The Director-General of the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR) says inclusion of citizens in the governance and socio-economic life of the country can go a long way toward ending conflicts.
Dr Bakut Bakut made the statement while answering questions at the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) Forum in Abuja on Sunday.
The academic argued that the dynamics of global changes in the environment and the world had made individuals, groups and nations to become constrained.
“They are being opened up and at the same time, they are being challenged. Then information communications technology comes in, making interaction very easy.
“Individuals who have negative motives decide to take advantage of space for communication and reel out hate speech messages,
They reel out radicalism and terrorism ideas and because of poverty, unemployment, ignorance and many issues that are in our environment people feel that they are exploited and not included in governance.
“They feel they do not have a voice and that some of them are taken advantage of by either politicians or religious clerics or whatever so that they bring issues of ethnicity and religion and begin to fight for public resources – who controls what?
“You now find out that this is not just in Nigeria but it is something that is happening across the world.
According to Bakut, it is a global issue and so we have to look at it in that context but that is not to say that there will be no end to it.
“What we do is to try and make people understand that the challenges are basically socio-economic in nature.”
He underscored the need to develop a strategy to reduce poverty, injustice and unemployment.
“As long as we fail to do any of these things, then we still have problems.
“Conflicts are a result of misunderstanding or disagreement over values, or over some other things that are there.
“So we need to make sure that we get to a level whereby, individuals feel that they are welcome and not just welcome but also accepted.”
