Govt suppressing information on kidnappings, killings in Southern Kaduna –Asake, ex-SOKAPU leader

•Says we always had mass burials in Southern Kaduna when I was president

Former President of the Southern Kaduna People’s Union (SOKAPU), Dr Jonathan Asake, has accused the Kaduna State government of suppressing information on the kidnappings and killings going on in Southern Kaduna.

Speaking in an interview with VINCENT KALU, Asake noted that if the African Democratic Congress (ADC) wants to form the next government, it should give its presidential ticket to Peter Obi, noting that making a northerner the ADC presidential candidate will be giving President Bola Tinubu an easy victory.

The build-up to 2027 elections has started. What are your expectations?

Honestly, it is a very difficult question for me because I don’t think there has been any time the political future of this country has been so bleak like now. Seeing that all parties that will be giving real opposition are being coaxed into submission to the ruling party in one way or the other, and everybody is running to take cover under the All Progressives Congress (APC) government, and it appears everybody is trying to protect his own enclave; to protect his own personal interest.

So, the question of the interest of Nigerians is not there if you look at what is playing out. Nobody is talking about the interest of the average Nigerian, every politician that you see from governors that are running to join the ruling party, to members of the National Assembly that will be making laws to strengthen the system, everybody is running to show his loyalty; so it’s all about self. The common Nigerian citizen is not in the equation.

When you talk about the future, what future are you going to talk about again? Looking at the last elections that we had, and there were all hopes by Nigerians that things would change, especially, based on promises that the Electoral Act will be applied with electronic transmission, but along the way, Nigerians sacrificed and trooped out to vote and a different result came out.

So, on expectations, there is no new thing that has been done to show that we are ready to change anything.

I’m just looking at the game the way it is going. I don’t think there is anything that will substantially change from what we have been doing, except if there is some kind of force majeure that will prevail.

What do you think is pushing people into the APC?

There is nothing that is attracting anybody. It is not that when a person defects, or flips over to another party, maybe you have seen that this other party in power is really churning out policies that are meeting up with their manifestoes and making the Nigerians happy. No, it is all about people just want to get re-elected. If the person is a senator and he wants to defect, how can I get the ticket? If I remain in my own party, if I remain in PDP or Labour or SDP, they may just rig me out, therefore, let me go to the ruling party where I will be protected, and the leadership there may graciously just donate the ticket to me, not through a primary selection anymore.

So, you see that people are being selected everywhere, nobody is subjected to any serious elections, even general elections or primary election.

That is the precarious situation that we have found ourselves. People run to the ruling party, believing that is where they can have assurance of being re-elected or will be given the ticket.

If the system was working and votes count, even people that will challenge them on other parties, and are doing the wish of the people will subdue them. But, no, that is not the case. You see people lining up to vote every time, and you see a different result coming out. That is why the impunity is there everywhere. We have situations even in my state, Kaduna, where people sacrificed and contributed money to elect them in other parties other than the ruling party. Immediately they won the election, they abandoned the people and defected to the ruling party.

It is as immoral as that. There is no driving force other than personal interest.

It is not a collective interest, it is not the interest of the people, and it is just personal interest. The system is so crooked and it is unworkable.

APC now almost has about 30 governors and a great number of members of the National Assembly. Some analysts say that with that, Tinubu has won his re-election, even before the election. What is your opinion?

That is what I’m saying. It’s believed that the governors command the people in their various states, and so they hold the aces for winning the election. So, the more he has those governors, the more he is assured that he can win.

Like I keep saying, it’s not that they win because the people will vote for that party, but because they have been positioned to be the rigging machines in those states; every state governor will be told that he must bring his votes for the presidential victory from his state. Every governor will deliver his state whether people vote otherwise. But you will see the results will come in favour of the ruling party.

We can conclude very certainly that having those governors behind him, the president is like winning the election because of our crooked system.

But 2023 election proved otherwise, because APC had more governors and they did not win up to that number…

The real revelation that came thereafter is that the Labour Party won the election. In fact, even the former governor of Kaduna State, El-rufai that was a very serious opponent of the Labour Party at that time, spoke it out and various other commentators have said it. But was Peter Obi announced as the winner? No. I’m saying that nothing has changed.

I know there is a resolve of the people that we will not allow what happened last time to happen again. But it takes a longer planning to do that with the Nigerian system.

Because if you see the people that are calling the shots and then juxtapose it with the insecurity that you see in the country today, you can put two and two together and know that it is the same Nigerian problem that we are going to face in 2027.

At the close of last year, the US bombed a part of Sokoto State in search of terrorists over the issue of Christian genocide. The federal government is said to be spending $9 million to lobby the U.S government over the issue. What’s your view on that?

The whole thing is a very complicated network. It is politics being played using insecurity, or insecurity being used to achieve politics, one-way or the other.

When you talk about the Christian genocide that the United States came to rescue Nigerians from, you will see that there was first a denial that there was nothing like Christian genocide.

