Senate President Godswill Akpabio on Thursday cautioned against framing Nigeria’s security crisis along religious lines, insisting that terrorists and bandits target Nigerians indiscriminately, regardless of faith.
Akpabio spoke during plenary in Abuja while contributing to a motion on alleged religious persecution of Christians in Nigeria, which followed a debate on reports that some foreign governments were considering sanctions against the country over claims of religious intolerance.
The Senate President said portraying terrorism as a conflict between Christians and Muslims was misleading and only served to deepen divisions among Nigerians.
He said, “When they come and start spraying bullets from, or they throw a rocket, they are not throwing a rocket into the crowd targeting a particular religion. They are killing Nigerians. I don’t know who will now go and sit down and bring out maybe their dead bodies and say, this one is a Christian, this one is from this family, this must be a Muslim.
“We are facing a situation whereby these terrorists are trying to terminate the lives of Nigerians and frustrate us from going into the farms to produce food to feed ourselves.”
Akpabio explained that the nature of attacks often depended on the region where they occurred, which should not be mistaken as evidence of religious targeting.
