THE pictures match. Perfectly. Whenever freelance and hardened criminals released their kidnapped victims, those fortunate victims looked haggered, jaded, famished, hungry, disorganised, disoriented, and generally forlorn. Fortunate kidnap victims? Yes. The unfortunate ones do not come back alive even after family, friends and relatives had paid the usual steep ransom, or the negotiated variant.
The pictures and videos of the #ENDBADGOVERNANCE protests prisoners who were arraigned in an Abuja court last week were replicas of the fares we have treated to and will still be treated to in our collective march into further darkness. The message embedded therein is that no matter who kidnapped you, you will end up being treated the same way. If the street kidnapper abducts you in your home or on the highway, you will be roughened up, starved, and tried. The torture and trial are embedded in the ransom negotiations and the constant threats to kill and throw your body to wild animals.
If the security agencies of this emerging totalitarian state kidnap you, you will undergo similar experience. You will be imprisoned even before you get a day in court. You will be tortured possibly inside an underground dungeon. You will be starved. Like the victim of street kidnappers, you could be killed execution style. The street kidnapper has no mandate to preserve your life. The state kidnapper has a bounding duty of care for you. But it does not. And it is not often held to account.
It has been said that if you want to measure the health or otherwise of any country, visit its prisons. Our country does not allow you to break that sweat. They bring the evidence of our diseased country to the court of law, and put it in open and public display. That was what happened in Abuja last weekend. Some Nigerians who protested against poverty, privations, hunger, and hopelessness imposed and inflicted on them by the dumb economic policy options taken by Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s regime, were arbitrarily arrested and herded into prisons. Many of the prisoners were minors even though the government worked hard to make us not to believe the glaring evidence before our eyes. All the prisoners looked withered and weather -beaten. But as we know, especially those of us who were in Biafra during the Nigeria-Biafra civil war (1967-1970), malnutrition has a way of ravaging and savaging younger people. If the minors who were shamelessly brought to court by agents of the state were to stay a little longer in prison, the footage the world would have seen could have competed with what was seen during the civil war. The minors of Abuja were in prison for three months and their images competed vigorously with the images of Biafran kids at the receiving end of starvation as a weapon of war for three years. This administration brought our children to court ostensibly pretending to seek justice but the world saw a demonstrably insecure regime which came to court not to prosecute but to persecute and to intimidate. The regime must have reasoned that if they made an example of their present set of hostages they could succeed in cowering the rest of Nigerians who do not agree with the direction that the country is headed.
The irony which regime enforcers may not in their life be able to comprehend is that the minors and the young adults that they brought to court for persecution were the children of Tinubu. Yes, they were to the extent that in our part of the world the president is generally, even if sometimes misguidedly, regarded as the father of the nation. Since obviously Nigeria is not yet a nation, Tinubu might as well pass as the father of the country, a benighted one at that. If Tinubu is the father of the country, then Nigerian children and youths do not really need a father. A father protects, Tinubu does not. A typical father fights for his children, this one stands aloof. A father sacrifices for his children, this one gorges the children’s dinner and ravishes the grand children’s breakfast. If the minors of Abuja manifested tell-tale signs of starvation and malnutrition, could it not be because the state is focused in serving the vanities of our president and his cohorts by providing appointed jets, spectacular yacht, fancy sport utility vehicles (SUVs), vacations abroad, and luxury mansions in choice locations.
If this regime were to have its way it would love for the spectacle of last week to continue. That explains why a captured judge in a cowed judiciary adjourned the sham case to January of 2025. In which jurisdiction except under an aspiring dictatorship would a citizen, and a minor for that matter, be slapped with charges of treason for protesting against bad governance, deprivation, and hunger? Where else?
Without doubt, this regime has its designs for Nigeria and Nigerians, and those designs are not for the good of a majority of the people. And in this regard, Nigerians need to pay special attention to the Nigerian Police Force (NPF). This security agency does not leave Nigerians in any doubt that they are not on the side of the people. The hackneyed slogan that police is your friend is a ruse to lure citizens to sleep. This police is a friend of the regime, and the regime alone. If you are in doubt read and analyse the statement issued in the name of the Inspector-General of Police by the Force’s spokesman. Study what that statement said, and especially what it failed to say. The IGP said 76 persons were arraigned on charges including ‘terrorism, arson, and treasonable felony’. The statement proceeded to claim that the ‘suspects were initially presented in court, where they were formally charged, and a remand order was issued by the court’. You are invited to note that the date the suspects were presented in court was not stated, the cadre of the court was not mentioned, the duration of the remand order was avoided, and no mention was made of legal representation for the suspects during that arraignment. Neither was it revealed the nature of the suspects’ plea. What’s the police hiding? Such number of suspects cannot be taken to court at once, and Nigerians would not get wind of it. Did the police procure a secret remand order, and which court issued it? Or was it an oluwole remand order since it seems nothing is now beyond the NPF in the service of their current masters? The police needs to come clean.
