Matawalle: We Stopped Dialoguing with Bandits Because of Their Deceit

Deji Elumoye in Abuja

Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara State has declared that the state government stopped dialoguing with bandits troubling the state because of their deceit.

Matawalle, who accused the bandits of reneging on earlier agreements reached with them, however, disclosed that relative peace had since returned to the state with the people now happy and going about their normal business.
The governor Thursday told newsmen after meting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the State House, Abuja, that the state government had been steadfast in the fight against banditry.

According to him, people had started seeing results of the stringent measures put in place to restore security, adding that though the measures were tough, the people had not minded,because they are now feeling secured.

The security situation in Zamfara State got to a desperate level recently, leading to the imposition of a couple of security measures, including the shutting down of telecommunication equipment and operations in the state.
Governor Matawale had also recently proposed dialogue as a strategy for ending the violent activities of bandits and kidnappers in the state.

When asked if the dialogue approach was no longer an option, the governor 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 realised that they had deceived us. So, we had to back out of it and decided to fight them to a logical conclusion.

“As you know, we are there fighting and we have taken a lot of measures in order to curtail this problem of insurgency and we thank God it’s yielding a lot of results. We’ve recorded a lot of successes from what we have done. As you are aware, we have a lot of security personnel that were deployed to Zamfara State and they are working seriously,” he said.

On the current state of play, Matawalle said, “The situation is calm and people are going on with their day-to-day activities, just that we have cut a lot of things, particularly, moving food stuff, animals and selling of petroleum products.

“We have imposed a lot of measures and the people are happy with the measures, because the people had suffered a lot. People were being killed and kidnapped every day before, but today, we have succeeded, we don’t have much of such issues in Zamfara State.”