Imo: How Not To Police A State!

 By Ikechukwu Amaechi

Penultimate week, I wrote an open letter to the Inspector General of Police, Usman Alkali Baba, lamenting the travails of Ikechukwu Ojokoh, who is in police custody in Imo State. For those who may not have read my column on May 11, let me restate the facts. On Saturday, April 15, 2023, Thaddeus Ikechukwu Ojokoh, a 53-year-old professional tailor, from Umugwa Umuokirika, Ahiazu-Mbaise LGA, Imo State, was arrested at Afor-Oru market.

Ojokoh, who is married with five children, had just left his shop where he has been practising his humble trade in the last two decades to buy some tailoring materials when armed security men swooped on him and whisked him away on the allegation that he is a member of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB. He was beaten mercilessly and dehumanised.

Take The War To The Terrorists!

 By Nick Dazang

By dint of the legion of dastardly and wicked attacks by terrorists of all hues over the past seven years across the country, leaving in their trail deaths and mayhem, the chickens have been coming home to roost. Only, and unfortunately, no one hearkened to them. Not even President Muhammadu Buhari whose solemn remit it is to protect and defend the country.

If anything, his aloofness, his complacency and smug indifference suggest, not to a few Nigerians, that he may have been at one with the terrorists. The government, under President Buhari’s watch, treated the terrorists, at best, as untouchables and at the worst with kid gloves. This is even as it dealt in draconian fashion with others in their ilk.

The government -until now? – has been slow and tardy in decimating the Boko Haram terrorists such that the terrorists became emboldened. And such that ordinary folks were tempted to conclude that government had betrayed them and that it was in cahoots with the terrorists.