KADUNA State governor Nasir El-Rufai has warned that a new insurgency may arise in the northwest of the country as armed cattle rustlers have turned the Kamuka Forest in his state into a den where they take stolen livestock to.  

Warning that Nigeria faces the prospect of having another Sambisa Forest on its hands as these armed rustlers have turned the area into their base, the governor warned that urgent steps need to be taken to nip the problem in the bud now. Speaking at the ongoing 21st Nigeria Economic Summit in Abuja, Governor El-Rufai delivered the warning in a lecture titled Sub-National Competitiveness towards Economic Growth: A Conversation With State Governors. 

Governor El-Rufai said: “Unless we have a secure zone, we are not going to make any progress. In my state for instance, we have a lot of cattle rustling in two local governments and we had this incessant killing carried out by suspected Fulani men, so we had to get to the button of the problem. 

"So the first thing we did as a government was to work on a common regional security strategy because most of the cattle rustlers reside in Kamuka Forest which we concluded will be the next Sambisa unless we take these guys out of there. Consequently, we came together and funded the operation as the federal government said it was not ready to fund it, so we contributed money, each of the seven states and we funded a military operation which has been going on and which has substantially degraded the activities of rustlers.” 

He pointed out that the development has led to the recovery of more than 12,000 cattle and sheep, adding that discussions are also ongoing on how to revive livestock farming in the region. Governor El-Rufai also disclosed that high level discussions are on across Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) with regards to killings in southern Kaduna, which has been traced to the post election violence of 2011. 

"In southern Kaduna, we looked at what was going on, so we traced the history of the killings to post election violence of 2011 in which Fulani cattle rearers were moving down to Mali and Niger and they got caught in the fracas. So most of the killings happening in Kaduna State are actually transnational as there are families that sent their soldiers to come and revenge the killings from Mali, Senegal and Niger. 

"In education, 6,000 children in primary schools sit on the floor, so we realised that we had to do something in the education system and we have committed to providing nine years of free basic education. We also found that 60% of our teachers were not qualified to teach, so we had to launch a programme not only to equip and rehabilitate the schools but to start a teacher training programme because we understand that we had to employ more than 2,000 English, mathematics and science teachers," Governor El-Rufai added.