The United Global Resolve for Peace (UGRFP), an NGO, says it will convene a national summit over the recurrent killings across the country.
Mr Olaseni Shalom, UGRFP’s Executive Director, in statement on Wednesday in Abuja, said that the recent killings in Plateau State called for sober reflections.
He said that the plethora of death and resultant crisis in the country questioned the nation’s commitment to the realisation of its millennial aspirations as stated in its 2020 Goals.
Shalom said that communal crisis must be interpreted beyond fault lines to a much more national scope.
“The threat to peace in any one region in Nigeria is a threat to peace in all parts of Nigeria.
“There has, perhaps in the history of this nation, never been a greater need to reflect on the issues that lead to such killings and proffer ways to avoid it repetition.
“We, at UGRFP, have summarily resolved to stand in the gap and facilitate the platform for constructive discussions and resolutions to finding applicable solutions and palliatives to crisis such as the Jos massacre.
“ It is this abiding imperative that informs our decision to put together an all-encompassing SUMMIT,’’ Shalom said.
He said that the objectives of the summit are among other things to create a forum for national discourse on the recurrent killings in the country; to bring disputing groups/parties to the table of discourse and to address, without reserve, the persistent issues that premeditate fatal internecine clashes.
Others are to address the issue of jungle justice and its wider implication on nationhood and to find, through exhaustive discourse, the way forward on issues of conflicts in Nigeria and make valid recommendations to stakeholders on how to best arrest the massacres.
Shalom conveyed the group’s deepest condolences to the affected families and states in the dastardly killings in Benue, Plateau, Zamafara among others.
