The Bloody Raid On Sunday Igboho’s Residence – Nigerian Tribune Editorial

NIGERIA is in its worst moment since the return to civil rule in 1999, and one of the worst in its entire history.  Last week, the Muhammadu Buhari-led government unfolded yet another criminal assault on the Nigerian constitution and the sensibilities of the beleaguered and long-suffering Nigerian populace when security agents led by members of the Department of State Services (DSS) raided the Ibadan, Oyo State residence of a Yoruba self-determination crusader, Mr. Sunday Adeyemo, popularly known as Sunday Igboho, committing murder and animal abuse, destroying vehicles and furniture and leaving in their wake a trail of destruction reminiscent of the very worst of brutal dictatorships. In the process, the state agents, armed with neither an order of the court of law nor backed by the express provisions of the country’s constitution, effectively turned the residence of a private citizen, and indeed the peaceful and law-abiding community in which he resides, into a war zone. Worse still, the bloody raid was effected under the cover of night, giving rise to speculations of state-backed terrorism carried out by non-state actors before the DSS, in a statement littered with rhetorical weapons designed to downplay the needless loss of lives, owned up to the gruesome attack and declared the activist wanted.

It was, for many Nigerians who had witnessed the bloodshed, carnage and gross abuse of fundamental human rights during military rule, yet another reliving of Buhari’s years as military Head of State. It was specially a vivid re-demonstration of the Orwellian 1984, gripping both in its totalitarian political landscape and human debasement. The conclusion is inescapable: Nigeria reels in its very worst moment.

Claiming that the ensuing gun duel lasted for an hour, DSS’s Public Relations Officer, Peter Afunnaya, said that the situation offered Igboho the opportunity to escape. Speaking last Thursday night at the national headquarters of the secret police, the DSS spokesman could not resist a willful descent into the political arena. He said: “Those cheering and eulogizing him may appeal to or advise him to do the needful. He should surrender himself to the appropriate authorities. He or anyone can never be above the law.” The raid on Igboho’s residence by a joint team of security operatives, Afunnaya claimed,  was based on intelligence that he had stockpiled arms in that place, which was why: “On approach to the residence, the team came under heavy gun attack by nine men, suspected to be Igboho’s guards. Six of them were armed with  AK-47 guns and three others, with pump-action rifles.” Afunnaya then confirmed reports that two of Igboho’s men were gunned down in the course of the exchange, adding that the rest were subdued and arrested. Afterwards, he said, the team procedurally searched the house and subsequently recovered a cache of weapons.

Contrary to the DSS’s position, we hold that the Ibadan raid was, to say the very least, entirely groundless. It lacked logic. When did the DSS discover that Igboho had a cache of arms and who were the people that had been “cheering and eulogizing him”, and for what purpose? What role did such eulogy play in the decision to invade the residence? If these are political questions, we ask them precisely because the DSS chose the template of politics to rationalise what was supposed to be a security briefing.  We agree with the legal luminary, Mr Femi Falana (SAN), who likened what the DSS did to a “nocturnal coup.” Falana observed pointedly: “There is no law in Nigeria that allows you to arrest somebody in the dead of the night when you are not planning a coup and you are not an armed robber. Everybody was wondering who did the invasion, especially as there was evidence of the killing of people in the house by the invaders who also carried away the corpses of those they killed. People were arrested and abducted at 2a.m by so-called security agents of the government, yet the governor of the particular state where the operation took place was not aware of anything of the sort. In these days of kidnappings, anybody can come to your house in the night and arrest you. And these are guys who don’t wear uniforms and there couldn’t have been any official warrant presented in the night to justify the raid and invasion!”

We also note the position of other patriots and people of conscience across the country who have condemned the action of the security forces. While noting that it was not criminal or illegal for anyone to express an intention to leave any country, Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, in an interview, remarked that the Federal Government should apologise to Igboho.
Indeed, the Gestapo manner of the raid mirrored a previous raid on the National Assembly by the same security agents. It is instructive that in the present case, as in previous ones, the DSS did not tell Nigerians that it acted under the authority of a court order, a development that demonstrates convincingly that what it did was an aberration, something that flies in the face of due process, law and order.  The recent handling of the case of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Nnamdi Kanu, also confirmed this government’s peculiar fascination for ambush, self-help and extrajudicial actions which brought the 1984 abduction and crating of Alhaji Umaru Dikko in Britain under the then Buhari military junta back to the consciousness of Nigerians.  If anyone, therefore, is still living in denial of the fact that the country is now effectively back to its jackboot past, such qualms have now been shown to be completely misplaced.

There were even reports that Igboho’s cats were also attacked. When did cats become of interest to the state? In saner climes, pets are treasured, and the officers who abducted Igboho’s cats would have been clamped in jail if they had staged that stunt in the United States or in Europe. Besides, why herd away Igboho’s wife and aides after killing some of his people? To be sure, we do not hold brief for Igboho and we do not endorse, wholesale, his ways and method of going about his activism. But that, precisely, is the beauty of democracy, where everyone has an opportunity to legally express himself/herself while the view of the majority prevails.

We do not sanction violence, but Igboho has not even been associated with any violence since he started his pro-Yoruba campaigns. Time and again, he had only issued warnings to killer herdsmen without taking any action against them, to the consternation of some victims who expected him to act. Pray, when has public concern about the activities of terrorists become a crime? When did a peaceful quest for self-determination turn into a crime? It is telling that no court has pronounced Igboho guilty of anything. But assuming that he did wrong, why go the route of invasion of his home in the dead of night, with destruction in tow, to right that wrong?

We condemn the raid on Sunday Igboho’s residence and call on the international community to take stock of the Buhari’s government’s ceaseless acts of constitutional infringements. Since the National Assembly has abdicated its constitutional responsibility to check the excesses of the executive on behalf of the people, we are then left with making an urgent call on people of conscience worldwide to speak out, and not to be tired of speaking out, against this regime’s descent into tyranny. We do not want to believe that the right to free speech had been taken away with Buhari’s election into office. And we do not have to overstate the fact of history that no government has ever succeeded in defeating the people, as the will of the people will eventually prevail in the long run.