Lorine Emenike
Civil Society organisation in Rivers State have blamed the nonchalant attitude of security agencies in the state for the lingering insecurity in different parts of the state.
Comrade Ken Henshaw, the principal of “We The People” a Port Harcourt based CSO, said he is irked by the state of insecurity in every part of the state.
Ken Henshaw condemned the nonchalant attitudes of the law enforcement agencies in the state in the handling and curbing of crimes and criminality.
He said “anybody who is not alarmed or deeply worried about this whole problem is not residing within the state, the law enforcement agents have been totally quiet about what is happening”
Continuing, Ken Henshaw also blamed media operators in the state for not being proactive with their jobs. He said “for me, it is totally shocking that even the news headlines today, they do not even find the names of the victims (the people who died), so how do we begin to ask for accountability. Who killed? How were they prosecuted? Which cult is being held? You know physical evidence/ accountability.
“There is no physical evidence/ accountability for the mass murder happening in Rivers State, the killings/atrocity will continue.
“The law enforcement agencies in Rivers State are totally, absolutely convenient to the killings and crimes happening in the state, the attitudes of journalists and the law enforcement agents in the state leaves a very dangerous tradition for us, a tradition of zero accountability”
“I will suggest that RIVSCO tolls the part that they are adopting. The part of leading some kind of action, it could be a protest. There should be a kind of action to show public disdain of what is going on because it seems like law enforcement, even the government are sitting with their hands tied without doing anything”
“We must call the attention of the media in the state to what is going on because the media is silent to the extent, killings in Rivers State no longer make headlines on the front pages of newspapers, it is bad. It is absolutely terrible that mass killings, the beheading of people, the sour, goring and disturbing images of beheaded souls on the street and major junctions don’t make headlines anymore. The society must not accept such level of human depravity, we are a society that has lost human value”
” I think that somehow, we just need to get the media to start taking issues of atrocities more serious. Almost everyday since April 9th, there have been uncountable numbers of killings within River State. So we need to definitely get the media to put these things back on the front burner of public discussion. Only when it is on the front burner do we tend to seek for accountability ”
“Thirdly, we need to start putting pressure on the law enforcement agencies in the state to make arrests and prosecute perpetrators of these crimes. We need to start having the names of the people who have been killed and demand for justice”
“We need to start having advocacy upon advocacy and pressure visits to law enforcement agencies in the state telling them clearly that their social contract with the people is basically the protection of lives and properties. We need to make them start taking actions now. We need to start identifying the drivers of these atrocities, and one such driver is the alarming increase in the use of narcotics, like marijuana, cocaine, tramadol etc, the severing of the head of a fellow human cannot happen without the influence of narcotics. We need to start taking the Nigeria Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) on their steps and actions in the control of narcotics because the use of narcotics is on the increase.
“We also need to start asking very serious questions about the proliferation of small arms in this region. The level of small and medium arms build up that exists in Rivers State doesn’t exist anywhere else in the country not even in Borno state which is in a state of war”
“We need to start asking questions how:
1. How these arms come into the state, what are the routs?
2. How are the bullets procured?
“We need to control the use of firearms. Also, we must start seeking immediately, radical and strong partnership with the national human right commission. Another conversion we need to start having is with the Nigerian Bar Association because we need to ask questions of how the judiciary prosecute criminals and then very conductively, let me say this that a lot of persons who perpetrate these atrocities are called repeat offenders. They are persons who have gone into the system and the system failed to process them, they were persons whom the system found guilty at some point, detained them by the system to be prosecuted but the system at some point vomited them on the account of bail”
“Our penal system fails to take the people in, process them and tame them”
On his part, the state chairman of Rivers Civil Society Organization, Comrade Enefa Georgewill called on the government at all level to wake up to its responsibilities of securing lives and properties as the spate of killings is unbecoming.
Continuing, Comrade Georgewill said that ” Of course we are aware that the security apparatus in terms of men and personnel are controlled by the federal government. However, we are equally aware that the state government and the local government control security votes. Security is all about government at different levels to organise people in a way that crime will not be lucrative. We don’t wait for persons to commit crimes before we begin to pay them and call it amnesty. Let us equally begin to organise a society in a way that those who have not committed crimes will receive resources from government, by way of employment, by way of sporting activities, by way of loans to encourage businesses, by way of even productive activities. We have a very high level of unemployment and this is one of the biggest ground for criminality. When people don’t have any means of survival, society tends to see the high level of insecurity ”
Comrade Georgewill, used the medium to call on the government to create job opportunities for people so that crime will be discouraged.
He equally urged the government to support the tactical units of security agents financially and otherwise, adding that by so doing, “we can actually get this crime lifted off from the board before it even occurs”
He also said that there’s a need to thoroughly and properly train our security agents and that their salaries and welfares should be increased, he said by so doing, ” it is another way to encourage them to diligently do their jobs”
“We are calling for professionalism on the part of our security agents. In recent times, we have seen where security officials left their primary duty of securing the society, but more or less go into their private ventures, in most scenario kill those that they are supposed to protect”
” For us, Rivers Civil Society Organization, we use this civil society round table to discuss these issues and to see how we can call state actors to be accountable for their failures in terms of this security”
“One of the best ways to discourage crime is to arrest and punish those who are found guilty and making sure, those who have not committed crime are provided with opportunities so that they will not go into crime”
