Why Insecurity Has Persisted In South East— IPOB lawyer Reveals

An Owerri-based legal practitioner and lead Counsel to the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Mr. Aloy Ejimakor has opined that that killings being witnessed in the South East is perpetuated by security personnel who are driven by sectarian impulses and lack of compatriot empathy in discharging their duties outside their zones.

The popular Lawyer made this known yesterday in Owerri, while sharing his view on why serious crimes are on the increase in the South East geo-polotical zone.

His words: “Truth be told, massacres won’t happen if there’s no premeditation, driven by sectarian impulses and lack of compatriot empathy customarily exhibited by some security personnel when it comes to law enforcement outside their regions, even when the targets of such law enforcement are unarmed and amenable to arrest.

“The inherent dangers of an imbalanced security leadership and formations is the main reason the framers of the 1999 Constitution enacted Section 217(3) of the Constitution, which roughly states 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 red-lined from all critical security formations, particularly the ones based in the southeast. It makes no sense and it is unconstitutional to boot.

“Still, for the same reason of sectional balance, Section 14(3) of the same 1999 Constitution provides 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. To be sure, there’s no better contradiction to the oneness of Nigeria than this profound injustice that appears to have become the norm and persisted since 2015.”

He said: “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 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 or unequals, 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.”