Nigeria’s Minister of State for Defence, Senator Musiliu Obanikoro has said high rate of illiteracy in the country is the cause of insurgent group, Boko Haram.
Speaking on Saturday, 07 June, 2014, at a memorial lecture for the late professor and former Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology, Obanikoro said to eradicate insurgency in the North education reform must be implemented.
The former Nigerian ambassador in Ghana added that such move would fill the “educational vacuum” which “Boko Haram is exploiting to pursue its subversive ideologies.”
Obanikoro also stated that the high level of underdevelopment in the North also allow for the rise of the Boko Haram insurgency.
He mentioned figures that declared the states in northern Nigeria which have the worst education for young girls and with the highest female illiteracy rate.
* Senator Obanikoro
It could be recalled that no fewer than 200 schoolgirls were abducted at the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State in April that led Boko Haram to become an international topic of discussion.
After the abduction of the girls, the leaders of the terror group, Abubakar Shekau surfaced in a video where he stated that he would not release the girls unless the Nigerian government is ready to swap them for arrested members of the group.
Few weeks after, another video surfaced in which Shekau claimed he would sell the 200 kidnapped girls into his “market of selling human beings.”
Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathon has declared that those behind the wave of terrorism in northern Nigeria are some unscrupulous elements who are determined to distabilised his government.
Jonathan added that the federal government is not ready to negotiate with the terrorists that they would rather continue to wage war against them.
However, Obanikoro believes the root cause of insurgent groups such as Boko Haram is illiteracy and poverty.
He said: “Those killing innocent souls are misguided people who have never read the Holy Qu’ran.”
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