While there was denial, people were recruited and paid to mount up that propaganda that there was nothing like this genocide.

And you could see that people like Reno Omokri, and even CAN and other organs and persons were recruited to do just that type of propaganda.

But it didn’t work because the United States government has their own sources of intelligence gathering; they have so much intelligence.

When I was the president of Southern Kaduna Peoples Union (SOKAPU), I know how many times they would ask me, even from the embassy of certain killings that I didn’t even know that somebody would have known about. We were always having mass burials during my time as president.

And so when people were denying that there was no Christian genocide, but the people we buried in my place, Southern Kaduna are almost 98 per cent Christian, and so they were all Christians. There was no place that they went into and killed the Muslim communities in my place.

It was always either in the church or they met them in their communities. So, we’re always doing mass burials. When people come out and say there is nothing like Christian genocide, I get surprised.

Even as I’m talking today, just yesterday, on Sunday, they went into a community in Kajuru Local Government and kidnapped 177 people while they were in church service and they are still in the forest. When you look at this and what the American government did; people were expecting that the bomb would be dropped in Sambisa forest, but the bomb dropped in Sokoto State. What did they find? Nobody is ready to talk about it.

They bombed exactly the depot where the cache of arms is being stored in the caliphate and they killed a lot of those terrorists, but there’s a very deliberate attempt to cover it up that it never happened. That’s why the same people that were doing propaganda are now saying that they just dropped an empty bomb, it didn’t touch anybody. It is not true. The Nigerian government still came up and said they collaborated with the American government and supplied them with intelligence, which we agree.

But, the lobbying team again of the government did not stop there; they had to go outside the country and what we heard is that they paid a whopping sum of $9 million. When you translate that into naira, you will see how much money they spent to just to go and lobby so that they can change the narrative. What we’re also hearing now is that it is about 2031election; that the national security advisor allegedly has an eye on 2031 when power will be coming back to the north. If they continue to dampen this narrative that there is nothing like Christian genocide then they will not be disturbed by the American government and so they will continue to take us the way we are. It’s just like a ping-pong; they pass this ball, this person takes and this person takes and so on. So, when power is coming back to the north, it’s coming back to the same people. If Nuhu Ribadu takes it again and when it goes back to the south, it goes back to the same.

That means that Nigeria will continue this suffering with an unyielding system in perpetuity, which is unacceptable.

On the US bombing of Sokoto, the narrative from the north is that a certain screwdriver seller in Onitsha, Anambra State provided the intelligence to the US to carry out the air strike. What do you say to this?

When you listen to some of our northern commentators, especially someone like Gumi, it is always nauseating when you hear their commentaries, as if they are talking to a bunch of idiots.

How can a screwdriver seller provide intelligence to American government? Do they know the people they are talking about?

When they tell you that you are talking to the government of America or Israel or Russia, people that are so specialised in intelligence gathering all over the world; they have the best intelligence gathering machinery in the whole world, then somebody will come up and then just go fearlessly and pay one newspaper in America and they will come up with this cock and bull that a screwdriver seller provided intelligence to bomb the terrorists in Sokoto.

Does it need a screwdriver seller to provide intelligence? Is there no genocide in Nigeria? We have places, like I said, in Kaduna State alone, I can take people to where we have mass graves. Where we have buried 30 people, I know the locations, I know the places, I know the dates we buried those people. If they exhume them today, you will see the skeletons.

I will give the number at every location. That is just Kaduna State.

We are not talking about Plateau, where their own started since 2010.

We are not talking about Benue; even Agatu in Benue. We are not talking about Taraba, all over.

In fact, in Plateau community, I have the videos, where in one night they killed over 500 people.

So, these things are before the international community, and they have all this information. They have all this data. We have been providing data for long.

When I was SOKAPU president, I know how much data that we kept and we provided to the world. So, it doesn’t need one screwdriver seller to provide information for the American government to take action.

So, they are only trying to cover up their tracks, to cover up their complicity, but it is already known and I know action will be taken at the right time.

There is a very dangerous narrative that is being taken in this country where everything that happens that has to do with insecurity, they try to divert it towards the Igbo, to give a dog a bad name and try to hang it and it has become a common thing now.

I remember when this Boko Haram started, they started to detonate bombs in different public places, and each time they dropped a bomb they will catch culprits, but you will see newspaper reports that one Odiaka or so, an Igbo man is the one that dropped the bomb. You will be wondering what is actually happening in this country that every time something bad comes, and we know the source of it, we’ll know where it started; everybody knows where the insecurity in Nigeria actually started.

The seed was sown in the north and germinated there and it is what we are suffering today, but somebody somewhere is mischievously trying to link it to an Igbo man in the South-East, as if we don’t know.

So, it’s part of the propaganda, and it’s part of the network of conspiracy that we’re seeing that is playing out in the country. But, it will not work because in the world we live today, we have better sources of information than before. Even social media alone is the one that is making everything to work.

Controversy has trailed the reported abduction of about 117 worshippers in three churches in southern Kaduna last Sunday. What is your stand on this?

