A Kaduna based legal practitioner, Barrister John Achimugu, has cautioned the Buhari-led government against the withdrawal of military personnel from insecurity prone communities and replacing them with policemen.
He said, “I am disappointed with the way security has been handled so far and is still being handled. I have read in the papers this week that areas that are prone to banditry actions, military personnel that have hitherto brought the situation under control be taken out of those places and that such places be handed over to the police.
“The type of guns banditry have are superior than the ones the military have and so it’s like throwing off the protection of the people and asking them how do you have police in every community?
“For the police to cover the security of these communities without the aid of the military, l look forward to a better 2020, but if what l see or what has been pronounced is what is going to happen, there will be better insecurity in 2020.”
Bearing his mind on national issues, the legal practitioner noted that 2019 witnessed greater bloodshed than the country has ever experienced.
In his words, “2019 witnessed greater bloodshed than we have ever seen in the life of our nation. We had attacks from bandits who kidnapped along our major highways, nobody felt secured to travel out anywhere in this country with the hope to return in safety.
“Insurgency we were told have been degraded, whatever degraded means, we find them more operative in the country particularly in the northeast in the year 2019. If the extent of the activities of insurgency reported is the degraded government wants us to believe then we still have to look into the books to see what degraded means.
“Degraded to me means that we would have heard nothing about the operations of insurgency in the country again. But we heard of operations and they are still active, then the word degraded is a deception. Then l think the earlier we sit down and assess the level of security challenges we have, the better for us all. But again, looking at the economic environment, the level of unemployment, l do not know what can really be done to improve the level of insecurity without laying a solid foundation for our economy recovery and for our economic well being so long as the level of hunger, depression and frustrations in the lives of our people continues, where there is high tension everywhere and everybody is disgruntled or dissatisfied with the economy of our country, it will be difficult to have a secured environment of hungry people.”
Looking at the year 2019, Barrister John Achimugu said, “We did not do well in 2019; there wasn’t free and fair elections in an environment with insecurity. An unsecured terrain cannot produce an election result that expresses the mandate of the people freely given because of the level of insecurity.
“Our electoral process did not fair better than the 2015 because most of the noticed lapses were not allowed to see the light of the day. When President Buhari did not sign the amended electoral law or some other amendments to give way to the desired amendment. This time, election experienced more violence in 2019 than it was in 2015, and in my little assessment, we did not do well instead, we retrogressed and laid a solid foundation for violence as part and parcel of our electoral process which is a great shame.
“Government needs to be sincere to the people whom the people have given them mandate to rule them so that if they have the fear of God in their hearts, then they will seek to serve the people. The great agony in this country is that politicians will tell you with or without your votes they will win elections, they are therefore not accountable to the people, therefore, they are not accountable to the people and so they steal the money to the detriment of the people. Politicians believe that all they need do is to amass their money, amass thugs to do whatever they want them to do. They know the Court system will be difficult to upset the victory because of the evidence that is required and the time set for doing electoral cases and so anything can happen.
“We have no resemblance of democracy in what we do but what we do is a democracy of deception of citizens of the country. We cannot build a nation the way are going and if we want to build a nation, then we must return to our maker.
“The problem with the judiciary in handling electoral cases is not judicial corruption that is the problem but the electoral law. Lack of time is not working for justice of such cases.”
THISDAY
