By our reporter| Governor Nasir El-Rufai, of Kaduna State on Tuesday reiterated that his administration will neither negotiate nor offer ransom to kidnappers, as that would mean surrendering to criminals.
In apparent response to the killing of another two students of Greenfield University by the bandits who abducted them from their campus two weeks ago, El-rufai in a statement by his Special Adviser on Media and Communication, Muyiwa Adekeye, argued that the payment of ransom has not curbed criminality in the country.
The bandits had last Friday killed three of the students.
“Several states sought to negotiate their way out of the problems by talking to bandits, paying them money, or offering them amnesty. This has not worked and has only encouraged the criminals to press ahead for a surrender of the public treasury to them. That is clearly not in the public interest,” the statement read.
El-Rufai, however, regretted the recent kidnaps and killings of students from tertiary institutions in Kaduna state, and sympathise with their families.
”We mourn the dead students and we offer our condolences to the family and friends of the deceased”, the governor said.
“The ruthless and heartless resort of the kidnappers to murdering these young persons is part of their effort to further their blackmail and compel us to abandon our ‘no-ransom, no-negotiation’ policy. Are people bothering with the consequences of state surrender to hoodlums, or is the continued politicization of security challenges not going to make all of us ultimately victims of the insurgents?
“The fact that criminals seek to hold us by the jugular does not mean we should surrender and create an incentive for more crime. In today’s Nigeria, it has become fashionable to treat the unlawful demands of bandits as worthy of consideration and to lampoon people who insist that outlaws should be crushed and not mollycoddled or availed the resources they can use to unleash further outrages,” he stated.
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