CITY NEWS Bwari crisis: Minister sues for peace

Fire razes house again in Abaji

The Minister of State for Mines and Steel Development, Abubakar Bawa Bwari, has sued for peace, while sympathizing with victims of the recent crisis in Bwari town.

The minister, in a statement he personally signed yesterday, urged the Gbagyi speaking people of Bwari in particular and the FCT in general not to forget their hospitality and pleasant nature.

He said violence does not solve anything, therefore, there was need to learn to resolve issues peacefully, rather than violently.

“What happened in Bwari during the last festivities therefore, at a period when people were supposed to be celebrating Christmas and anticipating the coming new year, was morally reprehensible and completely at variance with our culture and our religious leanings.

“In the history of Bwari, and in fact that of the Gbagyi speaking areas that were excised to form the Federal Capital Territory, one thing that has always been consistent is the generous nature of our people, their basic honesty and decency. I am sure this played a very big role in the decision to bring the federal capital to our ancestral home,” he said.

The minister said he was appalled at the level of violence he witnessed when he visited the scenes of the mayhem.

“Violence is never right whatever the level of provocation. We are a nation of law and anyone who takes the law into their hands or does anything to jeopardise the peace of the land deserves our collective condemnation,” he added. Barely five days after a fire razed a four-bedroom flat in Abaji, another inferno destroyed a house on Saturday evening in the town.

A neighbour simply identified as Salihu, said the fire incident occurred at about 4:37p.m. while the owner of the house was away.

He said children were playing with matches in a room when a calendar caught fire.

He said the mother of the children was at a wedding when the incident happened.

“I was standing in front of my house when I saw thick smoke billowing from my neighbour’s house and I quickly raised an alarm,” he said.

He said when he rushed to the house he discovered that two rooms in the compound were already on fire and he joined some neighbours to fetch water to put out the fire.

He said fire fighters arrived the scene late, after the two rooms had already burnt down, adding that nobody was injured in the inferno.