Kano & Ezu river killings: Igbos are the most unprotected, hated tribe
By Emeka Umeagbalasi
The leadership of International Society for Civil Liberties and
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, March 18, 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 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.
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 January 18, 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 six 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 six or seven 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 percent
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.
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. With political clowns in-charge of our zone, it is
perpetually enslaved politically. Coordinated media attacks directed against
Professor Chinua Achebe and his book titled: There Was A Country (A Personal
History Of Biafra) recently and ongoing politically motivated crisis engulfing
the Igbo central political party-APGA are a clear case in point.
Finally, it is very obvious that the Igbos are facing
battles for their survival and cultural identity from many fronts particularly
from Northeast, Northwest and Southwest. When an Igbo son or daughter
occasionally becomes the head of Army, Customs or Immigration, booby traps are
laid against him or her from other tribal partners. False or spurious
accusations such as tribal promotions, postings and recruitments, rent air, but
when someone other than an Igbo heads the Army, Customs and Immigration, etc,
anything goes with impunity and immunity.
We condemn the endless massacre of Igbo people by Nigeria’s
legal and illegal armed brigades. The President Jonathan’s gross incompetence
in the face of all these is alarmingly worrying. In the past 2012 and present
2013 budgets, a total sum of N1.87trillion(N921billion and N950billion
respectively) was provided for security, yet the country, particularly the
Igbos have continued to be unsafe and endangered in their own country. We
condemn unequivocally the mouthed reactions of the Presidency and those occupying
elective and appointive top public offices in the Southeast zone of Nigeria
each time these unprovoked killings of the Igbos take place. The Presidency
appears deaf and dumb and has refused to implement far reaching recommendations
and pieces of wise advice offered by thinkable Nigerians.
By this the Presidency is making unquenchable retaliations
someday soon by the targeted ethnic groups and their sympathizers against their
attackers, inevitable day by day. If, some say, coconuts heads, can produce elements
taking human lives in dozens, then it will be monumentally disastrous if the
thinkers and inventors of our times are pushed to the wall. Their own lethal
elements may most likely be WMD. The
great transformers of deserts and slums must never be underrated. If President
Jonathan and his team refuse to stop these senseless killing of the Igbos, then
great danger lies ahead.
Not minding the
foregoing and pending when the gross security imbalances in the country’s
polity including the NPF are frontally addressed, the Igbos should be vigilant
at all times wherever they reside in Nigeria and invoke their sacred
rights of Self-defense. They must remain
law-aiding and refuse being the attackers unless attacked. While exercising
their sacred rights to self-defense, proportions of their responses must not
exceed those deployed by their criminal attackers. This is universal yardstick
behind sacred rights to self-defense.
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