“The excesses of Boko Haram must stop. That is the decision of this present government now. It must stop, whatever it will cost the government, it must stop”.
With these words, President Goodluck Jonathan on Sunday read the riot act to members of Boko Haram, vowing that the government would get them wherever they may be hiding.
The President also promised to rid the country of evil elements.
He spoke in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the sideline of the 21st Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Africa Union (AU).
The President noted that the government does not lack the wherewithal to confront the reign of terror being unleashed by the sect members and that their actions are already being confronted with his recent declaration of state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states.
He said although terrorism is a global problem with the United States and United Kingdom and other countries having their shares, his administration was working hard to contain it in terms of immediate, medium and long terms approaches.
“For the short term, of course, there must be military intervention, we must beef up security, we must change the security architecture to make sure that we detect that something is about to happen before it happens so that we will be able to stop it.
“We have stopped a number of incidents in the country. It is just that the few that happened affect life and whenever life is affected, you will not even think that somebody is doing anything.
“That is why recently, I even had to declare a state of emergency in three states so that we go all out to make sure that we seize these weapons. We must comb the whole place to seize all these weapons and so on.
“A lot of free weapons come in because of the Libyan crisis. We must seize them. They are illegal weapons and must be seized and you cannot do that without declaring a state of emergency to enable the military enter any house, whether it is a residential building, it is a church, a mosque, a shrine, anywhere, hotel, anything that we suspect. We will be able to enter and seize these weapons.
“In the short term, it is to seize these weapons. That is why those three states we have the worst cases, we declared a state of emergency. By the time we finish combing, we would have not just stopped it there but we would have seized most of the weapons they are using. That is the short term.”
The President noted further that his government’s medium term strategy is to concentrate more on education.
He observed that the part of the country where there is prevalence of Boko Haram activities has the highest rate of school drop out.
