…ICC light on Nigeria

THE festering evil in Nigeria has been going on as if it has the whole world under its feet and that no one would call it to question.

Human life has become much worthless than those of cows under it and much consequences are at stake for toying with the life of those precious animals in this our  country.

A retired Professor once came to our meeting one day complaining how cow herders shot at his car and there was no police station that would take his complaint from Ekiti to Osogbo because the Miyetti Allah people are at present above the laws of the land and they have the great leisure of having the commander-in-chief as their patron.

I mentioned it on TV and the police called me thinking l made it up. I gave them his mobile number but they are yet to interrogate him in two years.

When over 70 Benue indigenes were massacred on January 1, 2018 by herdsmen, Governor Sam Ortom was summoned to Abuja not to be offered a word of condolence or be assured that law and order would be enforced. The Governor was told to go and learn how to live in peace with his killer-neighbours.

The cowherders have gone across non-Fulani Nigeria killing people with reckless abandon and raping women all over the place with law watching the other way.

All of a sudden, banditry took over the country with Governors posing with criminals and bandits sealing the fact we are truly back to the jungle of humanity.

Our government officials at a point became spokesmen for these terrorists and excuse their recklessness. Our polity became a laughing stock among enlightened humanity. It appeared we were hopelessly lost and irretrievably captured and irredeemable.

Even when we had #EndSARS and we sprayed live bullets on youths singing national anthem and waving our flags and CNN captured all the sordid details of the atrocities,  Minister Lai Mohammed was threatening the global news agency in reckless arrogance of power and singing “massacre without dead bodies” even with Lagos Coroner advertising unindentified bodies in its morgue dumped between October 19 and 27, 2020 which was the peak of the crackdown.

The civilised humanity has not totally abandoned Nigeria to the whims of its violators. We had the Brititish Parliament that had a profound public heating on Nigeria. Reputable organisations like the Amnesty International has not kept quite in spite of the shenanigans of a mad regime.

Now the International Criminal Court (ICC) is flashing its light on the dark deeds of the repressive authority in Nigeria.

The Nigerian government has not washed itself clean of Wall Street Journal allegation that it paid 3million Euros to Boko Haram years back and it has been recruiting members of the evil group into the Army calling them “repentant”.

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has said that a  decade-long probe has found enough evidence to merit opening a full-scale investigation into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Boko Haram extremists — as well as by Nigerian government forces battling them in a deadly insurgency.

Winding up the preliminary probe into North Eastern Nigeria’s Islamic uprising, Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said on Friday there is a “reasonable basis to believe” Boko Haram and splinter groups linked to it committed crimes including murder, rape, sexual slavery and torture, as well as intentionally targeting schools and places of worship and using child soldiers.

She added that while the “vast majority of criminality” in the conflict was by Boko Haram, prosecutors also found grounds to believe that members of the Nigerian Security Forces committed crimes including murder, rape, torture and using child soldiers.

Bensouda said the next step will be to request authorisation from judges to open a formal investigation.

Boko Haram and the breakaway faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province, are fighting to impose strict Islamic Shariah rule in Nigeria. Thousands have been killed in the more than 10-year-old insurgency and more than a million people have been displaced.

Bensouda said the preliminary probe took a decade in part because her office was monitoring investigations in Nigeria linked to the conflict.

Ultimately, she said that, “our assessment is that none of these proceedings relate, even indirectly, to the forms of conduct or categories of persons that would likely form the focus of my investigations.”

Amnesty International welcomed the announcement and urged the court to swiftly begin an “effective and well-resourced investigation.”

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