President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday told his United States counterpart, Donald Trump, that his government was already tackling the problem of incessant killings by herdsmen across the country.
Buhari who spoke at a meeting with Trump at the White House, said the use of arms by herdsmen was a worrisome development which was strange to Nigeria.
According to him, until recently, the herdsmen and farmers had lived peacefully together.
The situation, he said, turned violent recently partly based on the invasion of the country by people recruited from the Sahel by Libya’s former president, Muammar Gaddafi.
His words: “The problem of cattle herders is a very long historical problem. What is of a concern is that before now the Nigerian herders are known to carry sticks and machetes and cut follies for their animals but these ones are carrying AK 47.
“So, I don’t think we should underrate Libya, 43 years of Gaddafi people were being recruited from the Sahel and people were being killed.
“With the demise, they moved from their country and their region with their training and their weapons and that is what aggravated the situation.
“We are doing our best to make ensure we stop the cross border movement and so on. It will take time. We are Stabilising the situation in Nigeria.”
Buhari expressed happiness over the efforts to wipe out the ISIS.
According to him, that had helped to reduce the confidence of the terrorists group, Boko Haram, which had claimed to be an affiliation of ISIS.
“Now that ISIS has been virtually dealt with, we are very happy with that,” he said.
On security, Buhari said he was very grateful to the U.S. for “agreeing to sell to us the aircraft we asked for and the spare parts”.
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“We are even more grateful for the physical presence of the United States military who are training in our institutions and who also go to the front in the northeast to see how they are doing.
“The commitment of the United States to get rid of terrorism across the world, we have first hand experience of that and we are very grateful for it,” he said.
“Chibok girls’ kidnap was before we came. We rescue some of them. The Dapchi girls were 106, we rescued 100 back, four died, one is still in captivity.
“We are very grateful to the United Nations organisation that is acting as go-between and is helping out. We have not given up on the Dapchi girl,” Buhari said.
Earlier, Trump had said he had met Buhari before and they had a great relationship.
“We have had very serious problems with Christians who are being murdered in Nigeria, we are going to be working on that problem very, very hard because we cannot allow that to happen,” Trump said.
News Agency of Nigeria reports that the U.S. leader said his country had very much decimated ISIS over the last 12 months.
“But Boko Haram has been terrible. How did you do with the young women that have been kidnapped? It’s a terrible problem,” Trump had said.
