehending criminals and pardoning them when they surrender is only one component of the non-kinetic method to addressing insecurity, and that it is not the most essential.
According to him, the most crucial method to stopping the problem is to look at people’s overall conditions, which include poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness.
