A Senior Councillor of the Birnin Gwari Emirate, Zubair Abdurra’uf, has said the Ansaru terrorist group now manages the affairs of Birnin Gwari Local Government Area of Kaduna State.
Abdurra’uf said the terrorists have set up a parallel government within the municipal and now make laws and tax helpless residents.
“We have a government within the government,” Abdurra’uf lamented on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme on Wednesday.
“There are some areas within Birnin Gwari, particularly the eastern part, whereby the Ansaru (group) administer this territory because they give directives to the citizens who are there and they decide what to be done,” he said.
According to him, the splinter group of notorious Boko Haram terrorist group came into Birnin Gwari over 12 years ago under the guise of teaching the people Islamic knowledge but later turned to insurgents with aversion for western education.
“Most of the schools in the area are deserted because they issued a decree that nobody should go to any school or have any form of formal education,” he said.
Abdurra’uf said Birnin Gwari, which is vast with difficult terrain and mountainous places and adjoining forest to Zamfara and other states, has since been abandoned by government institutions as the insurgents sack local chiefs and enthrone their rule.
“At times, the locals have no option but to take some of their issues to these terrorists for adjudication because of the absence of some of the institutions of government that will normally take care of these issues,” the traditional councillor said.
“The ideological conviction of Ansaru is not different from Boko Haram because the Ansaru are a splinter group of Boko Haram and whatever you see Ansaru do is in consonance with whatever Boko Haram are doing but only that the modus operandi of the two groups differ.”
This is not the first time that officials would sound the alarm of terrorist dominance in Birnin-Gwari. In May, Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai said Boko Haram and the Ansaru terrorists are taking over the Birnin-Gwari and Giwa local government areas in the state.
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