A civil rights advocacy group, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has lambasted the Inspector General of Police, Alhaji Mohammed Adamu, for “embarking on a meaningless voyage of discovery in search of infantile reasons for the failures of security management” during the just ended governorship polls in Kogi and Bayelsa states.

HURIWA has also canvassed broad based media blackout by the independent Nigerian media industry of the activities and statements of the Department of State Security (DSS) for “deliberately defecating on top of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria of 1999 (as amended) by their disgraceful resort to illegality and illogicality in clear violations of subsisting and binding orders of competent courts of law in their willful failures to release Omoyele Sowore and Olawale Bakare from illegal detention days after the Federal High Court ordered their immediate release.”

The rights group enjoined the media to stop using the disjointed and illogical statements emanating from the DSS which graphically paints Nigeria like a Banana Republic or a failed state in the eyes of the international community. “The varying weird explanations of these violations of the constitutional rights of citizens Sowore and Bakare and many others languishing in solitary confinement held by the DSS as against binding bail orders from the Federal High Courts amounts to deliberate misinformation and the spreading of fake news and should not be encouraged by the Nigerian media.

“If the officers of DSS have lost their collective sense of shame please the media should stop allowing themselves to be used by DSS to insult and assault our sensibilities,” HURIWA said Wednesday in a statement.

The rights group stated that it was shocking that the chief of police of the Nigerian state can be heard saying that politicians used fake policemen to undermine the security of the elections even when the police’s hierarchy had deployed 66,241 police operatives for the exercise.

HURIWA said if Nigeria was indeed a constitutional democracy and were it not that the Federal Government is the chief promoter of impunity, lawlessness and flagrant disregard for the Rule of law, the Inspector General of Police having failed abysmally to secure the Kogi and Bayelsa elections would have either resigned or would have since been dismissed.

In a statement by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, HURIWA asked President Muhammadu Buhari to sack the failed IGP Adamu unless the President and his party the All Progressives Congress (APC) are the direct beneficiaries of the gale of insecurity and threats to national security that was witnessed during the heavily manipulated and orchestrated electoral heist that took place in Kogi and Bayelsa states few days ago.

According to the rights group, “In saner climes, the chief of police could have tendered his resignation for absolute failure to stop the bloody violence that trailed both the Kogi and Bayelsa election including the burning to death of a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Women leader, Mrs. Acheju Abuh, by alleged APC armed thugs but here we are in a country that masquerades about as a constitutional democracy and we conducted a violent election in which many lives were lost but the boss of the Police who failed in his duty rather than take responsibility and then quit is busy dishing out cock and bull stories to explain his apparent failure of leadership of the Nigerian Police Force.

“Can we tell the failed IGP that scholars of management science say that responsibility means state of being accountable or answerable for any obligation, trust, debt or something or in other words it means obligation to complete a job assigned on time and in best way.

“Responsibility according to management experts refers to an obligation to do something. When authority is delegated then some responsibility for getting the assigned task done is also fixed. Why has the police under the watch of the IGP refused to arrest the armed thugs that killed the innocent woman politician and the nephew of Senator Dino Melaye? The President should immediately remove the IGP unless of course the APC benefitted from the bloody violence that characterised the charade of an election.

“We in HURIWA align ourselves with the clarion call by good spirited non-governmental groups that have rejected the elections that took place in Kogi and Bayelsa which from every indications, were cases of daylight robbery of the mandate of the electorate. The failures of security is a direct breach of the Part 2 of the Nigerian Police Act.

“If therefore there are cases of breaches of the security the type we saw in Kogi and Bayelsa the IGP must take responsibility and be punished instead of letting him orchestrate a comedy of the absurd and dance naked in the market place by way of trying to manufacture excuses for the clear dereliction of duty.”

HURIWA rejected the claims of the IGP Adamu, who said politicians and other actors made plans to counter security arrangements for Saturday’s governorship poll in Bayelsa and Kogi states.

It said: “HURIWA hereby demands that the Nigerian President stops the IGP from further disgracing Nigeria before the World. The European Union monitored these elections and have issued damaging reports of compromise of the security management of the elections but here we are being insulted by an IGP who said part of the counter plans before the election made by the politicians was to sew uniforms for persons that posed as policemen and security officials. But this IGP has not tendered one single empirical evidence of arrest of these politicians and the Police have failed to arrest the fake police but rather IGP Adamu, who spoke with State House Correspondents after President Buhari and the service chiefs, held a meeting at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, maintained that the police and other security officers deployed for the elections carried ‘special identification tags’ even when he admitted that while the police did their arrangements, politicians and persons he called the ‘bad guys’, also made counter plans to cause problems in some isolated areas in Kogi and Bayelsa states.

“The IGP Adamu has indeed failed in his duty and the least he can do is to resign or apologise and then go after the agents of criminality that unleashed the blood cuddling violence in Kogi and Bayelsa states during the polls. He should stop insulting our collective psyche.”

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