Ebonyi State Governor, Dave Umahi has identified the unknown gunmen terrorising southeast Nigeria and killing people as those who hail from the region and not outsiders.
Some southeasters and the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) have accused some governors in the region of sponsoring outsiders to terrorise the southeast.
But while answering questions regarding the identities of the killers on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, Umahi said the atrocities committed in the region were largely carried out by youths from there.
He said, “People tend to be funny at times when they say that we have been invaded by outsiders, but it is not true.
“We have people from other regions that are in the South East. There’s no tribe that doesn’t have criminality. I wouldn’t say some of these people from other tribes don’t engage in criminality.
“What I call bandits are people that engage in violence; and they are our people, South-East people. The youths, some of them are in this category.
“So, when people say insecurity in the South-East is being imported, I do not buy that. Because I am a Governor, I do security reports.
We have arrested a number of these people, and it should be that they are about five or 14 per cent of those outside the South-East. If we have 90 per cent of our youths engaging in these things, you cannot say the South-East is being infiltrated.”
He also said, “We engaged with some of the bandits, we made contacts with some of them. We had to say, what is your problem? If it is infrastructure, we have done that.
“If it is jobs creation, we have addressed that through direct labour. The bandits are angry about the lack of what to do, and we said to them that if your only trouble is that you didn’t have formal education, there is no job for you to do.
“We put them together and said, if you will stop attacks on our strategic infrastructure, killing of our people and attack on security agencies, we can rehabilitate you. So, we have rehabilitated a number of them.”