Kaduna State Governor Uba Sani asserts that poverty, unemployment, hopelessness, and inadequate education are the primary factors contributing to the escalation of insecurity in the Northwestern region of the country.
In an interview with Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Wednesday, Sani stated that the problem of kidnapping and banditry in the North-West differs from that of insurgency in the North-East.
“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 insisted that data showed a higher proportion of individuals in the North-West were impoverished, and he added that many of the nation’s out-of-school youth were also from this region.
“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.
According to Governor Sani, apprehending offenders and offering them pardons upon their surrender is but one facet of the non-kinetic strategy for reducing insecurity; it is by no means the most crucial.
As he pointed out, the most crucial strategy for putting an end to the threat is to consider people’s overall conditions, which include unemployment, poverty, and hopelessness.