Amotekun Alleges Some Oyo Okada Operators Working Hand In Gloves With Kidnappers
The Oasis Reporters
January 19, 2021
Doing a walk around Ibadan city would reveal one astonishing fact, that a large preponderance of motorcycle transport operators are run by northern youths.
This is unarguably the same story in all major parts of the South West of Nigeria.
The Chairman of the Oyo State Security Network, aka Amotekun Corps, Col. Kunle Togun (retd.), has said most commercial motorcyclists in the state are spies for kidnappers and bandits who infiltrated the South-West through the various porous borders in the country.
The Amotekun chief made the disclosure during an interview with journalists at his office in Ibadan, Oyo State, on Monday.
Togun said investigation showed that the foreigners, who were ferried with trailers into Oyo State during the COVID-19 lockdown, could not speak any Nigeria language but French.
He said the greed of some community leaders led to the high rate of insecurity being challenged by the Amotekun.
Togun said, “Before Amotekun was established, the problem of Yorubaland since the invasion of the land by these herdsmen has been our traditional chiefs and leaders in Yorubaland. They take money, cows and cars from these people and allow them to settle and wreak havoc in their domains.
“I have attended meetings of obas in Oke-Ogun and I told them to stop giving land to foreigners. These herdsmen are called Bororos in Oke-Ogun and Ibarapa areas. They are not Nigerians. What is happening should not be analysed in the area of religion; it is territorial expansion.
“Their leaders argue about the ECOWAS free movement law, but the one I am aware of is that anybody from the ECOWAS country can go into another ECOWAS country without a visa. You cannot stay there for more than 90 days at a stretch; some of these people have been occupying our land for years and they are not Nigerians.”
He lamented that Nigerians were not security conscious, adding that unlike the neighbouring Benin Republic, the country had no database.
It has also been observed that kidnap victims who are forced to cough out millions of naira to their captors reveal unequivocally that their kidnappers are mainly northern Muslim youths who know the terrain very well.
