Katsina State Governor, Aminu Masari, on Tuesday, held a closed-door meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja.
The meeting focused on the security and other socio-economic developments of Katsina state.
Masari revealed this when he spoke to journalists at the end of the meeting held at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
He stressed the need for states in the North-West to work together in a bid to check the security challenges in the region.
He said: “I think what is most important for us to succeed in fighting these bandits is for all of us, the states, especially the North-West states to take the pains and work together to make sure that we block all the loopholes
“But if one state has a policy and another has a different one, certainly the bandits will always be moving from one state to another.
“Luckily enough, we are already working closely with states that border us, like Nasarawa and Niger, to bring the problem to a manageable and tolerable level.”
The governor also dismissed reports that one of his commissioners who died last week was killed by bandits, saying the incident was purely an assassination case.
Masari added: “The incident we had last week had nothing to do with banditry attack. It was purely an assassination by unknown killers, which the police and other security agencies are working round the clock to unravel.
“My commissioner was killed by an unknown assassin and not a single pin was stolen in his house. You could see that this was a pure crime that has to be fully investigated for us to know the root causes and why.”
The governor stressed that the state was recording progress in the ongoing fight against bandits and other criminals.
“I think if we are talking about banditry, certainly we have seen some improvement; we cannot say normalcy has returned but there is an improvement.
“When we had a comparative analysis before the issuance of the security containment order, what we saw in three months when we compared, was a drastic drop of over 100 percent in terms of the rate of kidnappings, killings, and their associated crimes with banditry.
“So, the incident we had last week had nothing to do with banditry,” he concluded.
