Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, on Wednesday stated that only religious leaders can end the Boko Haram insurgency that is currently plaguing the country.
According to PMNEWS, the clergyman made this known while speaking at the graduation send forth/prize giving day ceremony, organized by Stephen International Centre, Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.
“With all sense of all responsibility, I use this opportunity to call on all Muslims leaders, traditional rulers and political leaders in the north, not necessarily in the southwest, because in the southwest, we have lived together and I know the way it operates in the southwest, to join hands to end insurgency.
“I was told this land where this school was built was bought from a Muslim. If a Muslim organization needs a land and a Christian has it, sell it to them, that’s the way to live and the kind of country we are looking for. So, I am challenging from the north, our religious leaders, political rulers and traditional rulers, as a matter of urgency, to step forward and take responsibility for the way out of this problem.
“Boko Haram is propelled by a religious ideology, it is not poverty. Anyone who tells you it is poverty is not telling you the truth. It is not poverty. When you blame it on poverty, it is an insult to poor people. There are poor people everywhere even Christians all over the north. Bin Laden was not a poor man, he was from a rich Saudi Arabian family,” Oritsejafor said.
“The Nigerian boy who almost blew up a plane on Christmas day is a son of one First BankChairman and he is still one of the richest people in Nigeria today. Boko Haram insurgency is an ideology, people are being radicalised by an ideology. Salafism and Wahabism are doctrines that come from Saudi Arabia and they have crept into the southwest. They have taken people to Saudi Arabia and sent them back to you and coming into our mosques, they start their own new mosques and radicalising some of them. Boko Haram is a strong, devilish ideology and it is a terrible thing and we must not run from it, we must face the fact. Now, this ideology must be countered with a superior ideology. You can only counter an ideology with another superior ideology. They must engage them and win them with a superior argument and spread a positive view to Nigerians in the grassroots to their followers in mosques and everywhere,” he added.
Isaac Oluwole, the Director of the Centre, where orphans who lost their parents to insurgency in the north are being cared for, called on government and philanthropists to assist the centre, noting that: “There are millions of Nigerians who can do good work and they need encouragement from the Federal Government.”
It would be recalled that Zanna Bukar Mustapha, a legal practitioner who runs a school for orphans of members of the radical Islamist sect, Boko Haram, had previously hinted that the only way to stop the terrorist group from causing more mayhem in the country was to involve clerics from Saudi Arabia.
The Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati Wal-Jihad popularly known as Boko Haram, in Hausa language meaning "Western education is sin”. The terrorist group has its stronghold in the Northeastern part of the country, as well as in parts of Cameroon and Niger. It has launched several deadly attacks and bombings, which have claimed thousands of innocent lives in its quest to Islamise the country and put an end to what they described as ‘westernisation’. Boko Haram, which was designated a terrorist group by the USA in 2013, started its armed struggle in 2009, after the extrajudicial killing of its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, in police custody.
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