Nigeria’s Worsening Human Rights Records

With the flagrant abuse of court orders to legitimise prolonged detention of citizens without trial in a ‘democracy’ and other forms of suppression of individual’s freedom in Nigeria, it is not surprising that while Ghana, Burundi, Malawi and Cote d’ Ivoire were recently elected to represent Africa on the Human Rights Council of the UN General Assembly, Nigeria was humiliated with only three votes, Ejiofor Alike reports

The outcome of last Tuesday’s election into the Human Rights Council of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), where Nigeria failed to secure a seat, was an indication that President Bola Tinubu’s commendable efforts to make the country regain its lost enviable position in the global arena have not diminished his administration’s culpability in worsening the brazen violation of the rights of Nigerians with impunity.

In other countries that practise democracy, security agencies treat citizens with dignity and carry out arrests with a high level of professionalism. But Nigerian security agencies humiliate, intimidate, and abduct citizens in the name of arrest.

 In some cases, security operatives break into people’s homes with sledge hammers, iron rods and heavy weapons in odd hours like criminals to carry out arrests over alleged offences for which the individual should have been invited for questioning.

The armed forces, the Nigerian Police and the Department of State Services (DSS) are the worst culprits in the violations of human rights in recent years.

In Nigeria, military personnel run rampage, raze a community to the ground and shoot at innocent residents in protest to the killing of a soldier by a few miscreants around the vicinity.

This dastardly act is always justified in some unofficial quarters with a crude and dubious claim that the killing of soldiers is an invitation to war as if the killing of the soldier is a collective decision of the community.

While the police authorities have redoubled efforts to sanction unscrupulous elements within the force that violate the rights of Nigerians, the police high command seems to be doing the bidding of powerful Nigerians by using court orders to legitimise prolonged detention of citizens without trial.

In Nigeria, what it now takes for security agents to abduct and dump a citizen in detention is a frivolous petition by a powerful individual, and an order procured under questionable circumstances from a compromised judiciary.

On its part, the DSS, which has no public record of sanctioning its operatives for their various acts of impunity, has continued to show its power and overzealousness on unarmed Nigerians.

Earlier this month, the arrest of the former Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Calabar (UNICAL), Prof. Cyril Ndifon, who is at the centre of a sex scandal, was reported in the media as a case of abduction due to the manner he was allegedly abducted from his house by DSS operatives.

It took a clarification by the DSS Director of Public Relations and Strategic Communications, Dr. Peter Afunanya for Nigerians to know that it was an arrest carried out at the instance of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) and not a case of abduction.

But Nigerians are alarmed that ICPC could not arrest an unarmed professor and had to involve the DSS on a matter that does not threaten Nigeria’s security or sovereignty.

The secret police allow some of its operatives to drag its image in the mud without any sanction except promises of investigation, the outcome of which is never made public.

In a recent incident at Garki Market in Abuja, three DSS operatives allegedly shot a tailor, Mubarak Usman, over his alleged refusal to hand over pieces of fabrics given to him by a woman-customer to one of the operatives.

Though the DSS promised an investigation, it claimed that its operatives, who were obviously on an illegal mission over a disputed business deal, came under mob attack, in an apparent justification of their ignoble conduct.

Nigerians are still awaiting the outcome of the investigation, just as the agency’s investigation into the shameful conduct of its operatives involved in a fracas with the personnel of the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS) at the Federal High Court in Lagos in July, is still being awaited.

Security agencies in Nigeria justify rights violations with ridiculous claims without realising the extent of damage they do to the image of the country.

Section 35 (4) & (5) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), prescribes that any person who is arrested or detained shall be brought before a court of law within a reasonable time.

Subsection 5 defines a “reasonable time” to mean between 24 to 48 hours, depending on the availability of a court of competent jurisdiction within the place of arrest and detention.

But since the enactment of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015, signed by former President Goodluck Jonathan barely two weeks before the end of his tenure, government agents have continued to take undue advantage of the Act to detain Nigerians without trial.

Though the ACJA empowers the authorities to rely on court orders to jail Nigerians through the backdoor for 56 days without trial, the former Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Godwin Emefiele and the suspended Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Abdulrasheed Bawa have been in detention for more than 125 days, and 121 days, respectively, without trial under a supposed democratic government.

With no law still justifying Emefiele and Bawa’s continued detention, it is evident that the Nigerian government now deals with suspected lawbreakers on its own terms, and not based on the provisions of the constitution.

On August 10, the Nigeria Police arrested and detained one Chike Ibezim after his brother, Nnamdi Ibezim shared a defamatory post against former Lagos State governor, Mr. Babatunde Fashola.

Chike was clamped into prolonged detention for what many Nigerians believed was his brother’s offence.

Amnesty International (AI), human rights lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Mr. Femi Falana, and other activists as well rights groups have repeatedly cried out over the flagrant violation of the rights of Nigerians but the trend has persisted.

With the international community taking notes of the Nigerian government’s worsening human rights records, it was not surprising that Nigeria could not secure a seat on the Human Rights Council of UNGA, despite Tinubu’s powerful presentations at the recent meeting of the global body.

Since he assumed office, Tinubu has made commendable efforts to free Nigeria from her self-inflicted image crisis but his administration is inadvertently aggravating this crisis.

UNGA, on Tuesday, elected 15 new countries to serve on the Human Rights Council.

Four of the 15 new members are African countries – Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Malawi.

After the ballots were cast and counted, Assembly President, Dennis Francis, announced that Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Malawi were among the countries elected to serve for three years, beginning January 1, 2024.

Malawi topped the voting for African nations, with 182 votes, followed by Côte d’Ivoire (181), Ghana (179), Burundi (168) and Nigeria (3).

Nigeria’s poor human rights record shows that the country’s successive civilian administrations have failed to imbibe the tenets of democracy.