Insecurity: President Buhari Threatens To Kill Igbo Youths

President Muhammadu Buhari warned on Tuesday to deal with the youths of the Igbo-dominated South-East in the same way that he and other military officers who fought on the Nigerian side during the Civil War dealt with the region’s people.

The president said he’d had enough of the indiscriminate attacks on government buildings in the Southeast. Thugs have been on the loose in the area, killing people and torching public and private property. The president has previously warned that the attacks would have repercussions, and security personnel have been scouring the region for pro-Biafran individuals.

On Tuesday night, the president further up his condemnation of the violence, saying it was clearly perpetrated by those who had not lived through the Nigerian Civil War, which lasted from 1966 to 1970 and saw Nigerian military fighting Biafran separatists.

During the war, an estimated three million people were slaughtered, many of whom were picked up by Nigerian soldiers and shot at close range, while hundreds of others died of starvation. Several stories with strong corroboration stated how Nigerian forces slaughtered Igbo residents at Asaba, Onitsha, and Enugu, among other communities in the region, despite the fact that the war was not properly documented.

Although the war ended in 1970, historians continue to bemoan the country’s failure to achieve a meaningful reconciliation 50 years later.

Mr Buhari was reported to have participating in the killings at the time while seeking to keep Biafra as part of Nigeria, alongside Murtala Mohammed and other questionable military officers from the Muslim-dominated northern region.

Mr Buhari singled out the South-East with threats of bloodshed on Tuesday evening, despite overwhelming calls for him to do something about the violence that has engulfed the country. The president has persistently excluded the Igbo, one of Nigeria’s three major ethnic groups, from his administration, presumably in keeping with his remarks immediately after taking office in 2015 that they would not profit much from his administration because they did not vote for him.

Buhari wrote on Twitter: “Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War. Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.”

In 2016, Hundreds of Igbo youths were killed by Nigerian forces at a rally commemorating Biafran Day in Onitsha. Civil society groups later discovered their burnt bodies, but Mr Buhari’s government has yet to hold anyone accountable.