…As two citizens are brutalised
A group, Civil Rights Realisation and Advancement Network, CRRAN, yesterday accused the Enugu State Waste Management Authority, ESWAMA, of operating a killer squad. This followed the recent alleged barbaric attack on two residents of the state, Mohammed Koma and Haruna Koma, by ESWAMA officials.
Reacting to the development through its president, Barr Olu Omotayo, the group called on Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu State and the National Human Rights Commission, NHRC, to urgently end the impunity being perpetrated by the agency.
Omotayo said: “The continuous deterioration of human rights situation in Enugu reached its peak last Friday, October 23, 2015, when the environmental fees collection outfit of Enugu State government caught up with two citizens in the course of their revenue drive and in broad daylight used shovel and heavy iron rods to break and shatter the ankles and knee cap bone of the duo, reminiscent of the precivilisation era of barbarity. “This is the worst human rights abuse we have ever recorded in modern Nigerian history.
Two citizens of this country were caught like animal in a trap and the agents of the state used heavy metal to pieces their legs and incapacitated them.
“We have written severally to the governor of the state that the mode of operations of this agency is not only barbaric but dangerous to healthy survival of any decent democratic society, but the government looked the other way just because it believes in revenue collection for the state irrespective of the mode of collection overriding the entrenched fundamental rights of citizens of the state.”
While describing the operations of the ESWAMA as illegal and unconstitutional, he further re-called that a Federal High Court, Enugu, presided over by Justice D.V. Agishi had given judgment against the agency over the torture, humiliation, dehumanisation and unlawful detention of a citizen, Miss Nma Ukonu.
He, therefore, demanded the “intervention of the state government to stop these atrocities of its agents, failure of which we shall lay complaints before both national and international human rights institutions to compel the state government to immediately disband its killer squad known as ESWAMA.”
Omotayo equally called on the Enugu State Police Command to immediately withdraw policemen who follow “these ESWAMA thugs to dehumanise the citizens of the state,” and immediately arrest and prosecute. (National Mirror)
