‘Amotekun’ and the constitution: Between legal validity and a people’s inalienable right to live

BY ADEOLU OYEKAN

Malami may be right from the strict position of the law, what Malami has just done however, is to also proclaim the Sharia Police and the civilian JTF illegal. He cannot legally defend their existence if the logic of his position on ÀMÒTÉKÙN is accepted as valid in law.

The next step and the way forward is political. In the face of the exclusive failure of the FG to secure lives and properties as provided for in the exclusive list of the Constitution, we must either amend the laws to reflect our current realities or succumb to criminality and insecurity out of fidelity to an obsolete law. It is an existential choice.

The immediate concern should not be about sectional interests that are, or may be working against the decision of the Southwest to defend its people in the face of the failure of the FG and its security agencies, but with those who within the Southwest plot to profit from the politicization of the collective security of the region. Whether this is being done to please some interests in power as a show of loyalty, or to goad the FG into a conflict with the Southwest and rally the people behind a cause they hope to hijack at a decisive point, the people have a duty to ensure that their reckless opportunism is made to blow up in their faces.

It is important to force the conversation now that Malami’s statement doesn’t put the Southwest under any pressure. Forced into such a situation by the exigencies at hand, the pressure should now be on the FG to make legal what may illegal on account of the inadequacies of the Constitution, but is nonetheless a necessity in the face of serious threats to the security of the different regions of the country. The Constitution cannot be an impediment to a people’s collective rights to security and self-determination.

Legalism is good, but it cannot be at the expense of the lives of the people the laws are meant to protect in the first instance. We need more versions of ÀMÒTÉKÙN all over the country, supported by the law, not inhibited by it.