From Femi Oyelola, Kaduna
The Zango Urban Community Development Association (ZOCUDA), a Hausa/Fulani community in the Zangon-Kataf local government area of Kaduna State has cautioned Gen. Zamani Lekwot to desist from granting what it described as distorted interviews on the 1992 Zangon-Kataf crises.
Acting Chairman Board of Trustees of ZOCUDA, Alhaji Ibrahim Bisallah, stated this yesterday, in a statement made available to the media in Kaduna.
According to him, the interview Lekwot recently granted to justify heinous crimes committed against Hausa/Fulani members of the community in the 1992 crises, in which he played a role only opens the wound of the past and recoils the trauma and sorrow which families of the victims and those who suffered in the attack.
He therefore advised him to grant a fresh interview revealing the role he played in the 1992 Zangon-Kataf crises.
The Community in its reaction to a recent interview granted a media organization, not Peoples Daily newspaper by General Lekwot, alleged that, he was among the indicted culprits in the crises that were pardoned.
Furthermore Bisallah, said the purported site was an empty land without any infrastructure and no single stall built by the authority concerned, but relocation was announced impromptu to achieve what he described as an ethnic agenda by the then Chairman of the Local Government Area.
ZOCUDA however, challenged Lekwot to conduct another round of interviews to tell the world the “honest and humble truth”, saying that, contrary to Gen. Lekwot’s “false” assertion in the interview, that the 1992 Zangon Kataf crises started as a result of the relocation of new market, which led to an attack on an Atyap community which the general failed to mention its name, and how many persons killed, there are enough records in their (Hausa/Fulani) archives to enlighten the public of the roles played by all the parties to know the truth.
According to Bisallah, “General Lekwot needs to go for counseling on human relations and psychology and desist from granting an interview on the Zangon-Kataf crisis of 1992 because the more he speaks on it, the more he reworks sleeping victims and opens the wound of grief, sorrow, and tears yet to heal and remind victims’ families of the seeming frustrated and disgruntled Retired general you are.
“This is the least of what we would say to our convicted and unremorseful neighbour. If you continue to tow the path you are taking as against being apologetic and seeking forgiveness.”
“The people of Zangon Kataf especially the Hausa-Fulani Community would like to wonder what exactly you set out to achieve by this interview at this critical time when the nation is in desperate search for peaceful co-existence amongst its peoples in the face of the protracted insecurity involving kidnapping, banditry and unknown gunmen attacks in the nation, especially in Zangon Katat, Southern Kaduna and Kaduna State in general.
“Perhaps it could have been an opportunity for you to tender an unreserved apology to the widows, the orphans, and the relatives of the hundreds that the Atyap murderers maimed, as well as the tens of thousands of the Hausa/Fulani, you and your kinsmen displaced and sent out as Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in a continuing onslaught that has lasted about 31 years and their properties worth millions of Naira destroyed as well as those with scars on their bodies and grief in their hearts.
“But you derailed from an opportunity to rebrand your blood-stained personality and rather typical old disillusioned and diabolical machinations describing disgruntled and frustrated General that you are, you have by this misplaced interview exposed yourself to further hatred and ridicule by exhuming the ghost of the barbaric act that stinks to high heavens for which generations of the victims will continue to remember.”
