The militant group, Boko Haram, is planning to bomb the homes of VIPs, and not the residence of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, the VP’s office said Thursday.
The clarification came after media reports quoted the presidency’s initial claim that Mr. Osinbajo’s home was targeted.
The vice president’s spokesperson, Laolu Akande, said that claim, sourced by journalists from the text of a press briefing after Thursday’s National Economic Council, was a typographical error.
“A press briefing note circulated today by the Secretariat of the National Economic Council, NEC, contains a typo on the very last line of the last paragraph.
“That paragraph should read ‘The Vice President also disclosed that security reports has it that scavengers are now being prepared by insurgents to dump refuse laden with bombs in the houses of VIPs’.
“The last line erroneously says ‘in the house of the Vice President’,” Mr. Akande said in a statement after the media reports.
The earlier text said intelligence had confirmed that Mr. Osinbajo’s residence was being targeted for bombing.
During Mr. Osinbajo’s recent tour of Adamawa and Borno states, two suicide bombers had blown themselves up outside a village in Maiduguri while he was in Borno.
At the NEC meeting Thursday, governors of Yobe, Borno, Taraba, Kaduna, Gombe, Plateau and Bauchi took turns to brief the council about the security situation in the states.
On Boko Haram, the governors of Yobe and Borno States said five local government areas of the two states were still under the control of the militants.
They called for increased military deployment and provision of sophisticated military equipment to those areas.
Vice President Osinbajo regretted that the insurgency had affected the economic life of the Northeast and Nigeria, and called on the council to speak as a team to put pressure on military chiefs to increase their effort in fighting insurgency.
“There should be increase in sensitization and education channels like radio, television,” he said.
On cattle rustling and banditry, the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, disclosed that most of the cattle rustlers are in Kumuku national park. He said if the situation was not properly handled, it could result to another Sambisa forest.
