From Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
President Muhammadu Buhari met with Katsina State Governor Aminu Masari on Tuesday over the security situation in the state.
The governor highlighted collaboration among northwestern states as the solution to the security challenges in the region.
According to him, if each state in the region adopts different security policies, bandits and terrorists will continue to get away with their crimes.
Speaking to State House Correspondents after he led a delegation of elders from Katsina to a closed-door meeting with the president at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, Masari said: ‘I think what is most important for us to succeed in fighting these bandits is for all of us in the States, especially the northwestern states to take the pains and work together to make sure that we block all the loopholes.
‘But if one state has a policy and another has a different one, certainly they (bandits) will always be moving from one state to another. Luckily enough, we are already working closely with states that border us, like Nasarawa and Niger, to bring the problem to a manageable and tolerable level.’
Commenting on the recent killing of one of his Commissioners, the Katsina governor said the incident had nothing to do with banditry, adding that it was purely an assassination case.
Masari assured the family of the deceased and citizens of the State that security agents are working hard to unravel the cause of the murder.
‘The incident we had last week had nothing to do with banditry attack it was purely an assassination by unknown killers, which the Police and other security agencies are working round the clock to unravel what happened.
‘Because my commissioner was killed by an unknown assassin and not a single pin was stolen in his house so, you could see that this was a pure crime that has to be fully investigated for us to know the root causes and why,’ he said.
Masari said with the measures put in place by security agencies operating in Katsina State, against banditry, there is an improvement.
‘I think if we are talking about banditry, certainly we have seen some improvement; we cannot say normalcy has returned but there is an improvement.
‘When we had a comparative analysis before the issuance of the security containment order, what we saw in three months when we compared, was a drastic drop of over 100 per cent in terms of the rate of kidnappings, killings and their associated crimes with banditry. So, the incident we had last week had nothing to do with banditry,’ he stressed.
