By Yusuf Boluwatife
The Minister of Police Affairs, Maigari Dingyadi, has said repentant bandits are Nigerian citizens and the Federal Government has a responsibility to reintegrate them “peacefully and honourably into the society”.
He stated this on Tuesday when he featured as a guest on Channels Television’s ‘Politics Today’.
According to the minister, there is still a window for bandits to surrender to the government as they will be very much welcomed into the wider society.
“What we are trying to do is to get them settled in their various communities, to let them have a kind of means of livelihood so that they can integrate peacefully and honourably into the society.
“As a nation we have responsibilities to our citizens, to integrate them with the little that we can afford to give them and we will continue to monitor what they are doing in their various communities to ensure that they don’t go back to their old days of armed banditry and all of them. We will monitor them and ensure that they don’t go back to their bad old days of armed banditry and kidnapping,” he said.
Dingyadi also spoke on the ongoing onslaught against bandits in the North West, particularly in Katsina, Zamfara and Sokoto States, saying the government will continue to record successes as long as there is synergy among security agencies.
“You are going to see more successes coming up in the next couple of days. The security forces are working more on the precision of their intelligence and the sophistication of their equipment to achieve greater victory against the marauders,” he added.
