By Akinwale Kasali
A Group under the aegis of Social Reform Group, SRG, has joined the call for State Policing following the tragic outcome of the protest by agitators for Yoruba Nation. It led to the death of two persons in Ojota, Lagos, on Monday.
Condemning the killings of the protesters in its entirety, the National Coordinator of the Group, Charles Oludare, in a statement signed on his behalf by its National Publicity Secretary Group, Kayode Fasua, said that the fracas wouldn’t have resulted to death of innocent protesters, and stressed the need for State Policing.
He added that having state police in the country would curb excesses from security agencies, who have turned shooting sporadically to disperse peaceful protesters as a norm.
Oludare in the Statement said that, “The police standing between us and chaos should not be landing all of us in chaos.
“This is a sad reminder of the refusal of the Nigerian state to adopt the state police architecture for interior security.
“I commiserate with families of victims of the attack, however urging Nigerians to seize the occasion of next month’s presidential election to vote for a candidate that would advance the cause of true federalism.
“If we had operated state police in concert with other federal investigative and intelligence agencies, a peaceful protest would not have turned bloody, especially as prospective leaders of the protesters would have been legally profiled by the state police apparatus, whose men and officers are members of the community.
“In our community, despite our differing culture and ethnicity, we know each other, as it is the case in every community in the Nigerian federation.
“The police will know the people living in that community, root out outside crisis actors and protect the peaceful protesters from the community, wherein they will mount the stump, address their gathering, and return home without any incident.
“Our presidential system is ordinarily a carry-over of the American system, but local circumstances have given us a perverted version and we are all suffering for it.”
Oludare also reinforced the group’s belief in restructuring, which he said does not mean secession, but devolution of power to constituent states and local councils of the federation for effective administration.
“If the people feel empowered that they have the rights to self determination within the Nigerian state, these secessionist groups would have lost the locus of their regional agitations, hence they die a natural death.”
The statement called on the Police Service Commission, PSC, to adopt a culture of regular orientation courses for footmen in the police service.
