Northern leaders needed to ending insurgency -----Kuku
(Nigeria) The Special Adviser to the President on Niger
Delta Affairs and Chairman Presidential Amnesty Programme, PAP, Mr Kingsley
Kuku, on Thursday said northern leaders were key to ending insurgency.
KuKu expressed this opinion at a forum on Curbing Militancy
in Nigeria, organised by Nextier, a public sector advisory firm, in Abuja.
He said the lessons learnt from the PAP can be leveraged to
curb the present Boko Haram crisis.
``The programme has achieved its core goals of solving the
militant agitation in the Niger Delta of Nigeria and increasing the nation's
crude oil production. The PAP reduced violence and created room for
socio-economic development of the region,” he said.
The presidential adviser held that ``the Niger Delta is poor
despite its wealth of natural resources.
``The perceived insensitivity of the government resulted in
militancy that impacted the quality of life in the region and economy of the
country.’’
He said PAP was a success because it had national ownership
and was conceived as a process and not a programme, and had managers that
enjoyed the trust of the ex-aigitators.
Kuku noted that when the Boko Haram crisis started, nothern
leaders failed to condemn it thinking that it was a move against President
Goodluck Jonathan.
He said political, traditional, religious and women leaders
and other elites from the north hold the key to resolving the puzzle associated
with the Boko Haram insurgency.
Kuku challenged them to borrow a leaf from their compatriots
from the Niger Delta.
He said leaders in Niger Delta took up the challenge to end
militancy in the region.
``This culminated in a truce and eventual granting of
amnesty by the federal government, thus ushering in the extant peace in the
area.
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