Massacres Won’t Happen If There’s No Premeditation Driven By Sectarian Impulses – Ejimakor

Aloy Ejimakor, the lawyer of leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Nnamdi Kanu, has reacted the killings in the North, saying that massacres won’t happen if there’s no premeditation driven by sectarian impulses.

Barr Ejimakor made this known in a statement recently and obtained by Africa Investigative Magazine.

Ejimakor said that the non indigenous security forces have not done enough to contain the killings in the South East.

The statement reads, “Before post-colonial Nigeria transformed into its current unitary state, while still posturing as a federation, regional security was largely within the purview of the respective regions, not the federal government. And it worked well.

“This arrangement was not by chance but by well-considered design. Despite their many failings, Nigeria’s fathers and British colonialists knew that you couldn’t secure a people within their region without their participation.

“Even the British Empire knew that it couldn’t secure colonial Nigeria without the participation of Nigerians in vast numbers.

“In a diverse federation of equals (or even near-equals or unequal), Northern Nigerians shouldn’t be the ones exclusively or dominantly securing Western or Eastern Nigeria, and vice versa. When you do that, it becomes counter-intuitive to security and begins to look like an aggressive occupation or conquest.

“It also destroys the neutrality of the security personnel and engenders ethnic profiling and extrajudicial killings.

“Truth be told, massacres won’t happen if there’s no premeditation, driven by sectarian impulses and lack of empathy customarily exhibited by security personnel when it comes to law enforcement outside their regions, even when the targets of such law enforcement are unarmed and amenable to arrest.

“The inherent dangers of an imbalanced security leadership and formations is the main reason the framers of the 1999 Constitution enacted Section 217(3), which states that ‘the composition of the officer corps and other ranks of the Armed Forces of the Federation shall reflect the federal character of Nigeria’.

“In plain terms, it means that no region or tribe shall be excluded from securing Nigeria or any part thereof, especially its own part,” he said.