Yobe students’ massacre: HURIWA asks for sack of heads of Police, SSS

Angered by the brutal murder of scores of students of the College of Agriculture, Gujba, Yobe State, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria has called for the sack of the state’s Commissioner of Police and Director of the Department of State Security. HURIWA said it was an apparent dereliction of duty on their part as they were to protect innocent civilians. In a statement signed by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and its Director of Media Affairs, Miss. Zainab Yusuf, HURIWA said the failure of the Federal Government to hold top security chiefs responsible for failure of security in their areas of jurisdiction was partly responsible for the continuous breach of peace and security by all sorts of armed non-state actors across Nigeria since this administration assumed office. The rights group also said governments at every level have the constitutional obligation of safeguarding lives and property of every citizen in Nigeria and that the continuous violation of this sacred task was undemocratic and unconstitutional. It said this may gradually erode people’s confidence in the ability of the government to exercise its constitutional authority and legitimacy. HURIWA chided Federal Government for continuously failing to take urgent, comprehensive and result-oriented measures to build up the intelligence gathering capacity of armed operatives of Nigeria’s security forces. It described this as the root -cause of the dare-devil ‘successes’ recorded so far by armed Islamic insurgents and other armed non-state actors responsible for the spate of organised mass killings of Nigerians across the Northern states of Borno, Yobe, Plateau and Kaduna.