Ngozi James
Prominent Civil Rights Advocacy Group- Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) said the reason armed bandits are still attacking communities in Southern Kaduna, Niger and parts of Plateau, Zamfara, and Katsina States is because President Muhammadu Buhari is yet to compel the service/military chiefs to strike decisively at the heart of the terrorists.
HURIWA has also charged Media houses to describe the armed bandits declared terrorists by the Court of law as terrorists and should stop behaving as if the blood cuddling violence unleashed by the terrorists in the North is not grave enough to deserve that high level description ascribed to them by the Court.
HURIWA said this same government did not spend even one second in rushing to the Federal High Court Abuja in the dead of the night to obtain an ex party order declaring the now proscribed Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) a terrorist group even with no visible or legally convincing evidence of the involvement of neither the Indigenous People of Biafra or the Eastern Security Network in acts of terrorism.
The Rights group said with the declaration of IPOB as a terrorist group the government wasted not one second to issue the gazette declaring IPOB as a terrorist group and then massively embarked on well funded surgical military operations in the South East of Nigeria which resulted in hundreds of deaths and massive arrests of suspected members of IPOB and ESN who are languishing in different detention facilities without prosecution as required by the Constitution.
HURIWA however accused President Muhammadu Buhari-led Federal Government of pampering armed terrorists because it took many years of agitations by activists for the government to summon courage to even go to the Federal High Court Abuja to get the Court to categorise the hitherto criminal gangs known as armed bandits as terrorists.
HURIWA then said even after the Court had made the determination, the Federal Attorney General and minister of Justice who is of the North West extraction like President Buhari and majority of the members of the armed Fulani militia now declared terrorists, took many weeks to publish a gazette declaring them as terrorists thereby letting some of these terrorists to escape to safe havens.
The Rights group frowned at the fact that even after the gazette is out, the armed forces are not known to have carried out any transparent, verifiable and fool proof operations to decapitate, decimate and capture the terrorists thereby enabling them to spread their violent tentacles and to launch massive scales of terror attacks in Zamfara, Niger, Southern Kaduna and Plateau States.