The International Organisation for Peace Building and Social Justice, has held a three-day meeting in Gombe State, Nigeria on the need to promote peaceful co-existence in the North-East region.
PERISCOPE NIGERIA reports that the workshop was geared towards ensuring peace, safety which would entrench the much deserved sustainable development.
Our correspondent reports that PSJ is a Non-Governmental Organisation which aims to transform deep-rooted narratives that undermine peace.
Speaking on Thursday, at Rainbow Hotel in Gombe, North-East Coordinator of PSJ, Naimatullahi Mohammed, urged participants to de-emphasise religious and tribal inclinations, harping more on the essence of humanity.
Mohammed said, “We want to bring people together regardless of the ethnicity, religion, culture, and whatever happens we just want to believe in humanity, we are working with human beings. We want to pursue the fact that we are humans further than the fact that we are Christians or a Muslim so we are one.”
Mohammed stressed that it could be achieved through advocacy, adding that “to make social justice work, we need to advocate through the youths because they are the strongest part of the country. We are the ones to promote whatsoever that will bring a positive impact to the country so our main aim is to put the knowledge into the youth’s mindset.”
Speaking further the Regional Coordinator added, “We want them to believe that they can do it because change begins with you and I and we have a quote that says peace is everything because without peace everything is nothing so i think with a gradual process of spread the knowledge around advocating and passing the information to those with few knowledge about what peace and social justice will promote this.
On his part, Cliff Stanley, Gombe State Coordinator of PSJ expressed enthusiasm about the initiative in North-East, noting that the engagement will ensure the required peace and social justice.
While lauding PSJ for bring the engagement to Gombe State said, “My joy is we have the state coordinators fully represented here and for us Gombe to be able to host because we have other states bigger than us in the North-East.”
“If we look at the peculiarity of Gombe it will be different from Taraba and Borno States so the workshop is for us to share ideas and for us to see where the injustice is happening and then we can be able to address them and then take it up with the government. It’s an eye opener knowing about what is happening in all the six states in Nigeria because we know that the North-East has the eyes of the world because of certain things happening,” Stanley added.
Enumerating the challenges in the promotion of peace Stanley added, “Here we are faced with insecurities especially the Boko Haram insurgencies. We have those who are presently in Internally Displaced Persons camps even though a lot of International Non-Governmental Organisations and other Civil Organisations are helping these people and we are trying to look at it from the recovery to resilience.”
Stanley noted that the state coordinators and stakeholders were expected to implement the lessons learned bearing in mind the peculiarities of states, “we are going to engage them because the approach we will use in Gombe will be different from other states like Borno because Gombe is the most peaceful state in the North-East, so we will look at the approaches and try to look at the government policies and we try to look at how the budget affects the youths of the state.We are still going to talk to young people because we know young people’s predicament of young people and inspire some of them to go back and be an ambassador in their own community,” he added.
Also speaking, Coordinator for PSJ Strategic Team, Emmanuel Ezra, harped the essence of peace, saying that it would yield deserved development.
Ezra said, “No development comes to a Nation where there’s no peace and where the voices of the poor are not heard and are marginalised. We will speak truth to power, as well as defender of the voiceless and even in terms of gender equity and the main target is at the end every Nigerian will be proud to say that i am a Nigerian.”
While calling for collaboration to achieve its mandate, Ezra added, “We are calling on CSOs Civil Society Organisations in Nigeria to partner with us in this movement because we cannot do it alone.”
