identifiable human development indices by about 60 years or more.
The Rights group said the state of human rights violations in the past
five years has assumed epic proportions just as impunity, lawlessness
and lack of respect for the sanctity of human life have become so
widespread that much parts of Nigeria are currently in a state of civil
war just as hundreds of armed mass killers are getting away with their
dastardly acts of genocides waged against communities all across the
country with the North-West and North-East of Nigeria becoming killing
fields.
“The unfortunate scenario is that since the last five years top
government officials have misused their powers to turn Nigeria into a
police state thereby clamping journalists who write unfavourable news
stories into detentions with lots of framed up and trumped-up charges, ”
it said.
In a statement signed on Friday in Abuja by the National Coordinator,
Emmanuel Onwubiko and the National Media Affairs Director, Zainab Yusuf,
HURIWA said that it was laughable that whereas the federal government
identifies the armed Boko Haram insurgency group as terrorists, it has
rather chosen to treat armed Fulani herdsmen and the murderous attackers
in the North-West States of Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto as mere armed
bandits.
According to the Rights group, the statement by President Muhammadu
Buhari describing the killings of Christians and farmers in Southern
Kaduna by armed Fulani herdsmen as a ‘revenge attacks’ does not
communicate to the global community that the central government is
willing to crack down on all terrorists carrying out mass killings of
Nigerians irrespective of their religious or ethnic orientations.
HURIWA noted that: “it is said that in the last five years, the current
administration has treated with kid gloves the cases of coordinated
killings orchestrated and choreographed by armed Fulani herdsmen in
Benue, Plateau, Enugu, Delta with the clear failure of either the
Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami or the
Inspector General of Police (IGP) Mohammed Adamu to prosecute and punish
armed Fulani herdsmen arrested with sophisticated weapons and paraded by
the National Police in Abuja.
“We have a government that in the last five years has failed in the
basic task of preventing mass killings and genocides. Sadly, whenever
these suspected mass killers are arrested and are clearly shown to be
from the same ethnic-religious affiliations with the President which is
Fulani, these numerous terrorists arrested with sophisticated weapons of
mass destruction and paraded to the media by the Inspector General of
Police and before our very eyes the whole drama ends as media
showmanship just as the exact whereabouts of these paraded armed Fulani
herdsmen are not disclosed to anyone and the spate of killings have
continued in an unending vicious circle of violent and blood cuddling
attacks.