The Berom community has petitioned the Plateau State House of Assembly over plans by the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, to establish a school for the Fulani settlement in Mahanga town of Riyom Local Government Area of the state.
“By building a primary school for the children of herders at Mahanga village, the office of the special assistant to the president on SDGs is legitimizing “LAND GRAB” by “FULANI HERDSMEN” of a supposed Berom community called RANKUN.
“The land was forcefully taken over by Fulani herdsmen during a 19-year-old conflict between Berom ethnic supremacists and Muslims in the state, but there is no iota of truth in this,” the petition read in part.
This is just as the Fulani community appealed to the SDGs to ignore the petition, saying that citing the project in Mahanga is apt, especially as the place had been rid of education for over two decades.
The plea was contained in a letter jointly signed by a concerned elder, Nuhu Muhammad and the youth leader of the community, Abdullahi Ibrahim, and made available to newsmen in Jos.
According to the letter, the Fulani leaders said that shelving the plan amounts to serving the narrow ethno-fascist and ethnic cleansing agenda of the Berom political and traditional elite.
The letter, therefore, called on the office of the SDGs to ignore in its entirety the contents of the petition which, according to them, was aimed at retarding the attainment of education by the Fulani community.
“The Fulani as an integral part of the Nigerian community deserves to benefit from this universal goal,”
“Presently members of the community have to trek several kilometers through hostile communities to access health care services.
“We would also seize this opportunity to restate our faith in the capacity of the Plateau State House of Assembly to treat the said motion in a fair and dispassionate manner, despite its sentiment laden nature.
“The House of Assembly has always been a committed partner of Governor Simon Lalong’s Crusade for Peace through equity, fairness and justice to all.
“We thus expect it not to allow itself to be derailed in that noble quest by failed political opportunists trying to take us back to dark days of anarchy on the Plateau,” the letter stated.
