Govt Urged To Facilitate IDPs’ Return To Ancestral Homes

International Organization for Peace Building and Social Justice (PSJ) and the Conference of Autochthonous Ethnic Communities Development Association (CONAECDA) have called on the federal and state governments to ensure those displaced from their ancestral lands by terrorists return to their homes.

They said it is important for the governments at state and national levels to ensure that apart from improving the security situation, they achieve the restoration of communities to their homelands, care for the displaced, restore livelihoods, and provide qualitative education and employment for Nigerians across all skills and especially in the areas of agriculture, green economy, digital economies, and service sector, including care for the elderly.

Addressing journalists in Jos, Plateau State, as part of the activities to mark the 2023 world day for social justice, the executive director of Peace and Social Justice, Ishaya Inuwa Durkwa said apart from improving the security situation, there is the need to care for the displaced people while the security agencies and the government should reclaim such communities and return them to their rightful owners.

Durkwa said: “There are cases of land grabbing, villages that were sacked, houses burned and destroyed, farmlands destroyed, kidnappings, banditry and all forms of crisis from the North East to the North West, North Central, South-South, South West and South East. No geopolitical region is spared.

“Now, all these atrocities going on only prove that the scale of justice must be balanced. When we rehabilitate the aggressor, we must rehabilitate the victims through acts of restorative justice.

“Whatever happens in the elections of 2023, whoever emerges as our next leaders, we call on them to balance the scale of justice.”

The executive director pointed out that Nigerians cannot continue to play the ostrich, thinking all is well, whereas the nation is imploding and called on the government to double up on ensuring that its teaming unemployed youths are gainfully employed, otherwise they become a ready tool to perpetuate anarchy.