The leadership
of International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule of Law
notes with gravest concerns the uncontrollable and systematic killing in
recent times+ of Igbos in Nigeria particularly in the northern parts of
the country.
Less
than two months ago, over four dozens of Igbo youths who are in their
prime stages of socio-economic productivity were both killed
extra-judicially and murdered in cold blood by the Nigeria Police Force
and dumped into the Ezu River of Death in Anambra State, Southeast
Nigeria.
As
we speak, the outcome of the sampling autopsy, as seemingly manipulated
as its process appears, which was carried out by selected government
bodies, is still being awaited many days, if not weeks after it was
concluded and reportedly handed to the federal government committee in
Abuja, Nigeria. While the snippets of the scientific exercise,
corroborated by a top government official in the State, are already in
the public domain, clearly showing that the victims were gun-shot,
bruised, suffocated, etc, by their captors while in their custodies, we
have every reason to suspect that the result of the sampling autopsy is
being re-worked on to extricate the culprits and shift the blames to God
knows angle.
As if the forgoing atrocious act was not enough, up to 108 Nigerian citizens of Southeast extraction popularly called Igbo tribe, including 59 passengers who bought tickets and boarded a modern luxury bus belonging to the Gobison Motors Limited were on Monday evening, 18th day of March, 2013, massacred at the New Road Luxury Park in the Sabon Gari(non-native zone) city of Kano State, Northwest Nigeria(elomba reports 20-03-2013). According to confirmed accounts from the crime scene, corroborated by the Kano State Police Command, a strange Volkswagen golf car drove into the Park at about 4:00pm on the said date and parked in between two luxury buses belonging to the Gobisom Motors Limited, which were fully loaded with passengers, and exploded, killing all the passengers on board.
As if the forgoing atrocious act was not enough, up to 108 Nigerian citizens of Southeast extraction popularly called Igbo tribe, including 59 passengers who bought tickets and boarded a modern luxury bus belonging to the Gobison Motors Limited were on Monday evening, 18th day of March, 2013, massacred at the New Road Luxury Park in the Sabon Gari(non-native zone) city of Kano State, Northwest Nigeria(elomba reports 20-03-2013). According to confirmed accounts from the crime scene, corroborated by the Kano State Police Command, a strange Volkswagen golf car drove into the Park at about 4:00pm on the said date and parked in between two luxury buses belonging to the Gobisom Motors Limited, which were fully loaded with passengers, and exploded, killing all the passengers on board.
A
modern luxury bus in Nigeria carries 59 passengers outside attachment,
while the old model type popularly called akpuluka-Brazil, which is not
much in the transport usage nowadays carries 42 passengers outside
attachment. The explosion, according to the same accounts, led to
further explosions, which affected other three luxury buses belonging to
Ezenwata Transport Limited and Chiemzie Transport Limited, said to be
scantly loaded with passengers.
The
said New Road Luxury Park is located at the heart of the Igbo area in
Kano State called Sabon Gari. In the times past, the area, regarded as
an outcast by the host Hausa-Fulani, was given to early Igbo traders in
the State to live and suffer. But, years later, the area was transformed
to the envy of the host communities including the present and
successive governments in the State. The area is now the busiest and one
of the most costly sub-cities in Kano State and a melting pot for over
3million Igbos resident in Kano State.
Thirty
seven-year-old severely burnt Emmanuel Bassey lies in a hospital bed at
Murtala Mohammed Specialist hospital in northern Nigeria’s largest city
of Kano on March 19, 2013. Two suicide bombers rammed their car into a
bus loaded with passengers at the bus station, killing at least 22
people and injuring 65 others, the following explosions burnt five
buses.
While
it is possible that the number of Igbo citizens, who were massacred in
the bombing orchestrated by the northern politicians’ backed violent
Islamist groups, is in their hundreds as evidenced by other eyewitnesses
accounts including those who observed the evacuation of the dead bodies
and the injured, the Kano State Police Commissioner, one Musa Daura, as
expected, claimed that 22 people died and 65 injured in different
categories. It is recalled that we had on 18th day of January, 2012, in
our letter to President Goodluck Jonathan, protested against the endless
massacre of Igbo citizens in Nigeria with specific reference to the
massacre of estimated 510 Igbos in the Boko-Haram related violence
between 2011 and second week of January 2012 alone.
In
the said letter of ours, we made far reaching recommendations including
the need for geopolitical equity in the promotion and posting of senior
police officers from Superintendents of Police to Deputy Inspectors
General of Police. We observed then, which is still the order of the day
in the NPF, that the police-citizen protection ratio in Nigeria was
very high for northern Muslim citizens and Southwest (Yoruba) citizens
and very low for Southeast citizens (Igbos). We also observed that the
northern and southern minorities now called South-south and
North-central Geopolitical Zones of Nigeria (northern Christians) are
more protected in the hands of the Nigerian security forces led by the
Nigeria Police Force than the Igbos or the people of Southeast Nigeria.
We
discovered in the course of our investigation into the Nigeria Police
Force rankings, promotions and postings that there existed and still
exists an age-long suppressive policy being visited against the Igbo
senior police officers tended and still tend to shut them down from
ascending premium positions and postings.
For
instance, there were and still are tea makers and tea drinkers in the
police command cadre. There, also, were and still are commanders and the
commanded in same. It was on the strength of that gross lopsidedness
that we prayed President Jonathan to issue a presidential proclamation
to the effect that the promotion and posting of the 37 States and the
FCT Commissioners of Police should be based on six geopolitical zones of
Nigeria; that is to say 6 State CPs should come from each geopolitical
zone.
