FG wants northern govs to mobilise against terrorists.

THE Federal Government, on Wednesday, expressed its desire to see northern governors mobilise the people to check the spate of bomb attacks perpetrated by Boko Haram insurgents in some parts of the region. The government is worried that there has been a lot of political grandstanding that tends to encourage the insurgents in their bloody campaign against the people and the nation. Briefing State House correspondents after the weekly meeting of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) in Abuja on Wednesday, the Minister of Information, Mr Labaran Maku, said: “They are not doing enough to win the war against terror.” Speaking against the background of Tuesday’s bomb attack in Jos, Plateau State and the one in Kano two days earlier, the minister urged northern governors to do more than just criticizing the Federal Government’s decision to extend the current State of Emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states by re-organising social structures through grass-root mobilisation and information
gathering to halt attacks. Maku said the varieties of opinions among the political class fed into the confidence of terror groups, as he noted that the terrorists’ objective was to divide public opinions and penetrate and destroy the Nigerian society. He said the governors must use mass mobilisation to track down terrorists and pass relevant information to security agencies for a more effective military operation, since terrorism is a psychological war which thrives on wrong ideology. According to him, “it is not the weaknesses of the armed forces; it is the same way the Americans are getting frustrated in Afghanistan. If the terrorist there were to stand against the Nigerian armed forces, they will not last 30 minutes and will be completely destroyed.”