By
Kenechukwu Obiezu
Renowned
international human rights watchdog, Amnesty International’s recently released a
report damningly found that Nigeria’s security agencies had systematically
and extra-judicially gunned down one hundred and fifty members of the
Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), whose leader remains
incarcerated, in defiance of multiple orders for his bail by national and
international courts, and by a government which poorly continues to
disguise its monumental discomfort with the rule of law.
Nigeria’s descent
into a land of many and geographically-diverse killing fields has been steady decades
now. President after President beginning with Olusegun Obasanjo under
who security agencies fell on Choba, Rivers State and Zaki Biam in Benue
State, to the current administration which let loose security agencies in
Anambra State, Kaduna State and in other states to crush supposed secession
attempts by the IPOB and an alleged terrorist group in the IMN, have
cited threats to the national security and sovereign integrity of the country
to justify repeated ruthless deployment of force done with scant
regards to human rights, the rule of law and the rules of engagement.
Most gullible and
impressionable Nigerians increasingly afraid for their lives and
security in a country of mounting insecurity and scandalous corruption have
allowed themselves to be swayed by the government’s well–prepared propaganda
and party lines into believing that all those whose blood have flowed were
indeed terrorists whose places in the supposedly sane society of Nigeria had
become untenable and highly dangerous. Add the rampaging killings by the
terrorist Boko Haram sect and criminal Fulani herdsmen to the equation plus the
government’s anemic and even comedic response and reaction thereto and you have
a witch’s brew of mindless slaughter of innocent Nigerians. President
Muhammadu Buhari has done little to help calm the frazzled nerves
of Nigerians and international human rights monitors who have
remained alarmed at the killing sprees of security agencies in Nigeria.
Indeed, some of his
comments issued in defiance to groups alleging marginalization
have, a posteriori, been interpreted by overzealous security agencies as
war cries rising from the highest office of the land against those who seek to
tear asunder Nigeria’s internal security and render the giant of Africa ‘the
Afghanistan of Africa.’ The results are
bloody and scrawled in red.
From the beginning of time,
most human societies have affirmed directly and indirectly the sanctity of
human life. Even those who believed and propounded killings and human
sacrifices in satisfaction of religious and sundry obligations saw
differently with time.
The United Nations Charter which is the foundational charter
of the United Nations, an intergovernmental organization, was
signed in San Francisco, United States, on June
26,1945 by 50 of the 51 original member countries. Nigeria later appended its
signature and became a member.
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