Again,
Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has insisted that his administration
won’t offer ransom to kidnappers, adding that doing that would mean
surrendering to criminals.
This was
contained in a statement on Tuesday by the Special Adviser to the governor on
Media and Communication, Muyiwa Adekeye.
Recall that bandits on Monday killed two students of a private
institution, Greenfield University, in Kaduna, days after three of such
students were killed.
Also, at
least 29 students of the Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation, Afaka,
Kaduna, are still in captivity 47 days after their abduction due to the
no-ransom policy of the El-Rufai government.
However,
in a statement titled, ‘Surrender to criminals is not an option- KDSG’ on
Tuesday, the governor argued that the payment of ransom has not curbed
criminality in the country.
“Several states sought to negotiate their way
out of the problems by talking to bandits, paying them money or offering them
amnesty. This has not worked and has only encouraged the criminals to press
ahead for a surrender of the public treasury to them. That is clearly not in
the public interest,” he added.
El-Rufai,
however, regretted the recent “kidnaps and killings of students from tertiary
institutions in our state, and we sympathise with their families with whom we
share the aim of the safe return of all the students. We mourn the dead
students and we offer our condolences to the family and friends of the
deceased”.
“The
ruthless and heartless resort of the kidnappers to murdering these young
persons is part of their effort to further their blackmail and compel us to
abandon our ‘no-ransom, no-negotiation’ policy. Are people bothering with the
consequences of state surrender to hoodlums, or is the continued politicization
of security challenges not going to make all of us ultimately victims of the
insurgents?
“The fact
that criminals seek to hold us by the jugular does not mean we should surrender
and create an incentive for more crime. In today’s Nigeria, it has become
fashionable to treat the unlawful demands of bandits as worthy of consideration
and to lampoon people who insist that outlaws should be crushed and not
mollycoddled or availed the resources they can use to unleash further
outrages,” he stated.
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