Furthermore, the police boss said that,’Under Nigerian law, individuals who have reached the age of criminal responsibility are answerable for their actions, regardless of their age’, and that globally, accountability applies to ‘young individuals who commit serious offences. As in this sham case the prosecution (police) is at liberty to claim that the suspects committed serious offences but it’s the court or judge that determines the severity of the crime and the punishment thereto. There’s an implied assumption in the police statement that the suspects actually committed the offences they have been charged with. In our laws it is a given that every suspect is innocent of the charges until a competent court of law vested with the requisite jurisdiction pronounced otherwise. How many conscientious judges do we still have in the country?
A more pathetic case in this drama of the absurd was that of a man who addressed journalists within the precincts of the Abuja court. He is ostensibly a lawyer who was excited by the crumbs of the police brief on the case. This one would also refer to himself as a learned person. Really! We will reproduce much of his gibberish in support of the police and the regime and then leave you to make the call. He said: “These boys we brought to the court today are adults. Most of them are married men. None of them is a minor. Some of them are university graduates… Do you know how much it cost us to be at this level of democracy in this country? These boys are trying to destabilise Nigeria using the Russian flags and other countries, while calling on the military to remove our president. Is it fair? To even remove the state governor. If they don’t want democracy again, are we forcing them? Everybody is enjoying their fundamental human rights. Nobody is abusing their rights. Everything is moving on well in the country only for these boys for no reason started protests with Russia and other countries’ flags”. If this so-called lawyer’s statement didn’t make sense, it’s just because it didn’t make sense. Freedom of speech and freedom of gibberish are not the same. There’s need for routine house cleaning amongst lawyers.
But there is a silver lining in the insight reportedly provided by a senior lawyer, JB Daudu, a former president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA). “The only thing obscene about the federal high court proceeding in Abuja yesterday (Friday) is the nature of the charge, which is allegedly treason. Minors and that is if they are less than 16 years are usually treated as adults when they are found committing crimes. So had they been charged for the right offences in the territory of their States where they allegedly misconducted themselves, I would have had no problems. For me the highest offences that they could have been charged for are ‘conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace’, ‘unlawful assembly’, wilful destruction of public property ‘, ‘theft’ otherwise known in the South of Nigeria as ‘stealing’, and other offences of like nature i.e, affray’, which are not only State offences but bailable offences”.
Daudu went on to submit that the attorney-general of the federation has no locus to charge any of the young men “we saw in the dock for any offence committed during the #end bad governance riots within the territory of their respective states. It is a complete caricature of the federalism that we claim to operate in Nigeria, where state governments abdicate their responsibilities to the Federal Government and turn a blind eye to the pillaging of the rights of their citizens. For the avoidance of doubt, there was nothing treasonable in the conduct of these children or young men as discernable from the charge, and if our systems were working they could easily have been charged for offences mentioned above in juvenile or magistrate’s courts, within the territory of the states where it is alleged they committed those riots induced offences”.
He submitted and rightly so that nobody should gloss over the fact that the defendants, be they children or adults, have already spent over three months in”very dehumanising detention conditions. This is very inhumane and a breach of their fundamental rights. It is my view that even if they committed the offences they are being accused of, (certainly not treason) the maximum sentences that could have been handed down should have been reasonable fines and in serious cases, imprisonment not exceeding three months in the proximate correctional facility or borstal institution. For Daudu the case should be discontinued by the federal government, with “adequate rehabilitative compensation paid” to the victims.
Dehumanising Nigerians is a regular fare with our rulers. If what’s going on with these minors and young adults was not with the prior knowledge of the attorney-general of the federation, and indeed the president, then the police have gone rogue and they need to be reined in. There are serious security challenges across the country, and this distraction serves nobody any good. Let the children go and pay them ‘rehabilitative compensation’ to rebuild their lives. They should not suffer double jeopardy in that some of the minors could be among the 20 million out-of-school kids who are now also being visited with the rough edges of selective application of twisted laws.
•As reported by Sundiata Post, President Bola Tinubu yesterday, Monday, 4 November 2024 gave order for the release of the children. – Editor
