Why Zamfara govt withdrew from dialogue with bandits – Gov Matawalle

The Zamfara State Governor, Bello Matawalle, on Thursday explained why the government pulled out of dialogue with bandits terrorizing the state.

In a chat with State House correspondents after a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, the governor said the bandits deceived him and went contrary to their agreements.

He said the government had been steadfast in the fight against banditry in the state.

Matawalle had last week ruled out amnesty for bandits and other criminals in Zamfara.

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 realized that they had deceived us. So, we had to back out of the agreement and decide to fight them to a logical conclusion.

READ ALSO: Zamfara govt no longer interested in amnesty for bandits – Matawalle

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

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

“The truth is that the situation is calm and people are going on with their day-to-day activities. The only problem was that we have cut a lot of things, particularly movement of foodstuff, animals, and sale of petroleum products.

“We have imposed a lot of measures and the people are happy with the measures because they had suffered a lot. People were being killed and kidnapped every day before, but today we have succeeded.”

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