Herdsmen Attack: Nigeria North Central decry looming hunger
President of Middle Belt Arise, Comrade Samuel Odumu Okpe, has declared that Nigeria is being threaten by food crisis following the persistent and unabated killings of farmers and forceful taken over of lands by Fulani Herdsmen in the region.
He noted that most farmers in Plateau, Benue, Taraba, Southern Kaduna, Kogi, Adamawa and parts of Bauchi, Nasarawa and Niger States have been killed while others are confined at various Internal Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps in the respective states.
Comrade Okpe disclosed this on Thursday during a peaceful rally to the Plateau State House of Assembly to express displeasure over negligence of government to curb killings in the Middle Belt.
“The tentacles of insecurity are far reaching. The threat is grave for food production because the conflicts are in the agricultural belts of the Benue-Niger valley where food is produced not only for Nigeria but for West Africa. Farms are targeted and destroyed, farmers are killed and terror holds sway in our rural communities.
“This has a natural outcome of looming food shortage. We are condemning the plan to dislocate our communities from their hands. The rural populations from the Middle Belt who are mainly agrarian now live in Internally Displaced Persons Camps with no hope of returning to their respective villages”.
He challenged the Federal Government to accelerate efforts to see that all villages in the Middle Belt which have been displaced by as a result of conflicts are resettled and all lands forcefully occupied by armed herders returned to the lawful owners.
