HOW I AVERTED FULANI- YORUBA ETHNIC WAR IN KWARA --- ILORIN EMIR

From KEHINDE AKINPELU, Ilorin

The Emir of Ilorin, Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari has revealed how he averted a Yoruba versus Fulani ethnic war that could have thrown the country into a major crisis about two months ago.
  The Emir who made the revelation on Thursday at the  Annual National Delegate Conference of the Ilorin Emirate Descendants Progressive Union (IEDPU) at Fufu, headquarters of Ilorin South Local Government Area said the war could have started off from his domain before it was averted.
 He disclosed that the clash between the Yoruba people and the Fulani herdsmen at Alapa area in Asa local government in the Ilorin Emirate was to trigger off the war before his intervention.
 The clash which was said to have begun with a fight between a Fulani cattle rearer and a Yoruba man in the Alapa area eventually degenerated into a more dangerous violence in which many people lost their lives in the area.
 The Emir said that some people alleged that after the death of a Yoruba man in the Fulani/Yoruba man clash, members of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC), a Yorruba militant group were mobilised to attack the Fulani people in the area the following day.
He said that it was further alleged that after the OPC members killed many of the Fulani herdsmen, their wives and children they carried away their cattle and disposed them off in Ibadan.
  The Monarch disclosed that this allegation made a group of militants from the far north of the country to mobilise themselves and prepared to come to Ilorin to avenge the killings of their Fulani kinsmen.
 He said that when he heard of this plan he quickly intervened by explaining to the people that the progenitor of the head of Ilorin Emirate is from the Sokoto sultanate and that both the Fulani and Yoruba people in the Emirate are a one people cohabitating without discrimination.
 Sulu-Gambari disclosed that what he said discouraged the people to go ahead with their vengeance mission and thanked God that his  intervention worked saying the reprisal attack would have aggravated security problem of the country.
 He said that the remaining Fulani herdsmen who have been displaced after their huts were burnt were put in a camp where he volunteered N1m for their feeding alongside the assistance the Kwara state government rendered.
 The monarch who described Kwara state as the gateway between the north and South west parts of the country said if Ilorin, the state capital or the state as a whole is engulfed in violence the whole country is in crisis.
 He called on the people of his Ilorin community not to encourage violence by discriminating against one another on the ethnic basis saying they all came from somewhere else to live in the community and that they had long become brothers and sisters.
The Emir commended the leadership of the IEDPU lead under the presidency of Saka Yusuf for the achievement recorded under its tenure.
 Also speaking at the occasion, chairman of Ilorin South Local Government Council, Usman Magaji praised the IEDPU on its achievements but urged the union to work towards summounting the challenge of unemployment among the people of the emirate.
   In his remarks, Yusuf, the national president of the IEDPU thanked the emir, governments of the five local council in the emirate and people of the emirate in general for their support to the union in its effort to promote development of the emirate.