A non-governmental organisation, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has called for the immediate sack of the Yobe State Commissioner of Police and the State Director, State Security Services (SSS) over last weekend’s massacre of over at the College of Agriculture.
Suspected members of Boko Haram had on Saturday stormed the school with sophisticated weapons with which they killed over 50 students.
In a statement, HURIWA said it was “vexed” by the “gruesome mass killings of innocent students”, and called for the sack of the two security chiefs for “dereliction of duty to protect innocent civilians.”
The statement was jointly signed by its national coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and director of media affairs, Miss Zainab Yusuf.
The group, in the statement, blamed the string of attacks on innocent civilians on the “failure of the current federal Government to hold top security chiefs responsible for failure of security in their areas of jurisdiction.”
The failure of government at all levels to protect life and property, argued HURIWA,is both undemocratic and unconstitutional, “and may gradually erode people’s confidence in the ability of the government to exercise its constitutional authority and legitimacy.”
It further blamed the “dare-devil successes recorded so far by armed Islamic insurgents and other armed non-State actors” on government’s failure to ” take urgent, comprehensive and result-oriented measures to build up the intelligence gathering capacity of armed operatives of Nigeria’s security forces.”
The ease and effrontery of the attacks, said HURiWA, “has shown clearly that the government is being economical with the truth on the efficacy or otherwise of the full scale state of emergency in the North east.”
“We hereby call on governments at all levels to be sincere with patriotically equipping the operatives of Nigeria’s security agencies with sound intelligence gathering capacities and to take practical measures to sensitize the civilian populace to be alive to their civil duties of protecting their lives and property by all lawful means,” the group declared.