Also
where there are 90 State and non-State CPs in Nigeria, each zone should
get 15; where there are 240 DCPs/ACPs, each zone should get 40; where
there are 24/30 AIGs, each zone should get 4/5; and where there are 6 or
7 DIGs, each zone should get at least one DIG. This, we believe, should
be extended to the other branches of Nigeria’s security forces as time
passes by. The foregoing is still our position till date.
The
noble reason for the far reaching recommendation of ours stated above
is not farfetched. Firstly, the NPF is the largest public security and
law enforcement organization in Nigeria peopled by approximately
371,000. Other security forces put together are not up to the size of
the NPF. Secondly, by law and norm, the NPF is the chief protector of
Nigeria’s democracy and her citizenry and as such, the most populous and
powerful public security organization in the country; taking up to 60%
of Nigeria’s real defense/security expenditures both in terms of
recurrent and capital spending.
Thirdly,
the recommendation, if judiciously implemented, will address the
glaring police-citizen protection ratio gap between the Igbo citizens
and their counterparts particularly northern Muslims’ partners.
Fourthly, absence of same number of Igbo State ACPs, DCPs, CPs, AIGs and
DIGs with their northwest, northeast and southwest counterparts, in the
top police management or security meetings in Nigeria put the Igbo race
in a perpetual state of insecurity and other unsafe conditions.
Because
the 37 States and the FCT Police Commands in Nigeria as well as their
Area and Zonal Commands are dominated by ACPs, DCPs, CPs and AIGs from
our other partners’ zones, Igbo residents and communities particularly
in the northern parts of Nigeria are utterly denied early warning,
preventive and hazard mitigation security measures or interventions by
the country’s security forces led by the NPF. It has been severally
alleged that during killings targeted at the Igbos particularly in the
northern parts of Nigeria, official and private phone numbers of the
areas’ CPs usually go off, but hours after the killings they come back.
Even when their numbers are not off, responding to them at that point in
time is an act of impossibility.
They
usually emerge after the killings to evacuate the dead and the injured
and to grant press interviews so as to mangle the causality figures.
This is entirely the opposite when Hausa-Fulanis resident in the south
are occasionally threatened or perceived to have been threatened. Prompt
and effective security measures put in place in Anambra State and other
parts of the Southeast Nigeria following the Monday’s Kano massacre is a
clear case in point.
It
is on account of these apparent injustices against the Igbo race in
Nigeria that we hold that the Igbos are the most unprotected and hated
tribe in Nigeria. The race is also not safe in the hands of the
Nigeria’s security forces including the Nigeria Police Force. Despite
the fact that its youth population is very enterprising, non-violent,
tolerant and law-abiding, yet the promising population, especially the
males are the most hunted by the security agencies in Nigeria.
The
Igbos are akin to African Americans and Hispanics (Mexican Americans)
in the United States who are always gone after by the US law enforcement
agents with a false belief that they are more lawless than the so
called white Americans. Out of about 2.3 million prisons and correction
centers’ inmates reportedly in the U.S., as at 2009/2010, the former are
in majority.
In
Nigeria, it is possible that out of the country’s reported 54, 0000
inmates, greater percent of them are the Igbos; out of those killed in
the Boko-Haram insurgency in the country since 2009, Igbos are
indisputably in majority; out of those killed in the country’s
ethno-religious killings since 2001, the race had majority of its sons
and daughters murdered; out of those killed extra-judicially by security
forces in the course of fighting the Boko-Haram insurgency, it is most
likely that Igbos take a commanding lead; out of those taken into police
custody and murdered, Igbos may most likely be in majority; and out of
those killed across the country at police roadblocks, the Igbos may be
in majority as well.
We
challenge the Nigeria’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and the NPF to
prove us wrong by publishing credible crime statistics/reports detailing
the geopolitical origins of the victims including the country’s prisons
and correction centers’ inmates.
The
Igbos are also the most hunted in the areas of pre-crime checks by
Nigeria’s security forces particularly the law enforcement agencies like
the NPF. For instance, an average northerner who owns a car or
motorcycle; bears a machete or dagger or single/double barrel gun, etc,
is free from the prance of the law enforcement agents. He can drive his
car or ride his motorcycle for years without authorized papers, yet he
is not a law breaker; whereas any Igbo citizen who nears any of these is
an express candidate of summary death and extortion in the hands of the
law enforcement agents particularly the officers and men of the
NPF(Nigeria Police Force).
This
princely treatment is to a large extent, extended to the citizens of
the Southwest Nigeria. Politically, Igbos are endangered too. For a mere
fact that President Goodluck Jonathan, considered as a half Igbo, is
present Nigeria’s President, has irked the Northeast, Northwest and
Southwest political gladiators, who have ruled Nigeria in turn until
2010 when it moved to the South-south zone of Nigeria.
Today,
they have deployed both political, information and human warfare to
return the country’s presidency to their destructive status quo.
Dangerous and anti-Igbo emancipation moves have been initiated by the
trio of political power mongers by way of the so-called political
alliances using Igbo’s political tea makers and flute blowers to
catapult our great race back to the political Stone Age and enslavement.
Information warfare against the Igbo race is also directed against it
from left, right and center, particularly from its Southwest partners
The
Igbo political clowns and failed leaders are celebrated and canonized
by the Southwest media, whereas great achievers and successful political
leadership transformers from our great zone are condemned and destroyed
by same.
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