The government has been called upon to prosecute Benue state governor Samuel Ortom as well as his Taraba state counterpart Darius Ishyaku over the poor handling of the killings in their states.

 

The group, under the aegis of Good Governance and Transparency Initiative, is demanding the Nigerian government as well as the international community to urgently wade into the foot-dragging crises, which have rendered many citizens homeless and bereaved.

 

The group’s Director Mrs. Jaiyeola Mohammed accused Ortom of bias in the handling of the crisis saying the governor is using the state’s resources to cover up his mess by sponsoring protests abroad.

 

“It is most unfortunate that instead of accepting reality and admitting what he did wrong to provoke the current crisis, Governor Ortom has rather engaged in looking at the cause of the problem in every other place except within himself.

 

“This is despite the barrage of documentary evidence of him setting up militias and placing firearms in their arms to kill herdsmen. He is yet to explain what he stands to gain from the deaths of Benue people that he knew would definitely result from reprisals from the activities of his militias.

 

“The Benue state governor has even taken things a step further by deploying N1 billion of his state’s fund to finance protests in major cities of the world as we earlier alerted. Not even the shame of being discovered as manipulating events was enough to dissuade this governor from this folly. Our concern is how a state governor could spend so much of his state’s resources on just eight (8) protesters in the United States. We then wonder how much he has spent on the hundreds of militias he has organized and how much he has expended on their weapons,” she said.

 

She disclosed that the group was staging the protest because it was interested in the peaceful resolution of the conflict between herdsmen and farmers.

 

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