The Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar has blamed the North for the present insecurity in the region.
He also blamed the region for being the architect of its underdevelopment.
Sultan Abubakar who is also the President of Nigeria’s Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs disclosed this at the Northern Nigeria Governors Peace and Reconciliation Committee meeting in Kaduna on Monday. He blamed northerners for inflicting heavy pains on themselves.
“Let us sit and talk freely and articulate positions that will bring us out of the quagmire we put ourselves. It is important that religious and traditional rulers from our various states sit together, so that each and every one of us will talk freely for us to articulate a position as the way out of this problem we find ourselves.
“We northerners have put ourselves in a quagmire, because whatever that is happening in the North is our own doing. This was because we did not do what we are supposed to do. And since we know that, we have to solve our problems ourselves. So, I think, it is not a bad idea that the committee was set up,” he said.
Speaking on the efforts of to bring peace to the country, the Sultan said. “We wrote a memo of about nine pages or thereabout covering various issues affecting the country and the north in particular to the then Acting President and now President Goodluck Jonathan, through the Nigeria Inter Religious Council (NIREC) where we suggested solutions to the problems.’’
In his own remarks, the Catholic Bishop of Abuja, Cardinal John Onaiyekan, attributed the security challenges facing the North and the country in general to high level of poverty in the country and the region in particular.
Onaiyekan further said that another aspect of the problem was associated with religion, saying that, bad image of the country has spread to the outside world and there was need for the stakeholders to address the issue with a view to putting a permanent end to the problems.
