Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday said 90 per cent of all Boko Haram’s victims in the past years have been Muslims.
The insurgents began their heinous activities in 2009 after the killing of the leader Mohammed Yusuf. Global Terrorism Index indicates that the group since 2009, has killed tens of thousands and displaced 2.3 million.
President Buhari in an article published in Speaking Out, a guest opinion column for “Christianity Today”, said that the perception that members of the sect were always targeting Christians in Nigeria is not true.
According to him, the terrorists have targeted vulnerable Nigerians without discrimination.
“it is the reality that some 90 per cent of all Boko Haram’s victims have been Muslims,” Buhari said.
“They include a copycat abduction of over 100 Muslim schoolgirls, along with their single Christian classmate, shootings inside mosques; and the murder of two prominent imams.
“It is a simple fact that these now-failing terrorists have targeted the vulnerable, the religious, the non-religious, the young, and the old without discrimination,” the President stressed.
The President assured that his government was committed to bringing an end to activities of insurgents.
Buhari warned individuals, organisations and groups seeking to divide the country through religion to have a rethink.
“There is no place in Nigeria for those who seek to divide us by religion, who compel others to change their faith forcibly or try to convince others that by so doing, they are doing good,” Buhari said.
“We may not, yet, be completely winning the battle for the truth. Christianity in Nigeria is not—as some seem intent on believing—contracting under pressure, but expanding and growing in numbers approaching half of our population today.”
President Buhari stated that the terrorists today only attempt to build invisible walls between the adherents of the two major religions in Nigeria.
“They have failed in their territorial ambitions, so now instead they seek to divide our state of mind, by prying us from one from another to set one religion seemingly implacably against the other,” Buhari said.
