Zamfara Gov. Bello Matawalle says he is backing out of dialogue with the bandits that had unleashed reign of terror on the state because of deceit on their part.
“l backed out of dialogue as a strategy for ending the intractable and violent activities of bandits and kidnappers because they deceived me and failed on their agreements,” he said.
Speaking with State House correspondents after meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Thursday, Matawalle said the state now enjoys relative peace and that the state government had been steadfast in the fight against banditry.
Persecondnews recalls that telecoms equipment and operations were shut down in the state as part of strategies to checkmate banditry and kidnapping.
He said: “The results of the stringent measures put in place to restore security are being seen by the people, who now feel secure.
“They have deceived us. Some of them did not follow what we agreed with them. We thought it was something we could continue with them, but we later realized that they had deceived us. So, we had to back out of it and decide to fight them to a logical conclusion.
“As you know, we are there fighting and we have taken a lot of measures in order to curtail this problem of insurgency and we thank God it’s yielding a lot of results. We’ve recorded a lot of successes from what we have done.
“As you are aware, we have a lot of security personnel that were deployed to Zamfara State and they are working seriously.”
Matawalle described the situation in the state as calm, saying people are going about their day-to-day activities.
“We have cut a lot of things particularly moving food stuff, animals and selling of petroleum products.
“We have imposed a lot of measures and the people are happy with the measures because the people had suffered a lot.
“People were being killed and kidnapped every day before, but today we have succeeded, we don’t have much of such issues in Zamfara State,” the governor said.
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