If for nothing, President Goodluck Jonathan has entered the history books for one excellent reason of seeing to the actualisation of the signing of the comprehensive legislative framework that made Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) truly independent both operationally and financially after many years of agitation.

Observers will agree with me that the NHRC has an unusual history going by the fact that it berthed during Nigeria’s most oppressive, dictatorial and tyrannical regime – that of late General Sani Abacha.

It is indeed a dramatic scenario that a commission that was created by a despot (even though it was necessitated by the Paris principles of the United Nations of 1992) has now suddenly assumed its rightful place in a democracy under a government headed by a democratically elected president is indeed symbolic.

Soon after the amended enabling Act was signed into law by the current president, the National Assembly screened and passed the newly constituted governing council members headed by a tested and trusted champion of human rights and a young and unassuming professor of law, Chidi Odinkalu. This Imo State-born NHRC Chairman alongside the Benue-born erstwhile University of Jos Law Professor, Mr. Bem Amgwe, now NHRC Executive Secretary, have collectively embarked on a systematic repositioning of the NHRC to the admiration of critical observers of history.

The immediate past governing council in which yours sincerely served, was pivotal to the waging of a vigorous advocacy campaign that culminated in the eventual signing into law of the amended enabling Act setting up the NHRC even when we worked under a very strenuous and frustrating atmosphere imposed by Olusegun Obasanjo’s government that arbitrarily sacked the then Executive Secretary, Mr. Bukhari Bello, for trying to restructure the commission to give it greater autonomy.

In specific terms, the NHRC was created in obedience to the decision reached at the first international workshop on National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights held in Paris, France, on October 7 to 9, 1991. The Paris Principles were adopted by the United Nations Human Rights Commission by Resolution 1992/54 of 1992, and by the United Nations General Assembly in its Resolution 48/134 of 1993. The Paris Principles relate to the status and functioning of national institutions for the protection and promotion of human rights.

In less than two years of the reborn NHRC, it has received a deluge of high profile petitions from far and near and significantly, political leaders that used to treat the commission with scorn under the old dispensation, are rushing to it, seeking for redress because, as we all know, the rich also cry.

As a longstanding stakeholder, I have received several worrying calls from the poorest of the poor expressing concern that the plights of the oppressed who go to the NHRC may be overshadowed by the deluge of high profile petitions that have flooded the place from the unusual quarters harboring Nigeria’s politically exposed persons. In replying these messages, I have often assured my callers that the Rights Commission must find the mechanism for treating all kinds of petitions since human rights violations affects all categories of persons.

For better appreciation of the significant dimension that the petitions flooding the desk of the NHRC, it must be stated that even President Goodluck Jonathan has dragged the former President and an influential member of his political family, Chief Olusegun Okikiola Mathew Obasanjo, to the NHRC, asking it to probe the very damaging allegations contained in an open letter to him written by erstwhile President Obasanjo. One among the many allegations is the claim that the current President has started training state sponsored killer squad (snipers) to go after a list of one thousand “enemy combatants” considered to be opposed to the second term ambition of the current President.

Some funny reactionary political characters like erstwhile Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Mr. Nasir el-Rufai, have sensationally without any shred of concrete evidence stated in the gullible Nigerian media that his name was on that ‘mystery’ list of one thousand political enemies of the current President marked for ‘elimination’ by the so-called killer squad.

Before filing his petition through the country’s chief law officer and the Federal Attorney General, Mr. Mohammed Bello Adoke (SAN), the President had published his extensive reply whereupon he denied all the allegations contained in the controversial open letter authored by Obasanjo, who remains the only Nigerian to have ruled Nigeria both as a military despot and as an elected civilian President spanning a princely period of 12 years.

President Jonathan is serving out his first full tenure and it is speculated that he may run for second term next January. His speculated second term ambition has torn apart his once cohesive Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) into two diametrically opposed camps based in Southern and Northern Nigeria.

So the petition by President Jonathan to the NHRC has put the unusual rights commission to the spotlight. The governing council with the statutory mandate of resolving all petitions to the panel is to meet before mid-January 2014 to deliberate on the pending petition.

Other weighty petitions to the rights commission include the one sent by the Governor of Rivers State, Mr. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, against the controversial State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Joseph Mbu, accused of partisanship and gross abuse of his professional ethics in siding with the nation’s first family in the ongoing political warfare over 2015 election that has pitched Amaechi and President Jonathan and his wife [Mrs. Patience Jonathan], who is from Rivers State by birth.

Another high profile petition is that of the estranged wife of Enugu State Governor, Mrs. Clara Chime [a fresh university graduate], also dragged her husband [Governor Sullivan Chime, a lawyer] to the rights commission over illegal detention inside the Enugu State Governor’s house for a period of four months. Mrs. Chime hired the Lagos-based lawyer, Chief Femi Falana (SAN), who successfully brought the ordeals of the Enugu State First Lady to the front burner of public discourse. The State Security Services (SSS) and the Nigerian police operatives assigned to the Enugu State Governor are accused of aiding and abetting the alleged illegal detention of Mrs. Chime, who was later booted out of the Government House by the security details attached to the embattled Enugu state governor.

The rights commission is at the moment also probing the killing, allegedly by soldiers, of over half a dozen homeless youth sheltered at an uncompleted house in Apo District of Abuja on September 20, 2013.

Under the new legal dispensation, the NHRC has the power to compel appearance by relevant witnesses and the determination of any matter assumes same status as a judgment of a competent state High Court which can only be over turned upon appeal at the Court of Appeal.

Nigerians have unusual expectation of superb performance from this unusual reborn the NHRC. Accordingly, the governing council and management of the commission will constantly be on the watch list of Nigerians to determine their level of independence and commitment to carry out their thematic mandate. This is indeed a catch 50-50 scenario since the members are not Angels that dropped from Heaven but are expected to operate as much as possible as a purely independent body of arbiters and ombudsmen. The commission members and management must live above board just like the Biblical Caesar’s wife.

•RIGHTSVIEW appears thrice a week on Mondays, Wednesday and Saturdays. The Columnist, popular activist Emmanuel Onwubiko, is a former Federal Commissioner of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and presently National Coordinator of Human Rights Writers’ Association of Nigeria (HURIWA).

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