Ebubeagu and the excesses of impunity
There appears to be no love lost between Governor Hope Uzodinma and the good people of Imo State. It does not take a lot to sense that for a very long time, the people of Imo State will feel aggrieved with the Supreme Court for foisting on them someone they could never have voted for in a million elections even if the court only did what the law dictated and no more.
If the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) group had thought that its agitations and activities were in the interests of the Southeast, it has since stood by, watching haplessly as criminal elements have infiltrated it, piling atrocities with each passing day. Multiple attacks have been carried out in the Southeast to push a region known for its relative peace towards the precipice.
Until recently when Anambra State became the epicenter of the troubles, a lot of the attacks were in Imo State with citizens taking as many hits as security forces. Even before the attacks started, Governor Uzodinma was already hugely unpopular, with many perceiving him to at best be the beneficiary of an opaque judicial verdict that fed from Nigeria`s highly corrupt patronage system.
What one will never know is how much of the attacks happened because Uzodinma was on seat as Governor, and how many of them were by forces bent on achieving their own goals. What is clear is that Uzodinma’s incendiary rhetoric has never helped matters. Neither has his formation of the infamous Ebubeagu security unit which has lurched from one controversy to another since it came into existence.
Created at a security summit of 11th April 2021 as a regional security outfit by the five South-east governors to tackle insecurity in the region, Ebubeagu was formally inaugurated by the Ebonyi State Governor David Nweze Umahi in December last year. The outfit was no doubt created to ape Amotekun,a similar outfit in the Southwest which was created to counter growing security threats in the region.
With its headquarters in Enugu, it was mandated to coordinate the vigilante in the Southeast and generally improve the security situation in the Southeast. It appears however that more than anything else, it was the activities of IPOB that panicked the South-east governors to the security summit in which Ebubeagu was formed.
With the incarceration of its leader in Abuja, the IPOB had increased the frequency of its attacks in the South-east, threatening and targeting the governors directly. If today, Ebubeagu in spite of its handful of modest achievements is being fingered for contributing to some of the problems it was created to tackle, it is because many of its members have shown that they lack any iota of professionalism. On Sunday, 17th July 2022, the lives of seven youths in Awomama, Imo State were brutally cut short, reportedly by operatives of Ebubeagu. Uzodinma has since absolved Ebubeagu of any complicity in the murder.
It does not take clairvoyance to see that some unscrupulous governors who already operate like demi-gods will leave no stone unturned in turning their state police into their personal vigilante and vicious attack dogs. One only needs to look at what some state legislatures have become at the hands of some overbearing governors to know that in Nigeria anything is possible. It however does not mean that in the face of rampaging insecurity, Nigeria should not explore all legal avenues to secure her citizens while getting justice for all those who are ever treated outside what the law prescribes.
Kene Obiezu, keneobiezu@gmail.com
