Last Tuesday, Okrika, a port town in Rivers State, capital of the Local Government Area of the same name, situated on a small island just south of Port Harcourt, lost its peace when some gunmen went rabid, bombing and shooting in a Rambo-like style and leaving blood and tears on their trail.
By the time the dust settled, a policeman had dropped dead while several party members and supporters lay wounded. This was about the third time the All Progressives Congress (APC) had been attacked in the same Okrika. The occasion was the APC gubernatorial campaign.
In a statement issued shortly after the attack, Dakuku Peterside, the gubernatorial candidate of APC, said: “The shooting lasted for about an hour and several persons were injured including Charles Eruka, a Channels Television reporter who was stabbed. Five police officers were shot, one of them is dead and four are laying in critical condition at the hospital.
One policeman is yet to be accounted for. Some other APC supporters are still missing as at the time of this press statement while equipment at the venue have been set ablaze and several cars including three police vehicles were destroyed.”
The orgy of violence that is being unleashed at opponents and their supporters at campaign rallies has become so frightening that observers now doubt the validity of the peace pacts entered into by all the political parties.
In what appeared to be novel in the history of Nigeria, the incumbent President and presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) had on January 15, signed a peace bond in Abuja, which was tagged “Abuja Declaration Accord.”
The peace pact signed at a sensitisation workshop on non-violence organised by the Offices of the National Security Adviser and the Special Adviser to the President on Inter-Party Affairs, was aimed at ensuring a violence-free general election- before, during and after.
The agreement signing, which was chaired by Emeka Anyaoku, a former Commonwealth Secretary General, provided that the candidates run issue-based campaigns at national, state and local government levels devoid of religious incitement and ethnic or tribal profiling; refrain from making public statements, pronouncements, declarations or speeches that have the capacity to incite any form of violence before, during and after the election; forcefully and publicly speak out against provocative utterances and oppose all acts of electoral violence, whether perpetrated by supporters and/or opponents; commit themselves and their parties to the monitoring of the adherence to the accord, if necessary, by a national peace committee made up of respected statesmen and women, traditional and religious leaders; and that the institutions of government including INEC and security agencies must act and be seen to act with impartiality.
Apart from the peace pact signed at the federal level, it has since been replicated at the state level where gubernatorial aspirants agreed to ensure that their supporters eschew violence. Despite the much-advertised pact, Nigeria has continued to harvest politically-motivated disturbances from various parts of the country.
The other day, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said about 58 people have been killed in election-related violence in 22 states from December 3, 2014 to penultimate Friday.
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Chidi Odinkalu, chairman, Governing Council of the Commission, made the disclosure while representing a report entitled, ‘Pre-election Report and Advisory on Violence in Nigeria’s 2015 General Elections.’
On many occasions, there have been reported cases of violence in some parts of the North, where campaign materials (vans, billboards, posters, belonging to opponents were burnt and campaign offices torched.
Speaking in an interview with Silverbird Television on the Okrika shooting, Olu Martins, a civil society practitioner, said the development signposts danger for the entire Rivers State in particular and Nigeria in general.
Martins expressed disappointment over the inability of the police to preempt the attack.
“This is about the third time it’s happening in Okrika. The security agents had given the go ahead for the rally in Okrika. Then the question is what has happened to police intelligence? Why are we reactionary instead of pro-active? We were told that blasts happened three times before the sporadic shootings. It means that the police did not do its home work well,” he said.
He further expressed sadness over the seeming inability of the security agents to flush out miscreants and bring them to book. Martins believes that the fact that the police have not been able to frontally attack the miscreants or because of the connections of such youths perpetrating violence, no punitive measures are taken against them, they have become emboldened to commit more crime in society and easily get away with it.
Martins further pointed out that a possible reason for the escalation of violence in the polity is the emphasis on cutting corners to achieve electoral victory. According to him, “if elections are seen to be free, fair and credible there will be less violence. Again, looking at the peace accord, how many of the politicians who signed the pacts believe that it will work? An average politician doesn’t believe in himself; so, there is something wrong with us to continue believing them. The greatest problem is that the peace accord is not actionable. We have seen and heard a leader in this country say that a particular election was a do-or-die affair.
“How do you think that peace accord will work when the political practitioners do not have control over the activities of their supporters?”
“One thing is becoming very clear. A time will come when the politicians themselves will be looking for a hiding place. When the explosions happened in Okrika and the shooting persisted, I saw the APC gubernatorial candidate being whisked away from the venue, which means he was also afraid for his life. A time will come when a governor will be kidnapped in Nigeria. The chicken has come home to roost. When the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) struck, everybody struggled to fight it. The government at various levels fought vigorously. They did so because the person that brought it in came through the airport, international airport at that. If it were a poor man disease, they would have relaxed; they would not have done anything. So, this electoral violence is a monster that will consume both the rich and poor if nothing practical is done and urgently too.”
“From the chronicles of events taking place in the North and south, we are on ourselves consciously and unconsciously working toward the fulfillment of that prediction that Nigeria may cease to remain as one in 2015,” Martins further observed.
The international community has continued to express concerns over the polls. The United States, the United Nations, and the European Union have made significant investments towards conflict prevention in this regard. Some of them have had to organise seminars and workshops where politicians were exposed to the dangers of violent elections. The United States Embassy in Nigeria, for instance, recently organised a debate for the gubernatorial candidates of PDP and APC in Lagos State. The candidates were also charged to keep the peace and to carry out their campaigns within the ambit of the law.
But observers say that the threats and challenges posed by Boko Haram extremists, political provocateurs, and ordinary criminals are vast. They have expressed fears that it may not be possible to prevent election violence but that “mitigating the level and scope of killings is all that is left at this point.”
A pundit, who spoke with BD SUNDAY on condition of anonymity, accused politicians of precipitating violence for their own selfish ends, also blaming the growing violence on the level of unemployment in the country.
“Long before now, we heard that some people were already stock-piling arms ahead of the elections. We have yet to hear of anybody that was jailed as a result. We should expect greater violence in a society where millions of educated and able-bodied young men and women roam the streets without meaningful engagements. An idle mind has not ceased to be the devil’s workshop. With the dollars politicians are throwing about, recruiting idle hands from the army of unemployed youths is as easy as ABC. I think, we, as a country, has sown the wind, and must reap the whirlwind,” the analyst said.
Agomuo Zebulon
