Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s spokesman, Garba Shehu, told the BBC on Monday that a group of farmers massacred by Boko Haram terrorists on November 28 in northeast Nigeria had not received permission to farm the land from local security forces.
Members of Boko Haram, an Islamic terror group, killed 70 farm workers in Borno State’s Zabarmari village on Saturday. The militants reportedly tied up the laborers and slit their throats.
The rice farmers “were attacked because they had on Friday [November 27] disarmed and arrested a Boko Haram gunman who had been tormenting them,” a member of the local parliament, Ahmed Satomi, told the Nigerian newspaper Premium Times.
The massacre is one of the worst attacks by Boko Haram in recent months in Borno state, the terror group’s traditional stronghold. Boko Haram has waged an Islamic insurgency in the region, located along the Lake Chad Basin, for years. The attacks often spill over into neighboring countries including Chad, Cameroon, and Niger.
Shehu addressed Boko Haram’s latest massacre in a radio interview with the BBC on Monday.
“The truth has to be said. Was there any military clearance from the military who are in total control of the area? Did anybody ask to resume activity?” Shehu asked, implying that the farmers failed to get permission from the Nigerian Army forces to work in the rice field.
“People need to understand what it is like in the Lake Chad Basin area – a window that the terrorists have exploited,” he explained.
“So ideally, all of these places ought to probably be allowed to pass through proper military clearance before resettlement or even farmers resuming activities on those fields,” Shehu said.
The presidential spokesperson’s radio comments have since caused a backlash in Nigeria, with many people on social media accusing Shehu of blaming the farmers for their own killing.
“Today, I found myself leading the trends in the social media for the wrong reasons,” Shehu wrote Monday on Twitter, the first of several tweets in the same thread.
“The State of Borno is essentially a military zone up till now that we are talking and much of what people do; much of where they go are governed by the exigencies of security [sic],” he explained. “Routinely, traders, administration officials and even UN agencies get the green light to go to many of the areas to avoid trouble.”
“Information from security agencies says that the Zabarmari marshlands are infested with land mines and movements in around those areas subject to military oversight [sic],” Shehu wrote. “No one is delighted with the massacre in Zabarmari and there is nothing anybody will gain by playing blame games.”
“The question I tried to answer on BBC was: did the security sign off on the area as being free of mines and terrorists? The honest answer is, no,” the presidential spokesman concluded.
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