Zamfara: Why We Stopped Dialoguing With Bandit Terrorists – Bello Matawalle

Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara State has stated that his administration stopped negotiating with bandit terrorists because they were deceived.

Recall that Matawalle, who has initially stated that dialogue with bandits was the best solution, had on September said the state will no longer offer amnesty to repentant bandits.

Speaking to State House correspondents after meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday, Matawalle is government is committed to fighting bandit terrorists.

He said: “They have deceived us. Some of them did not follow what we agreed with them. We thought it was something we could continue with them, but we later realised that they had deceived us. So, we had to back out of it and decide to fight them to a logical conclusion.

“As you know, we are there fighting and we have taken a lot of measures in order to curtail this problem of insurgency. We thank God it’s yielding a lot of results. We’ve recorded a lot of successes from what we have done.

“As you are aware, we have a lot of security personnel that were deployed to Zamfara state and they are working seriously.”

The Zamfara governor revealed that the people of the state are happy with drastic measures taken to aid the fight against bandits because they are now getting peace.

“It’s just that we have cut a lot of things, particularly moving of foodstuffs, animals and selling of petroleum products,” he said.

“We have imposed a lot of measures and the people are happy with the measures, because the people had suffered a lot; people were being killed and kidnapped every day before, but today we have succeeded. We don’t have many of such issues in Zamfara state.”