Chinelo Obogo
Founder of Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC), Dr. Frederick Fasheun, claimed on Wednesday, that Nigeria is under siege and that the country has been turned into a police state.
Fasheun also alleged that the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (F-SARS) has lost focus.
In addition, Fashion called on the Federal Government to expedite action on the release of Leah Sharibu and other schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram.
He said these to newsmen, at his Lagos office, where he evaluated the country’s 19 years of democracy and assessed President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration and the security situation in the country.
“Today, Nigerians appear to be under siege. From the North to the South, from the East to the West, all parts of the country are militarised and turned into a virtual police state.
“The Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (F-SARS) has lost focus. Instead of implementing its primary objective of curtailing armed robbery in the country, it has turned itself to an army of occupation, harassing and pilfering money from innocent citizens. Unfortunately, the government ignored the End-SARS campaign.
“But the End-SARS campaign must be revisited. Nigeria did not need SARS to end the evil regimes of notorious armed robbers like Oyenusi and Anini, and even now that crime-fighting and crime-bursting in most parts of the world are technologically driven.
“Imagine SARS apprehending youths and forcing them to bank ATM machines to withdraw cash to ‘bail’ themselves from illegal arrests. Why should police be searching people’s phones and laptops on the streets?
“We seize this opportunity to demand the release of Leah Sharibu, the Chibok girls and other hostages in Boko Haram captivity. Every day they spend in captivity is a disgrace to this democracy. Meanwhile, the government continues to show total disregard for the activities of killer herdsmen in several parts of the country, including Southern Kaduna, Plateau, Taraba and Benue states. The Nigerian government has continued to excuse their killings as a clash between herdsmen and farmers. However, the herdsmen’s resort to slaughtering unarmed church worshippers and clergymen, as well as soldiers and police shows that government has been playing politics and nepotism with this grave issue. Enough is enough, President Buhari must comply with the global index that has ranked the killer herdsmen not just as a terrorist organisation, but the fourth most deadly in the world…”
He must immediately mandate the killer herdsmen pay for their crimes and eventually wiped out.
“The war of attrition unleashed by Boko Haram against defenceless citizens throughout the country continues unabated, nullifying Buhari’s campaign promise to end the insurgency immediately he took over power. Worse is the fact that in a classic case of living in denial, the government keeps jumping from one sloganeering to another. One day government says, ‘We have technically defeated Boko Haram’, and another day it says,’We have significantly defeated Boko Haram’. But the reality indicates that Boko Haram inflicts as much damage as before, with bombings, abductions and suicide squads going unabated.”