Solomon Dalung, a lawyer and former Minister of Youth and Sports, has challenged former Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, to provide concrete evidence to support his allegation that former Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai deliberately planned the killing of people in Southern Kaduna.
Dalung made the remarks on Inside Sources with Laolu Akande on Channels Television on Friday, while discussing the longstanding crisis in Southern Kaduna and the controversies surrounding the response of successive Kaduna State administrations.
He said attributing the Southern Kaduna crisis solely to el-Rufai was an oversimplification of a conflict that had existed for decades before the former governor assumed office.
‘Reducing the question of Southern Kaduna to Malam el-Rufai is the beginning of injustice itself,’ Dalung said.
According to him, Kaduna State had experienced about four or five major crises, dating back to the 1987 Kafanchan crisis, followed by the Zangon-Kataf crisis, the Sharia crisis and the violence that followed the 2011 general election.
‘Kaduna had undergone about four to five different crises. As far back as 1987, there was the Kafanchan crisis which started from the interpretation of Quran by a Christian clergy,’ he said.
‘So, these things have been there down to the Sharia crisis, down to Zongon-Kataf crisis, down to the 2011 post-election crisis where a lot of people lost their lives.’
Dalung said the 2011 post-election violence was particularly significant in understanding the evolution of what is today referred to as the Southern Kaduna crisis.
He said the then Kaduna State Governor, Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa, established a Commission of Inquiry after the violence, although Dalung said he had advised the governor to pursue reconciliation instead.
‘I personally advised against a Commission of Inquiry. I suggested to him that it will be better for him to approach the issue of a reconciliation, but he went for a Commission of Inquiry,’ he said.
According to Dalung, about 180 people were indicted by the commission, with 115 of those indicted coming from Southern Kaduna.
He said Yakowa did not proceed with producing a White Paper on the commission’s report, which he argued contributed to the escalation of the dispute.
‘And he couldn’t proceed with producing a White Paper of that particular Commission of Inquiry. So, that now led to the escalation of the issue because the report of that Commission of Inquiry was escalated,’ Dalung said.
He said the report subsequently became a source of further tension, as those who suffered losses during the crisis and those who benefited from the commission’s findings continued to push the issue.
‘I was given a copy at the motor park in Kaduna while travelling. Those who lost in the crisis and gained at the Commission decided to escalate the report,’ he added.
Dalung said when el-Rufai assumed office in 2015, he inherited an unresolved crisis and decided to establish another panel to advise his administration on how to address the outstanding issues.
‘When el-Rufai came in, he decided to set up another panel headed by General Agwai to advise his government about how to deal with the unresolved question of the issues that the previous government could not deal with,’ he said.
According to Dalung, the recommendation for payment of compensation to victims came from the committee headed by retired General Martin Luther Agwai.
He therefore rejected descriptions of the payments as compensation to bandits, saying such characterisation was unfair to el-Rufai.
‘The recommendation of payment of compensation was actually made by General Agwai’s committee,’ Dalung said.
‘The payment which was made which is now referred to as compensations for bandits is an unfair comment on el-Rufai.’
Dalung said the allegation that el-Rufai deliberately planned the killing of people in Southern Kaduna was, however, too serious to be ignored or dismissed without evidence.
‘So, for General Musa now to come up with a very serious allegation that el-Rufai planned a deliberate killing of the people of Southern Kaduna is too weighty to be swept under the carpet,’ he said.
‘So, we will want General Musa to give us concrete evidence.’
He said the history of violence in Kaduna needed to be properly examined before assigning responsibility for the crisis to a particular individual or administration.
Dalung’s position is that the Southern Kaduna crisis cannot be divorced from decades of communal, religious and political tensions in the state, and that the actions of successive governments should be assessed within the context of the crises they inherited.
He also argued that the Agwai panel and its recommendations were part of an attempt by the el-Rufai administration to address unresolved grievances from earlier conflicts.
His call for evidence comes amid renewed scrutiny of the causes of the killings in Southern Kaduna and the roles played by political and security authorities in responding to the violence.