Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, who turns 79 on March 5, has revealed how he spent two days with some members of Taliban sect.
Former president stated that seeking the best solution to the issue of world insecurity forced him to do this.
Obasanjo was speaking at the 2016 national summit and 4th international colloquium organised by the Centre for Human Security at the sidelines of his birthday programme.
The politician lamented the spread of the insurgency saying that the situation would have been under control if religious leaders had not failed in their responsibility of instilling the right values into their followers.
He said: “I went to Syria when I was president of Nigeria. One of the places I was taken to was a refugee camp where those refugees have been since 1948, nothing has been done to them. How do you want their children to think?
“In Norway, I met some members of the Taliban. We spent two days together. They are in the second echelon of the leadership, I was told the top ones will not come out and when we listened to them, we are bound to say yes, they can get something better than they were getting.
“If we do not get it right from home, we have started losing the battle. Communalism is going down the drain. There is popular saying that four eyes brought a child to the world and 200 eyes nurtured the child. But where are the 200 eyes of the community?
“We do everything with impunity. We have been dealing with issues beyond us. We ought to prevent it. Prevention is even cheaper than cure.
Can we prevent? Can prevention be part or best of our solution? We can also see where things are going down. We have home or houses, what happened at home?
What do we teach? Moral training starts from home. Home is very important, but parents do many wrongs.”
Obasanjo urged the global community to enable fairness in the fight against insurgency, adding that is only way to uphold peace.
The Taliban is an Islamic fundamentalist political movement in Afghanistan currently waging war (an insurgency, or jihad) within that country.
Nigeria is currently suffering from the Boko Haram terrorists, who despite being technically defeated remain active.
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