FG Should Nullify DSS’ Lopsided Enlistment,

By Says Huriwa

A non-governmental organisation, Human Rights Writers Association Of Nigeria (HURIWA), has called on the federal government to nullify the recent enlistment into the officer cadre of the Department of State Services (DSS).

The group described the recruitment which is believed to favour the North-west and Katsina State, the home state of President Muhammadu Buhari as unconstitutional.

Making the call in a statement by its National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, the group also condemned as puerile, unethical and unconstitutional,  a reported defence put up by an unnamed presidency official that the lopsided enlistment was done to redress past lopsidedness.

HURIWA dismissed the “tepid defence for this outrageous and indeed heartless violations of the constitutional principles of federal Ccharacter and natural justice by officials of the DSS whose Director General, Alhaji Lawal Musa Daura, also comes from Katsina State which took a joint lead in the high number of favoured candidates enlisted into this national security institution.

It said apart from the fact that the defence put up by the presidency official is irrational and illogical, the so-called presidency official failed to produce any convincing statistical data to validate the “justification of this national show of shame by those who conducted the enlistment exercise recently done in the DSS. 

“If we take the claim that because in the past Kano and Katsina States were reportedly shortchanged in the previous enlistment exercises (assuming without conceding), do we then say that the South-east of Nigeria should produce the president of Nigeria for the next four tenures from 2019 because of the historical crime of systematically excluding the zone from producing any executive president of Nigeria since Independence? This gross breach of the constitutional principles of federal character as occasioned by the lopsided enlistment exercise carried out by the Daura led DSS must be reversed so as to preserve our much cherished unity as a country.”

HURIWA stated thus: “We in the human rights sector are by this statement calling on the Northern hawks that have constituted the presidential cabal under the President Buhari’s administration to stop their longstanding implementation of pro-northern regional agenda which are signposted by the heavily lopsided appointments into key national defence and economic departments of the Nigerian government with only Nigerians from the Hausa/Fulani section of northern Nigeria.

“This longstanding rape of the Nigerian Constitution would inevitably have significant negative impacts on the unity of this very highly fragile and fragmented nation-state known as Nigeria.

“Those who have constituted themselves as political demi-gods and are waging vicious campaign of total capture and occupation of all vital security institutions and other juicy economic positions must know that power is ephemeral and that they can’t subject and subjugate forever without resistance the rest of the Nigerian population to this enslavement and forceful occupation of national offices and key positions that by constitutional right belongs to each and every Nigerian citizen irrespective of ethno religious beliefs and orientations.”

HURIWA recalled that a breakdown of the recruitment into the DSS in 2016 commissioned cadet officers on geopolitical basis showed that Katsina State alone had (51) candidates.

This is even as all the South-east states combined got a paltry (44).

The statistical data as released are as follows:  North-west           165; North-east 100; South-south 42; North-central 66; South-west 57; and South-east 44.

HURIWA also called on the National Assembly to wade in and direct an investigative hearing on “this dangerous violation of the Nigerian Federal Character principle in the enlistment exercise recently carried out by DSS with a view to ensure that equity, fairness and constitutionalism take overriding place.”