 Welcome back to the breakfast here on Plus TV Africa. Now let's talk of the current situation in Zamfara. The major challenge, you know, and of course this goes beyond Zamfara State but to other northern states in Nigeria today. I remember maybe about a month or more ago you had, you know, asked one of our guests the question about shutting down schools, you know, and what if that was necessary, if it was time that the state governors in the northeast give the order to shut down schools. And if that really was the motive of the terrorists in the first place. Exactly. And you know, and you know, the guests at that point didn't agree, you know, and I personally didn't even agree because I was thinking, you know, that really just tells of us accepting defeat. It means that Nigerians and state governors have accepted defeat and, you know, everybody needs to go back home. I mean, immediately you close down the schools, it means that the terrorists have won and we're not able to defend ourselves. But because we also need to look at the security challenges that we're dealing with here, the value of life that we're dealing with here, the fact that, you know, students are taken, sometimes not all of them come back home safe. Sometimes, you know, they, you know, the last one we heard about six of those kids dying before, you know, all the drama was over. So it may, you know, at some point become necessary that they take these drastic steps. And that's what has happened in Zamfara with the order that schools be shut down. Earlier, we spoke about banning interstate movement of cattle. In Kaduna, in Katsina, in Sampara. Exactly. And how sad that was, you know, that we've gotten there. But, you know, it is, these are important steps that I believe the governors and people who manage the state have decided that it's time that we take that, you know, these steps. It's also very vital, you know, to point out that one of the things that was said yesterday with our guests is that at what point, or the question that was asked earlier, is at what point is the state governor and the government going to realize and accept that they have failed? And when we've gotten to a place where schools need to be shut down, where movement is restricted, where business places have to maybe also be closed, mosques, churches, all of them need to be closed, it really just paints a picture of a complete failure of government. But what happens in Nigeria when you get to that stage? The answer is absolutely nothing. Some people might rumor or throw out words of, you know, a declared state of emergency here and there and, you know, or whatnot. Eventually, they play politics with it. And, you know, a few weeks later, you realize that nothing absolutely happens. In this same period, the state governors are still receiving allocations and security votes. In this same period, local governments are still receiving their monthly allocations. In this same period, there's still security, you know, patrol for the governor. And, you know, it feels like it's a normal thing for those certain people, but not for the people of Zamfara. The question that I was asking when I saw this newsbreak yesterday was, what next? And are we ready for what next? Because the reason these people have continued to attack schools in northern Nigeria is because they feel like they need to kidnap people in their dozens or hundreds. And they feel that they have the opportunity to do so unhindered. So, now you shut down schools and ask everyone to stay at home. What next? Are these bandits going to say, oh, well, no more schools to, you know, to attack? Well, close shop, let's go home and, you know, and repair. They've been kidnapping people from their homes. Exactly. Because, you know, shutting down the schools doesn't really solve the problem. It doesn't make them any safer. It protects a few kids. It protects, you know, kids from being, you know, vulnerable to these, you know, kidnappers and these terrorists. But what next is the state of government Zamfara state going to do? Is Kasinah going to do, Sokoto is Kaduna, all of these states, Bauchi, what next are they going to do in order to solve this problem? And at what point are they going to own up to their failures as individuals, as governors, as heads of government, to their failures of the most critical part of governance, which is the protection of lives and property I could never understand how people would kidnap children by their dozens. And then we hear the military saying that they have handed over 5,890 repentant terrorists to the state government. Gina Johnson asked, what's the indices for repentance? How do you measure repentance? And other security analysts have come out to, you know, point out the possibility that these people simply say they're repentant to get reintegrated into society and feedback information to their gangs. So it really is a shame. But updates regarding the Zamfara story, the book yesterday night was that five students have escaped, five of the confirmed 73 who were abducted from the government day secondary school in Kaya in Maridon local government area of Zamfara state have escaped. Now another source that I read said that the bandits freed them. So we don't know if they actually escaped because one of the fathers of the children who escaped granted an interview to DBC house yesterday and he said that when they kidnapped them, they were grouping them into groups and they saw that as an opportunity to hide and after they grouped them, they thought they had a particular number, they moved on and those people began to run and that they ran and ran until it was 1am when they sighted a mosque at 1am. Imagine kids aged between 11, 12, 15, 16 running in the forest at 1am. Can you just imagine the wild animals that could have attacked them? All the security threats, all the threats to their life running at 1am. I can't imagine myself being out in a forest by 1am. But teenagers were out at 1am trying to fight for their lives, they spotted a mosque, they ran to safety and they were able to return back to their families. The father said one of them had been taken to the hospital visibly shaken. One of them, according to the news, sustained gunshot wounds. So five have now come to safety. How about the others? And what is safety in fact? What's the assurance that those kids would not be kidnapped again by bandits who just invade their communities? So it's really a lot and I really want the government to put its foot down and take a decisive action regarding this repentant terrorist because it really breaks my heart to see that people go ahead and kidnap Nigerians and then when you catch them, when you arrest them, rather than put them through the due process regarding our laws, regarding prosecution, you go ahead and say that they have repented. I think a lot of this is still coming off the fact that a lot of Nigerians and we don't even have the truth really. In the absence of truth or speculation and we still don't know exactly what the truth is concerning these people who have repented, we also don't know if there's a difference between Boko Haram and ISWAP and the bandits and the kidnappers and the unknown gunmen and the militia. We don't know if there's a difference or it is just one and the same group that have, because the actions are different, been given different names. We don't know if these people are funded by the same. We don't know if people criminals have really just run wild in over Nigeria and news media simply just called them bandits or calls them unknown gunmen or calls them Boko Haram. Because of the lack of clarity here, that's why you can never really tell who exactly is repenting. If it's a kidnapper or it's someone who has wiped out villages before or someone who really was just helping buy bullets, there's so much confusion with regards to all of these things. But my question really is what next in Zamfara, what next in Katzina in Burno and are we going to run through four, five, six, eight years and just experience these things play out this way and then if everyone goes to sleep and say, oh, you know, finally the banditry has stopped. No, somebody needs to accept that they have failed. Somebody needs to accept that they are filled with the very core responsibility that they had while taking that office. And it hurts me to see some of these governors and their faces and of course they will, you know, go about their normal day. They will still eat breakfast this morning. They will live their life like it's normal even if they know that it's, you know, all things are not normal. Same thing with the federal, same thing with the president, same thing with everybody who currently is, you know, in in in Aso Rock, who really doesn't see all of this as a failure of their own government, countless of how you want to paint it. It is a failure of their own government that there are certain regions in Nigeria today that are completely ungoverned. But, you know, there's there's no acceptance that they have failed in a very core reason that they were elected into office. So these kids were kidnapped the first of September 2021 while they were writing exams in school. The card now has begun for how long they spend in captivity. And then the next few days, the information we're going to get from the press men and, you know, the chief press secretary and all of that in Zanfarah State is conversations about ransom payments. We're not going to negotiate with bandits. Oh, we've ordered the commission of police to swing into action and all these statements without thorough action. But here's where we are. We'll take a break here and we'll come back to talk about the transfer window in football.