I’m aware of it, but I did not visit the place personally, because the soldiers, in an attempt to block information, have taken over the place. From what I heard, they are blocking people from entering.

But I have spoken to people that are from that place. One of the leaders that I worked with when I was the SOKAPU president is from that place. He told me that three churches were involved. According to him, the abductors took many of them but that one guy escaped. So, they reached a community that has been sacked by these incessant attacks. And so he saw an empty house, and because the people were so many, he was there with his children. He just sneaked in and entered a room, and they didn’t see him and he came back home.

From the testimony he gave, immediately they came to their own church, they heard a sound. So he went out, and then saw four fully armed people, and he quickly went into the church and picked one of his children, and wanted to run, but they pointed a gun at him. That’s how they brought all of them out.

They also went to the other two neighbouring churches and brought all of the worshippers out too. They didn’t know that there were other people that were taken from another community. They now combined them, and started beating them indiscriminately. In fact, you could see his picture with wounds on his head. That’s normally what they do. They will so brutalise you until you lose your voice.

I was just talking to my former public relations officer this morning, who is now the national PRO of the Southern and Middle Belt Forum, Mr Luka Biya. We were just talking, and we had agreed that he has to make a statement on the platform of the Southern and Middle Belt Forum.

I reminded him that this is repeating itself. If you recall, when I was SOKAPU president, an attack took place in one community in the same local government called, Gwenaorogo, where 17 people were killed on the 13th of July, 2020. And we reported this case, but they stopped the attacks and then they went into other communities and they killed 35 people in one day and displaced over 5,000. So when we reported, the government under El-rufai threatened to arrest us. When I got the hint, I quickly called 21 media houses and prepared a bus. As early as 7 o’clock, they had assembled, and I took the risk and we went to the place where the people were. At the end of the day, we met over 5,000 people in that camp.

The journalists interviewed them physically, and they gave their own on-the-spot accounts. That is what silenced the government. They would have arrested us.

At that time, they had already asked the then chairman of the local government, just like it happened in this case. The chairman of the local government came out and debunked it and said it didn’t happen; that people were just trying to destroy the image of the government.

So the same thing they did. The BBC interviewed that chairman at that time, and he came out and said that we were lying. So, what we did was the only way we could reveal the truth against what they were claiming. So it’s a repetition of what happened at that time.

And these things have been recorded. Let me tell you, the attacks that are going on, the kidnappings and the killings, in fact, are more than what one can even say. But, this president governor has come on the platform that he’s peaceful, and everybody is praising him. They have been suppressing information about the atrocities that are taking place in Southern Kaduna. They have been suppressing information; a serious oppression.

Even the police commissioner, yesterday, denied and threatened to arrest people. But, now they are swallowing their words because the Christian Association of Nigeria brought a list of the people abducted. So far, 177 people, and they are in the forest.

Now, if nobody says anything now, then you will not see Nuhu Ribadu will come and then they will go and give those kidnappers a lot of money in billions, and then they will say that, okay, they have released the people, and then they will be clapping for the government. That is the stage-managing that has been going on all over.

And then the issue of the Christian genocide narrative is, again, what they are running away from. Because if people are being picked on Sunday during worship service, it means that it is actually confirming it. Up to now, there is no report because they are suppressing information heavily.

They have warned, they are threatening the villagers that even on social media, they don’t want to see those details again. Even the chairman of the local government and the member of the House of Reps are warning them. These are supposed to be their representatives, but they are warning them that they should not be divulging such information, that they should know that the government is doing something about the insecurity internally.

African Democratic Congress (ADC) seems to be revving up, as more people are trooping in there. Do you see the party making any impact in 2027?

I have said it over and over, and I’m still saying it again. Thank God that the last thing I read about the ADC was that they are already thinking about leaving the ticket in the south.

If the ADC makes the mistake and insists that a northerner must pick that ticket, if they do not zone the ticket to the south and they leave it open, then certainly Atiku will pick that ticket. And if Atiku picks that ticket as a northerner, just after four years of a southern president, I’m telling you, it is as good as the APC will take the day.

It’s as good as Tinubu will have a free ticket to his victory.

But, if they zone the ticket to the south and they allow the southerner that has this organic followership, I’m talking about Peter Obi, to pick that ticket, I can assure you,  that is when you see the people’s resolve. The common man will again make the necessary sacrifice, including the maximum sacrifice for the right thing to be done.

Because people are ready to sacrifice when they see that somebody is there, that they believe in; that can protect their interests, that can give them good governance, good leadership.

The world over is crying for good leadership, strong leadership that will set policies that will place the country on the progressive trajectory. But, if you have weak leadership that is just coming just like that, nobody is ready to sacrifice.

If the ADC wants to win this election, they should give it to Peter Obi. The Nigerian people still believe in him, and they will still come out and sacrifice and protect their votes this time around.

They will not allow the mess that happened last time in 2023 to happen again. That is the only option.