The Yoruba Summit Group has vehemently rejected the Federal Government’s plan to deploy more troops in a bid to check the rising cases of killing and kidnapping in the region.

The group said in a statement issued on Thursday and signed by the Publicity Secretary, Mogaji Gboyega Adejumo, said: “This is the first time we the Yoruba have ever beheld a central government promoting terrorists as “vigilantes” and openly whitewashing terrorism...!

“The Yoruba Summit Group is constrained to express its profound dissatisfaction with the Federal authorities proposed measures in response to the deteriorating security situation in the South-West.

“The deployment of soldiers along the major inter-state motorways, as is being proposed in certain quarters, is unlikely to be any more effective for reasons that are not dissimilar to those that have rendered the Army’s earlier intervention ineffective in the killing fields of the central Nigerian States of Plateau, Benue, Taraba, etc.

“Worse still, the Yoruba Summit Group is shocked at reports of the appearance on major motorways of the South-West of Miyetti Allah-affiliated Fulani vigilante groups. The reports indicate that these Fulani vigilante groups were introduced with the view to assisting in the maintenance of security in the South-West.

“The Yoruba Summit Group views the reported deployment of Fulani vigilante groups in the South-West as an insult and provocation by the same authorities who have steadfastly, and for so long, opposed the establishment of state police forces.

“This hare-brained scheme of deploying an organisation, whose members are deeply complicit in the depredations taking place across swathes of Southern and Central Nigeria, as arbiters of law and order in these same regions of the country is akin to employing the fox to guard the hen house!”

According to the Yoruba Summit Group in the statement, a copy of which was made available to News Express, “Objective observers of the unfolding events in South-Western Nigeria cannot but come to the conclusion that these arrangements were deliberately put in place to humiliate the people of the South-West, or, worse, as a Trojan Horse for the attainment of yet undisclosed goals.

“The Yoruba nation categorically rejects army of occupation in any part of her land.

“The Yoruba Summit Group solemnly advises the Federal Government of Nigeria that the only way out of the evolving crisis is to revisit the proposals contained in the 2014 Report of the National Conference, with a view to returning the country to a decentralised federal system of government, which is the only constitutional arrangement that can facilitate – by safeguarding the interests of each ethnic nationality – the emergence of a harmonious and progressive union of our disparate ethnic nationalities, and thereby create a sustainable basis for Nigerian unity.”