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John Shiklam in Kaduna

The Southern Kaduna Leadership Council (SKLC) has appealed to the international community to investigate alleged “genocide and discrimination against the Southern Kaduna people during the eight year administration of Nasir El- Rufai, the immediate past governor of Kaduna state.

The group also called on Governor Uba Sani, not to follow the footsteps of El-Rufai, who they described as “a bigot sectional and nepotistic.”

The former governor, had in a recent viral video recorded at a dinner with Islamic clerics in Kaduna, after the 2023 elections, said he excluded Christians from governance because they don’t vote for his party, the APC .

El-Rufai had said Muslims will continue to govern Kaduna state, adding he and others have successfully installed  Muslim leadership at the federal level.

However in a statement issued yesterday  in Kaduna after their meeting which held on June 17, 2023, in Kafanchan, the SKLC, which comprised  prominent Southern Kaduna leaders of thought, accused the eight year administration of El-Rufai of total neglect and impoverishing the Southern Kaduna people.

The statement signed by Chairman of the group, Mr. Ishaya Akau,  lamented the massive destruction of lives and property in Southern Kaduna in an orgy of violent attacks by terrorists perpetrated “in pursuit of El-Rufai’s implementation of jihadism in Kaduna state.”

The statement said: “The incessant killings and maiming of our children, women and youth, and the burning of our homes and destruction of our communities from 2015 to 2023, was part of a strategy for Islamic dominance by the government of Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai in Kaduna state.

“That the assassinations, murders, kidnappings, arrests and imprisonment, removal of indigenous Southern Kaduna traditional rulers, and the balkanisation of our chiefdoms to create emirates out of districts under our traditional leaders, was part of an undeclared jihadist campaign being surreptitiously waged by Nasir El-Rufai as governor of Kaduna.”

The group further accused the former governor for the removal of Southern Kaduna traditional leaders and imposing foreign ones on the people, noting that the action was aimed at changing the structure of traditional leadership in the area and “facilitate the creation of new settlements for foreigners and change the demography of the area for El-Rufai’s “Islamic dominance”.

The group said despite the fact the Southern Kaduna people paid taxes to the state government, “El-Rufai made sure our people were not entitled to the benefits derivable therefrom, in the regime of crass discrimination and marginalisation institutionalised under his administration”.

The SKLC also dismissed “the false statistics being churned out to show ‘settlements’ of foreigners as ‘indigenes’ of Southern Kaduna.”

The statement alleged that consultants from “Islamic states” were recruited to carry out “Settlement Surveys” in Southern Kaduna, to showed that there were more Fulani settlements than the indigenous communities.

Akau alleged that, “To justify these false statistics, Fulani terrorist gangs began attacking, destroying and displacing indigenous settlements.

He said: “Without our consent, our lands were given to the foreigners with the intention of growing their population in 20 years to outstrip that of the indigenous people.

“Just before the now postponed 2023 National Population and Housing Census, thousands of Fulani herders were taken into Southern Kaduna, where they went into the forests and plantations grown by our communities, and began hanging clothes and bags of belongings on the trees, which would then be counted as ‘houses’ belonging to Fulanis during the planned census. “

Akau noted that El-Rufai’s video which went viral “made public certain issues that had hitherto remained in the domain of conjecture and hypothesis among Nigerians, but which we the victims of El-Rufai’s actions have lived and experienced over a period of eight years.”

The statement alleged further that “El-Rufai set out deliberately to misinform the Nigerian public and the world, and waged false propaganda amongst certain religious circles, to the effect that the people of Southern Kaduna who are mainly Christians did not vote for the APC.”

Akau maintained that the voting figures in the 2015 and 2023 general elections bear testimony to the fact that El-Rufai deliberately deceived those in the APC who are not Muslims of his actions.

Akau said: “The system of governance by exclusion practiced by El-Rufai was deliberate against the people of Southern Kaduna.

“El-Rufai picked a Muslim deputy from Southern Kaduna to spite the Christian majority for not supporting the APC. “The most insidious aspect of this El-Rufai Islamist agenda was his claim that he extended such a Muslim-Muslim system to the presidential election in order to extend the scope of “Islamic subjugation” across the length and breadth of Nigeria within 20 years.

“From the above and many more revelations by El-Rufai in his viral video, the Southern Kaduna Leadership Council and the people of Southern Kaduna, wish to let the nation and international community know of the heinous plans and to draw the attention of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to the 2014 National Constitutional Conference where it was agreed to create Gurara State from the present Kaduna State and to invite the President to activate the demand which has gone through the constitutional process of obtaining the consent of two thirds of the 36 Houses of Assembly in the Federation.

“We call on the international community, to constitute a visitation panel to ascertain the genocide orchestrated and supervised under the Islamist regime run by Nasir El-Rufai as governor of Kaduna state between 2015 and 2023.”

The statement said the people of Southern Kaduna will not use El-Rufai’s statement “to determine how they live and relate with Muslims, settlers or visitors to Southern Kaduna. “We are a peaceful people and will follow peaceful and lawful means in pursuit of our goal of surviving as a people under the regime of hostility and hate instituted and handed down as a legacy by El-Rufai in Kaduna state.

“However we will not fail to tell our people to defend their lives, lands and heritage”, Akau said.