The Special Counsel to Nnamdi Kanu, the detained leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Aloy Ejimakor, has said lack of empathy by security personnel and lack of regional security are the reasons for persistent insecurity in the South-East states.
He lamented that the people from outside the region enforcing security were not committed to ending the killings.
Ejimakor disclosed this in a statement he signed and issued on Monday.
The statement reads, “Before post-colonial Nigeria transformed into its current unitary state, while still posturing as a federation, regional security was largely within the purview of the respective regions, not the federal government. And it worked well.
“This arrangement was not by chance but by well-considered design. Despite their many failings, Nigeria’s fathers and British colonialists knew that you couldn’t secure a people within their region without their participation. Even the 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 unequal), 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 an aggressive occupation or conquest. It also destroys the neutrality of the security personnel and engenders ethnic profiling and extrajudicial killings.
“Truth be told, massacres won’t happen if there’s no premeditation, driven by sectarian impulses and lack of empathy customarily exhibited by 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), which 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 excluded from securing Nigeria or any part thereof, especially its own part.”
