A human rights activist has decried the level of insecurity in the suburbs of Kaduna State, northwest Nigeria, attributing the menace to ungoverned spaces.
In a recent interview on Channels TV, Steven Kefas, founder of Community Development and Rights Advocacy Foundation, disclosed, “In July I toured some communities in Kajuru LG and it will shock you to know that these areas are places where there is no government presence; there is no road network, no telecommunication network, no electricity, not even a school.”
Although politically the Southern Kaduna area falls under North-western Nigeria, the region, which is mainly populated by Christians, is in the middle belt of the country.
The activist decried that “the people living there are at the mercy of these terrorists,” detailing that “the terrorists just come in for fun, take women and children and take them to the bush and sometimes they will release one and say you go get ransom for us.”
On the livelihoods of the locals in the community, he stated that “These people have been impoverished. They are actually poor before now and then they have further been impoverished by these terrorists.”
Stressing that “It is a very sad situation,” he also reacted to the recent abduction of 177 people from ECWA Church and Cherubim and Seraphim Churches 1 and 2 in Kurmin Wali community, Kajuru Local Government Area of Kaduna State, who are yet to be reunited with their families, saying “what happened on Sunday is just because the number was kind of high. That is why it made the headline. But it is a daily occurrence in those areas.”
Providing further information on general security in the area, Kefas observed, “It is unfortunate that we are still where we used to be.”
Still, he acknowledged that “even though, to a large extent, one could confidently say there has been a bit of improvement in Kaduna state.
He reckoned that the “mass casualty attacks that we used to have 2 to 3 years ago have gone down but in Kajuru and Chikun LGAs, to be precise and also Kauru there [are] cases of kidnapping that seem to be on the rise.”
