The Special Counsel to IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu, Barrister Aloy Ejimakor, has accused the Federal Government of Nigeria under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari of ethnic stereotyping and the fueling of extrajudicial killings in the south east. Barr Aloy Ejimakor asserted that sectarian impulses and ethnic profiling were the driving forces behind President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.
According to Barr Aloy Ejimakor, using such profiling, led to extrajudicial executions and killings in the Southeast. The Special Counsel was responding to a report that military personnel had allegedly killed some civilians in Ogbaru, Anambra State.
In the Ogbaru region of Anambra State, soldiers are alleged to have opened fire ruthlessly and killed a number of defenseless civilians. Sharing the story on his Twitter handle, Barr Aloy Ejimakor said the lack of neutrality in Nigeria’s security formation was fuelling insecurity in the Southeast.
According to the words of Barr Aloy Ejimakor; “Insecurity can be fueled by lack of neutrality in a nation’s security leadership and formations. It is worse when the government of the day is driven by sectarian impulses and ethnic profiling. This is what is driving the spates of extrajudicial killings in the Southeast, especially the one that happened at Ogbaru in Anambra state,” Barr Aloy Ejimakor concluded.
Before post-colonial Nigeria lapsed into its current unitary state, while still passing off as a federation, regional security was largely within the purview of the respective regions, not the federal government. And it worked pretty well.
This basic arrangement was not by chance but by well-considered design. Despite their many failings, Nigeria’s indigenous founding fathers and the departing British colonists knew too well that you cannot secure a people within their region without their participation.
Even the mighty British Empire knew too well that it couldn’t secure colonial Nigeria without the participation of Nigerians in vast numbers. In a diverse federation of equals (or even near-equals), Northern Nigerians shouldn’t be the ones exclusively or dominantly securing Western or Eastern Nigeria, and vice versa.
When you do that, it becomes counter-intuitive to security and begins to look like belligerent occupation or conquest. It also destroys the neutrality of the security personnel, engenders ethnic profiling and extrajudicial killings.
Massacres won’t happen if there is no premeditation, driven by sectarian impulses and lack of compatriot empathy often exhibited by some security personnel when it comes to law enforcement of the kind that comes with ethnic connotations.
Even when the targets of such law enforcement are unarmed and amenable to arrest, the risk of ethnic-tinged massacre remains very high when the personnel is lacking in national spread.
The dangers of an imbalanced security leadership for Nigeria is the reason the framers of the Constitution enacted at Section 217(3) that “the composition of the officer corps and other ranks of the Armed Forces of the Federation shall reflect the federal character of Nigeria”.
In plain terms, it means that no region or tribe shall be markedly excluded from securing Nigeria or any part thereof, especially its own part.
But today, the opposite is the case as Southeast officers and ranks are significantly redlined from all critical security formations, particularly the ones based in Southeast. It makes no sense and it is unconstitutional to boot.
The same Constitution states that “the composition of the Government of the Federation or any of its agencies shall ensure that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few States or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that Government or any of its agencies”.
This means that the Southeast shall be equal partakers in the opportunities of the Nigerian enterprise. But it is not and uniquely so. This is wrong, ungodly and it runs counter to the notion of #OneNigeria.
To be sure, there’s no better contradiction to the unity of Nigeria than this profound injustice that appears to have become the norm and persisted since 2015.
And this: Southeast being continually absent from the table partly explains why each time the witch cries at night in the Southeast and the baby dies in the morning, the authorities jump to conclusions that it’s the witch that killed the baby.
In other words, almost every incidence of insecurity ends up being blamed on the people of the Southeast, such that they are now left with no other option than rampant resentment, widespread alienation and popular agitation.
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