…Gumi is a Terrorists Sympathiser
Prominent civil rights advocacy group: Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has warned the federal government not to accept the Sheikh Ahmad Gumi’s persistent advocacy for dialogues with terrorists and bandits who are responsible for the incessant kidnappings of school children and the assassination of innocent citizens through coordinated attacks of soft targets.
HURIWA is calling on President Tinubu to outrightly reject the constant demands for terrorists to be pardoned or bribed with a programme similar to the Amnesty programme in the crude oil rich Niger Delta region which was established by the then federal government of Umar Musa Yar’adua and Goodluck Jonathan just as the Rights group dismissed the suggestion made by the Kaduna based Islamic scholar as unconstitutional, illegal and absolutely reprehensible.
HURIWA said that whereas the Amnesty programme for Niger Delta militants was justifiable following the continuous environmental degradation and destruction of the ecosystem of the people of the Niger Delta which necessitated the armed struggles by the armed militants that ended with their peaceful disengagement and the establishment of the Amnesty programme funded with funds generated from the exports of crude oil resources that the explorations are done in their immediate environment.
But HURIWA wonders why Sheikh Ahmad Gumi thinks the Fulani terrorists who have no legal reason for any agitations should be bribed with an Amnesty programme and apparently, to fund the programme from revenues generated from crude oil resources that are found in the Niger Delta. So, the call for Amnesty programme for Fulani terrorists is fallacious, untenable, criminal, puerile and laughable and should be dismissed as a garbage that it is.”
Dismissing the Kaduna based Islamic scholar as a terrorists sympathiser, HURIWA condemned Gumi for failing to see the need to totally condemn and deprecate the bloody violence unleashed on Innocent citizens by terrorists based in the North West made up mostly of armed Fulani militiamen but this Kaduna Islamic scholar has carved a niche for himself as someone who would always be the first to rush to the media since the last one decade to plead the cause of terrorists which is totally misdirected and misconceived.
HURIWA, in a media statement by the National Coordinator Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, recalled that the controversial Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi had claimed that gaining access to terrorists is easy if the Nigerian Government is ready to dialogue with them. And then on another breath, this same man said these terrorists are unknown. “So, if the terrorists are unknown, how does Gumi think he can make access to them seamless? Is this not a fallacy?”
HURIWA recalled that Gumi said this while reacting to the abduction of over 280 schoolchildren and staff members in Kaduna State last week even as Gumi during an interview with Arise News TV on Thursday night insisted that the best way to rescue all the abducted children and other residents was for the government to use a non-kinetic approach.
Gumi, via an earlier press statement, had said he was ready to engage the terrorists who kidnapped the schoolchildren from Kuriga Government Secondary and LEA Primary Schools in the Chikun local government area of Kaduna State.
Giving more clarification on his relationship with the terrorists, the Islamic cleric said they were becoming more hostile because the Nigerian government had been threatening to kill them.
Gumi stated as follows: “We are seeing that these bandits are getting more and more vicious. Before they didn’t do what, they do. Now they are heading to softer targets, as the military man has said.
“We can only attribute that to the kinetic approach, which is over emphasised when we talk. When we hear politicians talking about kinetics, nothing is done to overcome these people.
“But let me give you an example: we are fighting bandits. They are anonymous, they are phantoms. How can you fight somebody you don’t even know? We said let’s go in, let’s know them, let’s map them out. Map them means know who they are, where they belong or all this intelligence information is virtually not there.
“How can you know somebody from satellites, from drones? And the harsh-handed approach to the matter is what is making it worse. Now they are kidnapping small children and they are threatening death, which they didn’t do before. So I think what ought to be done is let’s go back to the drawing board and truly be non-kinetic.
“You know when we had victims of the train attack, a committee was set by the military then and the former government and they were able to contact them, the same way journalists have been able to contact them. They are not that difficult to contact.
“But what you don’t know is their foot soldiers. You need a programme just like you have for the Niger Delta, a programme which will bring them out of their forest. With the promise of educating them, giving them healthcare, giving them a peaceful life.”
HURIWA in its reaction, called on Nigerians to totally denounce Sheikh Ahmad Gumi for ever so often presenting himself as the passionate advocate and sympathiser of terrorists just as the Rights group stated that the terrorists who have in the past nine years virtually crippled the farming and economic activities of the North West and are known to have carried out frequent genocidal killings of mainly Hausas in the North West, are not fighting for any constructive or positive cause but they are purely criminals and terrorists who deserve nothing but to be despatched decisively to the great world beyond or arrested, prosecuted and executed for their crimes against humanity.
HURIWA faulted the call by Gumi for an Amnesty programme for Fulani terrorists in the North West who are behind the spate of killings, kidnappings, wanton destruction of schools, villages and townships of Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and Niger states just as the Rights group said if President Bola Ahmed Tinubu accepts to begin any kind of Amnesty programme for Fulani terrorists then the government has automatically asked that different armed non-state actors should also escalate their attacks on soft targets and strategic national security assets so they can merit another of this so-called Amnesty programme for repentant terrorists as is being canvassed by the Kaduna Islamic cleric and former military officer Sheikh Ahmad Gumi.
HURIWA said: ” Only on Friday, we were informed that President Bola Tinubu had approved the appointment of retired Brig. Gen. Lawal Ja’afaru-Isa as Executive Secretary of the new National Commission for Almajiri and Out-of-School Children Education. This was contained in a statement by Chief Ajuri Ngelale, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, on Friday in Abuja. Ja’afaru-Isa, a respected leader, was Military Administrator of Kaduna State from 1993 to 1996.
HURIWA recalled that the new appointee will replace the pioneer executive Secretary of the commission, Sha’aban Sharada, who was appointed to the position by former President Muhammadu Buhari just as Tinubu urged him to ensure the realisation of the administration’s drive to guarantee comprehensive education for the out-of-school children. The commission was established to provide a multi-modal system of education for the millions of children not attending school in Nigeria.
The Rights group maintained that the National Commission for Amajiris and the National Nomadic Education commission are already in existence and are bridging the educational gaps in the Northern part of Nigeria even as the Rights group wonders why Sheikh Ahmad Gumi is still busy canvassing for additional Amnesty programme for terrorists of the Fulani extraction when the nation is already committing billions of Naira of public fund to educate children of mostly peaceful Fulani herders. The Rights group said the only thing that terrorists deserve is death by public executions in firing squads.
HURIWA said that Gumi is freely advocating for the welfare and wellbeing of terrorists even against the provisions of the counter terrorism law that prohibits showing of sympathy to terrorists and the Nigerian federal government refused to arrest and charge Gumi to court for being sympathetic to terrorists but if Gumi were to be an Igbo man canvassing support for separatists, he would have been locked up in the underground dungeons of the Department of State Services or even made to disappear without any trace. “HURIWA is not saying that any unlawful action be adopted against Sheikh Gumi but we are cautioning the federal government to beware of the antics of Sheikh Ahmad Gumi who has made it his business to constantly inundate Nigerians with advocacy speeches on behalf of terrorists.”
