Onaiyekan to FG: Liberate all abducted persons

Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, John Cardinal Onaiyekan has urged the Federal Government to ensure the release of other persons abducted by the Boko Haram insurgents.

Speaking during a pre-conference media briefing for a 3-day World Religious Leaders Conference yesterday in Abuja, Onaiyekan said the job was not yet done with the release of 21 out of the over 200 Chibok schoolgirls abducted in April, 2014.

“As far as the issue of Chibok girls is concerned, they’re over 200 girls of a school. But we’ve heard that many people had been abducted before them and even after them. People think that once the Chibok girls are back, everything is over but it may not be like that.

“We thank God they’re back in whatever condition, though we can’t say the job has been done. Sometimes we talk as if the fault belongs to government. We can’t say the Boko Haram insurgents are faceless individuals. I don’t believe in that, we must blame the insurgents for abducting the girls in the first place,” he said.

Speaking on the essence of the religious conference, which opens today in Abuja with the theme ‘Faith Works Africa: Partnership for Peace and Prosperity,’ Onaiyekan said the idea was to bring religious communities in Africa for peace and prosperity.

“We all know that poverty is very bad, but war and conflict are worst,” he said.

Representative of the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, Malam Ibrahim A. Jega said the conference was holding against the backdrop of the successes recorded in the area of security in Nigeria.

Also speaking, the Secretary General of the Religions for Peace International, which is the organizer of the event, Dr William Vendley, said governments all over the world discovered that without religious communities, they could not achieve their purpose of existence, which was why they decided to engage religious leaders on the way forward.

He said the organization was doing everything within its powers to discourage production of weapons used during wars, saying “human race cannot kill itself.”