{"id":7218,"date":"2018-01-15T23:10:56","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T23:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=7218"},"modified":"2018-01-15T23:10:56","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T23:10:56","slug":"what-transpired-between-osinbajo-and-ortom-vps-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=7218","title":{"rendered":"What transpired between Osinbajo and Ortom &#8211; VP&#8217;s Office"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By<strong> Laolu Akande,\u00a0<\/strong>Senior Special Assistant on Media &amp; Publicity to the President<br \/>\nVice President Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, was shocked by a news report ostensibly quoting the Benue State Governor Sam Ortom as saying that the VP was warned of the savage\u00a0and inhumane killings by alleged herdsmen in Logo and Guma local government areas which took place on the 1st of January 2018.<br \/>\nAlthough the Vice President, Prof. Osinbajo, does not believe that the Governor could ever have said so, it will be a terrible falsehood to suggest that the VP was ever informed by the Governor or anyone else of the imminence of the killing of citizens of our country in those or any other local governments in Benue State.<br \/>\nGovernor Ortom wrote to the Vice President, then Acting President, on 7th June 2017 protesting a newspaper publication where the leadership of\u00a0Miyetti Allah was reported to have stated that it was opposed to the Open Grazing Prohibition law of\u00a0 the State and that they\u00a0would \u00a0mobilize to resist\u00a0 the law. The Miyetti Allah had written to the Vice President on the 5th of June 2017 on the same law protesting several sections of the law. The Governor went on to say that the leadership of Miyetti Allah should be arrested because they used words such as \u201cwicked, obnoxious and repressive,\u201d to describe the law, and because these were \u201cutterances that are capable of undermining the peace&#8230;\u201d<br \/>\nThe Vice President subsequently met with the Governor, discussed the matter and the security situation in the State\u00a0and\u00a0then ordered law enforcement agencies to be\u00a0on the alert to prevent any attacks or violence. This was in June 2017!<br \/>\nIn the said letter written by the Governor, there was no mention of any threat to any specific one of the 23 local governments of Benue State, so the best the law enforcement agencies could do even then was to await information or intelligence of an imminent attack. None came.\u00a0 Since then the VP has held several meetings with the Benue State Governor, including a visit to the State\u00a0on the 6th of September, last year at the behest of Mr. President during the tragic floods in the state last year. At all such meetings, the Vice President discussed the\u00a0security situation of the State with the Governor.<br \/>\nFollowing that, the then Acting President convened a major national security retreat which was attended by all State Governors, service chiefs and heads of security agencies. The Retreat featured very detailed discussions on the herdsmen\/ farmers\u2019 clashes.<br \/>\nTo the best of our knowledge, neither Governor Ortom nor the Federal Government was aware of the imminence of the cowardly attack on\u00a0Logo and Guma on the 1st of January, and therefore any suggestion that the President or the Vice President ignored the State Governor\u2019s warning is both absolutely false and certainly misleading.<br \/>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7053\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7053\" style=\"width: 232px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7053\" src=\"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/2018-01-09-23-30-13-.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"232\" height=\"130\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7053\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Samuel Ortom<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Laolu Akande,\u00a0Senior Special Assistant on Media &amp; Publicity to the President Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, was shocked by a news report ostensibly quoting the Benue State Governor Sam Ortom as saying that the VP was warned of the savage\u00a0and inhumane killings by alleged herdsmen in Logo and Guma local government areas which took [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":7219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}