A banker-friend of mine once related his ordeal at the hands of the Nigeria Police Force to me. He was passing by the Oshodi Bridge in the afternoon. It was a few years before the rehabilitation of the area by the Fashola administration. On this particular afternoon, a robbery or other disturbance had apparently occurred prior to his arrival in the area and police patrol vans had been deployed, in the usual manner, to the area to arrest the likely culprits long after the real culprits must have disappeared.
A banker-friend of mine once related his ordeal at the hands of the Nigeria Police Force to me. He was passing by the Oshodi Bridge in the afternoon. It was a few years before the rehabilitation of the area by the Fashola administration. On this particular afternoon, a robbery or other disturbance had apparently occurred prior to his arrival in the area and police patrol vans had been deployed, in the usual manner, to the area to arrest the likely culprits long after the real culprits must have disappeared.
Even though he was wearing a suit, having just closed from his internship job at a bank near the area, one of the police vans accosted him and despite his showing them his ID card and other evidence to exculpate him, the officers at the back of the van bundled him into the back of the van and promptly drove off toward their police station.
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To cut the story short as they say, it was not until a few Naira notes exchanged hands that the policemen let him go – and returned his ID card and other documents (which they had seized) to him.
There are many things one could say about assertion of human rights, refusal to bribe the policemen, and even suing the scoundrel-officers to court but there are other scenarios one can equally contemplate like a bullet-riddled corpse dumped along the highway by God-only-knows-who or a battered “criminal” appearing on Crime Fighters, with no one to buy his protestations of innocence but his family and close friends. That is another way the story could have ended for my friend. Apparently he wasn’t too wowed by either deadly prospect and he chose the easy way out.
This and more was the reason why the NEF’s recent announcement to drag the immediate-past Chief of Army, Lt.-Gen. Azubuike Ihejirika (retd.) to the ICC over the extra-judicial killings at Bama and Giwa Barracks struck a chord with me.
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In his own reply on Sunday 19 January 2014, Ihejirika was reported by the media to have carpeted the statement released through Prof. Ango Abdullahi as ill-conceived and probably based on misinformation. He is further reported to have said “rather than instituting a court case against him, the elders should be thanking him, other service chiefs and his men for their contributions to restoration of peace in the region if they were really elders.”
The case of Borno state is a classic case of the saying that when two elephants fight, the grass suffers. The Jonathan administration’s tongue-in-cheek implementation of the report of the Presidential Committee on Dialogue and Peaceful Resolution of the Conflict in the North has led to an escalation instead of a containment of the violence with increasing number of innocent civilians losing their lives in the process.
The lines between Boko Haram militants and innocent civilians killed during offensives by the erstwhile JTF and the new Nigeria Army 7 Division grows thinner with each passing day. And while the Islamic militants, going by Boko Haram or whatever names, cannot be exonerated for this sorry state of affairs, Ihejirika and the Nigeria Army forces he ordered into the area to suppress the insurgency are equally guilty through acts of omission or commission of the extra-judicial killings that occured.
It hardly helps that in the court of Nigerian public opinion, all it needs for one to become a “criminal” is for one’s dead body to end up at the end of a police or military personnel’s rifle during a “raid.” The Baga and Bama massacres in Borno state suffice as examples.
Even as majority opinion in the south remains decidedly anti-FG-Boko Haram dialogue, historical antecedents, old and recent, have clearly shown that simply matching fire with more fire to combat insurgencies especially of the religious variety hardly work unless complemented with dialogue. It is in this wise that Jonathan should disregard the pressure from the hawks among his advisers and ensure full implementation of the report of the Presidential Committee on Dialogue and Peaceful Resolution of the Conflict in the North if for no other reason than to forestall the loss of innocent northern residents caught in the cross-fire through no fault of their own.
Further to the first call to the Federal Government by Human Rights Watch in 2009 to stop extra-judicial killings related to the Boko Haram insurgency, the Jonathan administration should remember that with each innocent man wrongly arrested and detained as a Boko Haram militant, with each young man that becomes a fresh orphan due to the extra-judicial killing of his parents by the military, a potential recruit lies in wait for Islamic fundamentalists in the area, with the potential for the continued escalation of a mindless and bloody conflict that need never have happened in the first place.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of SaharaReporters
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