Borno State governor, Babagana Umara Zulum, has described as over-bloated the figures in the media of the abducted Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Gamborun Ngala, Borno State.
The victims were abducted by ISWAP terrorists when they went to fetch firewood last weekend.
Zulum made the clarification yesterday when he met a team of North East Ambassadors Group in Maiduguri, the state capital. Some national dailies had put the number of the IDPs abducted between 100 and 200.
In his reaction, Governor Zulum cautioned those reporting the incident, saying, “nobody could be able to ascertain the number of the abducted persons.”
“As the chief security officer of the state, I am yet to receive any official figure on the abduction in Gamborun Ngala. So, we must be very careful of making unverifiable predictions.
“What you heard a few days ago in Gamboru Ngala is about recruitment. They lost their members and their numbers have depleted and they are now looking for new recruits and women.
“We are yet to ascertain the correct numbers of the abducted victims. Some may have decided to go voluntarily. And that’s what I am afraid of. If people decided to go to the bush voluntarily, you cannot do anything to stop them, that has been my fear since.
“Reliably, I was informed that some of the women were returning to the bush willingly. Even in Mafa, I went a few days ago and I saw a group of 200 women who said they wanted to go to the bush.
“They said in the camp that they are not getting anything.
We went and calmed them. This also underscores the fact that there is hunger in the IDPs camps. We therefore needed your support especially at the local government levels where we have resettled our people.
“We needed to provide them with durable and sustainable livelihood. We needed to move away from the immediate solutions to medium and longtime durable solutions. Because, once we don’t take care of the IDPs, we will be at a risk of them returning back to the fighters in the forest.
“We have heard situations where they are calling them from the bush and mocking them that they are suffering. Even when their colleagues who surrendered asked them to come out they always asked them what has the government done for them,” he said.
The governor said 162,000 insurgents and their family members have surrendered under the Borno State Model, adding that this was the first time in the world that such a number of ex-fighters laid down their arms through the exit programme of the state government.
