Shehu of Borno, Abubakar El-Kanemi, has asserted that the Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeastern part of the country is caused by some foreigners, who according to him came into the country in the guise to acquire Quranic education.

Naija News reports that the traditional ruler asserted this on Thursday during a town hall meeting organized by Yateem Faqeer Global Foundation in Abuja.

El-Kanemi lamented that the people of the region had suffered so much at the hands of the insurgents.

He said: “Borno has witnessed so many things, both good and bad. Boko Haram is something meaningless, mindless and without any sense of direction as none of the Holy Books, either Quran or the Bible, indicates that you show disrespect to others, burn and destroy their property. And I want people to know that Boko Haram was never initiated or started by people of the Northeast Zone. It is something they just brought to us from nowhere.

“Boko Haram insurgents came to Borno and the North-East in the guise of acquiring Quranic education while not many did not know they had an ideology which was polluted as well as promoted into the minds of the youths, and created havoc in our area.”

Earlier, former Chief of Army Staff, General Alwali Kazir (retd) faulted the insinuations that the bandits and additional armed criminal gangs operating in the Northwest and other parts of the country were the offshoots of Boko Haram insurgents in the North East, insisting that apparent ideological differences separated them.

He recommended both kinetic and non-kinetic approaches as a panacea to Nigeria’s insecurity.

Also speaking, the National Coordinator, of the National Social Investment Programme, NSIP, Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Dr Umar Bindir, called for the formulation of a 15-year regional policy and strategy to rehabilitate and develop the North East region post-Boko Haram era.

This article was originally published on Naija News

Source: News