The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has bemoaned what it
noted as “hate campaigns and propaganda” being conducted by certain interest
groups in the South-East to carry out unprovoked evictions, attacks, killings,
destructions of properties and other forms of violations against northerners in
various parts of the region.
The CNG said it is particularly disturbed by the reports of
the brutal murder of a mother and her four children for the only sin of being
northerners, adding that other reports that some trucks conveying goods to the
south were also set ablaze in Anambra at the weekend and the drivers and other
occupants were killed, injured or disappeared without a trace.
The group, speaking through its spokesman, Abdul-Azeez
Suleiman in a statement, said, “The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has
taken stock of events unfolding in South-East Nigeria, noting especially, the
unrelenting attacks and killings of northerners passing through or residing
among Igbo communities as minorities.”
It said that there is a manifestation of a dangerous
conspiracy of silence days after Sunday’s killing of the northerners without
any provocation, saying that the story has not been told by any of the national
print and broadcast media despite wide coverage by the social media with
graphic photos of the mayhem and condemnation by security operatives, groups
and individuals.
According to the statement, “We have watched and studied
these events carefully and with considerable restraint and maturity, to the
point of condoning and accommodating several unreasonable and unacceptable
actions that have been perpetrated against Nigerians collectively, and
northerners in particular.
“The intrinsic bias of the media and the double standards,
hypocrisy and cowardice of regional, traditional, cultural, political and
religious leaders from both the South and the North have become more glaring
when they condemned the Deborah incident in Sokoto but conspiratorially and
deliberately decline comments on the murderous activities of IPOB/ESN
terrorists including the slaughter of a legislator.”
CNG explained that it also noted the deliberate attempt by
the media and southern leaders to conceal the true identity of the murderous
IPOB/ESN terrorists by concealing them as ‘unknown gunmen’ while in actual
sense they are known.
It claimed that it is aware that the activities of the
IPOB/ESN terror groups are supported morally and politically by the vast
majority of Igbo elites, politicians, traditional rulers, business persons, and
the larger population of this ethnic group, alleging that it is also a
situation that feeds on the docility of the affrighted section of those who
pose as Northern leaders today.
It stated that the North’s reticence in speaking out or
taking action is not born of fear or ignorance of how to respond in kind,
saying that those who tempt them should know that the North is no longer going
to turn the other cheek.
“We, therefore, invite the attention of southern leaders,
their Northern collaborators and the bankrupt section of the northern political
elite and other authors of mindless violence and separatism who see it as their
duty to actualise what their fathers started in 1966, to remember that people
from other regions are residing and doing businesses all over the North and to
warn them that we shall no longer be expected to turn the other cheek if
northerners would not be protected wherever they live as minorities in
particularly Nigeria,” the group said.
CNG warned media operators of an imminent boycott of
patronage all over the North unless they change to being more restrained and
balanced in their reporting of all situations in the country, particularly when
matters coming from or affecting northerners are reported or commented on.
“We caution them to desist from and to eschew the slanted
reporting of events with greater bias against a particular religious and ethnic
group as is witnessed in the reporting of security situations recently,” the
statement stated.
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