The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has bemoaned what it noted as “hate campaigns and propaganda” being conducted by certain interest groups in the South-East to carry out unprovoked evictions, attacks, killings, destructions of properties and other forms of violations against northerners in various parts of the region.
The CNG said it is particularly disturbed by the reports of the brutal murder of a mother and her four children for the only sin of being northerners, adding that other reports that some trucks conveying goods to the south were also set ablaze in Anambra at the weekend and the drivers and other occupants were killed, injured or disappeared without a trace.
The group, speaking through its spokesman, Abdul-Azeez Suleiman in a statement, said, “The Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) has taken stock of events unfolding in South-East Nigeria, noting especially, the unrelenting attacks and killings of northerners passing through or residing among Igbo communities as minorities.”
It said that there is a manifestation of a dangerous conspiracy of silence days after Sunday’s killing of the northerners without any provocation, saying that the story has not been told by any of the national print and broadcast media despite wide coverage by the social media with graphic photos of the mayhem and condemnation by security operatives, groups and individuals.
According to the statement, “We have watched and studied these events carefully and with considerable restraint and maturity, to the point of condoning and accommodating several unreasonable and unacceptable actions that have been perpetrated against Nigerians collectively, and northerners in particular.
“The intrinsic bias of the media and the double standards, hypocrisy and cowardice of regional, traditional, cultural, political and religious leaders from both the South and the North have become more glaring when they condemned the Deborah incident in Sokoto but conspiratorially and deliberately decline comments on the murderous activities of IPOB/ESN terrorists including the slaughter of a legislator.”
CNG explained that it also noted the deliberate attempt by the media and southern leaders to conceal the true identity of the murderous IPOB/ESN terrorists by concealing them as ‘unknown gunmen’ while in actual sense they are known.
It claimed that it is aware that the activities of the IPOB/ESN terror groups are supported morally and politically by the vast majority of Igbo elites, politicians, traditional rulers, business persons, and the larger population of this ethnic group, alleging that it is also a situation that feeds on the docility of the affrighted section of those who pose as Northern leaders today.
It stated that the North’s reticence in speaking out or taking action is not born of fear or ignorance of how to respond in kind, saying that those who tempt them should know that the North is no longer going to turn the other cheek.
“We, therefore, invite the attention of southern leaders, their Northern collaborators and the bankrupt section of the northern political elite and other authors of mindless violence and separatism who see it as their duty to actualise what their fathers started in 1966, to remember that people from other regions are residing and doing businesses all over the North and to warn them that we shall no longer be expected to turn the other cheek if northerners would not be protected wherever they live as minorities in particularly Nigeria,” the group said.
CNG warned media operators of an imminent boycott of patronage all over the North unless they change to being more restrained and balanced in their reporting of all situations in the country, particularly when matters coming from or affecting northerners are reported or commented on.
“We caution them to desist from and to eschew the slanted reporting of events with greater bias against a particular religious and ethnic group as is witnessed in the reporting of security situations recently,” the statement stated.
