Boko Haram, ISWAP largely dissipated, on ‘their last legs” — Minister
The Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris has disclosed that the terrorist groups, Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have been largely dissipated and “on their last legs.” He said before, they were holding territories especially in the northeast part of Nigeria, local governments, towns and cities, but now, it’s […]
Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris
The Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris has disclosed that the terrorist groups, Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have been largely dissipated and “on their last legs.”
He said before, they were holding territories especially in the northeast part of Nigeria, local governments, towns and cities, but now, it’s no longer the case as they are crushing them, adding that they no longer have the kind of force that they had at the beginning.
“I mean, they’ve been largely dissipated. They’ve ran into the bushes coming to take some soft targets. We’re not saying that we have 100% exterminated Boko Haram. But I think that we’ve degraded Boko Haram significantly for them to pose any kind of significant challenge for us as a country,” he said.
The Information Minister, who stated these during an interview with France 24, also denied the allegation that the Nigerian government formed the Lakurawa group to aid France in fighting Niger.
Speaking on Nigerians becoming poorer than they are in the last 10 years, Idris pointed out that since President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came to power, there has been some upward movement, saying, “The 1st quarter of 2024, we saw the GDP moving from 2.3 per cent to 3.84 and we are already begin to see indication that it will go further up, so yes we have this decline in the last decade but also seen some movement of upward and I think it is getting better.”
Reacting to the case of four West African countries recently experiencing coups, the minister dissuaded any fear saying that Nigeria has fairly strong democratic institutions.
“We don’t have that fear; we have fairly strong democratic institutions in our country. We’ve been running a democracy now. In the next two months, we will be 26 years old. So fairly we are getting stronger, the institutions are becoming more institutionalized and we don’t have that fear. Of course, coups are not desirable. We don’t want them to happen anywhere. We encourage people to go with democratic that is the way to go.”