Segun Atanda/
Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has explained why the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) has been branded as a terrorist organisation.
Mohammed who spoke with Online Publishers in Lagos on Monday also accused IPOB of using fake videos to hoodwink the international community through social media platforms.
According to him, the sins of IPOB include the formation of the Biafra Secret Service; formation of the Biafra National Guard; unauthorized blocking of public access roads, extortion of money from innocent civilians; possession and use of weapons, including Molotov cocktails, machetes and broken bottles among others on a military patrol on the 3rd of September 2017.
He said, “IPOB engages in physical confrontation with troops at a checkpoint in the month of September 2017, during which they attempted to snatch soldiers’ rifles; IPOB carried out an attack also on other military checkpoints on 12th September 2017. No nation will allow that to happen unchallenged.
“You find that Boko Haram festered because it was not decisively tackled by the immediate past administration; it meant we should never again give room to any organisation to threaten the corporate existence of our country.
“Some argued that due process was not followed before IPOB was declared a terrorist organisation by the military and proscribed by the states of the South-East. This is a bogus argument, because all it does is to provide oxygen for organisations like that… an organisation that set up military and paramilitary bodies, an organisation that set up road blocks and extort money from people, an organisation that confronts a national army is nothing but a terrorist organisation.
“If anything at all, this Federal Government has been too lenient in dealing with IPOB. Those advancing bogus and spurious arguments should stop giving succor to IPOB. They should show restraint and responsibility.”
Mohammed added that irrespective of its “lies and propaganda, IPOB was not set up to fight for anyone but as a tool to destabilize the nation, divert attention from efforts of the administration and obliterate the laudable achievements of the administration”.
He said that IPOB was being sponsored by those he called the coalition of the politically disgruntled and treachery looters, who belief that they could escape justice by sponsoring the group and causing chaos.
He accused IPOB of using fake videos of mass killings, harvested from other parts of Africa and doctored to look current, to mislead the international community and win their support.
”We must warn the nation against IPOB’s next line of action, which is to externalize their lies and propaganda. Now they are writing to the governments and the national parliaments of some Western nations to give the impression that they are victims of an ethno-sectarian violence orchestrated by the government, hence they need protection.
He said, ”Some of the tools that have been employed by IPOB include blatant lies and cheap propaganda, and the medium of choice for the organization is the Social Media. IPOB has harvested gory videos and pictures from other lands and the distant past, which they are now circulating via the Social Media, to deceive the international community into believing that the people of the South-east are being subjected to state-sponsored, ethno-religious violence.
”Such videos, which have very high emotive quotient, are circulating on the Social Media as we speak. These videos are doctored to make them look current. They are fakes!”
Alhaji Mohammed said some ill-informed foreign individuals were already trumpeting IPOB’s lies and propaganda and even alleging genocide, adding: ”It is either they do not understand the meaning of genocide or are being mischievous. Either way, there is nothing like genocide anywhere in our country today. What we have in the South-east is a clampdown on a band of lawless people who have no regard for the laws of the land.”
He appealed to the Online Publishers to help counter the fake narrative on the Social Media on the situation in the South-east
He said, ”In the interest of the nation and your own interest, you must counter this fake narrative, report the issues responsibly and without sensationalism and present the truth to the public. If the Social Media, your platform, is discredited because of the activities of quacks and Internet Trolls, you too will be discredited and your publications will simply go down.
”That is why you must distinguish yourselves, as trained and tested professionals, from the charlatans who have seized the Social Media by the jugular, those who have no regard for the truth and who do not care whether their fake posts set the nation ablaze.”
0