Governor reveals identities of criminals terrorising South-East says they’re not Fulanis
Governor reveals identities of criminals terrorising South-East says they’re not Fulanis
Anambra State Governor Professor Chukwuma Soludo has directly challenged the prevailing belief that Fulani herdsmen are primarily responsible for the spate of kidnappings and criminal activities plaguing the Southeast. Addressing a town hall meeting with Anambra indigenes in Maryland, Governor Soludo asserted that the vast majority of criminals terrorizing the region are, in fact, indigenes of Igbo extraction.
The governor’s statement directly counters a widely held perception that Fulani terrorists, often disguised as herdsmen, are the main perpetrators of abductions and other criminal acts in the Southeast, with an alleged agenda of territorial conquest.
However, Governor Soludo emphatically stated that “99.99 percent of criminals arrested in Anambra were not Fulani, but Igbo.”
He said: “The so-called liberators hiding in the forests are homegrown criminals feeding fat on blood money. They come under the guise that they are the ones protecting you from Fulani herdsmen.
“They live in the bushes for months, but no one has ever asked how these so-called liberators survive in the forest. They have to feed, who is paying for their services, don’t they have needs?
“In my three years and three months in office, 99.99% of the kidnappers and other criminals we’ve arrested are Igbo. Let’s stop the lies. Igbos are kidnapping and killing fellow Igbos, not Fulani.”
However, a prominent human rights organization, the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), has strongly refuted Governor Chukwuma Soludo’s assertion that Igbo indigenes, rather than Fulani herdsmen, are primarily responsible for criminal activities in the Southeast. Intersociety insists that herdsmen are, in fact, present in bushes across the region.
The group has gone further, accusing Soludo’s administration of “shielding Jihadist herdsmen since 2022” and “dangerously dragging Anambra State into Federal Government’s (Fulani) Ranching compliant state and sitting the state on a keg of jihadist gunpowder.”
In a press statement, Emeka Umeagbalasi, Chairman of Intersociety’s Board of Trustees, declared, “We’re strongly puncturing Gov Charles Soludo’s Maryland speech in the USA, exonerating Jihadist Fulani Herdsmen in Anambra’s Forest and Farmland Insecurity.”
Umeagbalasi specifically cited several communities across Awka South, Awka North, Oyi, Ayamelum, Orumba South and North, and Dunukofia local government areas as having “camps inhabited by Fulani terrorists herdsmen.”
“The State Government has also severally been found to have joined conventional security establishments in the state and beyond in shielding these jihadists and shifting blames over their atrocities to militant IPOB or ESN or Unknown Gunmen.”
