Stop funding terrorists, stop paying ransom, Buhari tells African leaders; meets Obasanjo at AU summit

President Muhammadu Buhari has urged his fellow African leaders to collaborate to stop ransom payments and all forms of financing for terrorism networks on the continent. He spoke at the opening ceremony of the African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where he fraternized with his former colleagues, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Abdulsalam Abubakar, the retired General who birthed the 4^th Republic democracy in Nigeria after a long lull of military dictatorship. Obasanjo and Buhari would be meeting for the first time after the former’s scathing letter to Buhari in which he advised him not to seek re-election in the 2019 election.

The leader of Africa’s most populous nation called for the creation of a continental database on terrorist groups and a halt to all flows of funds to them as part of a comprehensive approach to fighting the threat.

“Concerted efforts must be made to not only dismantle the network between transnational organized crimes and terrorist organizations, but also to block the payment of ransom to terrorist groups,” Buhari told African leaders at a meeting in Addis Ababa, according to a government statement.

Boko Haram, a terrorist group with ties to Islamic State militants, has sought to impose a version of Sharia law in an eight-year campaign of killings in northeastern Nigeria. The group has taken hostages in the past, but the government has denied paying ransoms for their release. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al-Shabaab, another al-Qaeda linked group blamed for an Oct. 14 truck bombing in the Somali capital of Mogadishu that killed more than 300 people, have raised millions of dollars from ransom payments.