Ile-Ife mayhem: No to partial justice

The deft reporting of The Punch newspaper correspondent in Osun State culminating in an interview published in the papers’ edition of Sunday, March 26, must be commended. The reporter succeeded in tracking down a vulcanizer reported dead in the Ile-Ife mayhem of March 8 and got a good interview.

Mojeed Owoyomi disclosed in the interview that Yoruba and Hausa used guns and shot arrows at each other during the mayhem, expressing surprise that the police arrested and paraded only Yoruba people as being responsible for the crisis. Owoyomi’s workplace is, or was, as it has now been burned, at Sabo, the epicenter of the violence. Typical of us in this part of the world, various casualties and fatalities have been bandied around that it becomes difficult to know exactly how many lives were lost.  At a press briefing cum parade of suspects – I shall return to the so-called parade later – last week in Abuja, the Nigeria Police said that 46 people were killed while 96 were taken to the Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital in the town with 81 already discharged while 15 were still receiving treatment as at that time. It can be confirmed that it was an altercation between an Ife man whose wife or girlfriend, depending on the version you hear; a Hausa man allegedly molested and the husband later retaliated culminating in the violence. At the end many shops were razed down with properties destroyed and lives lost in the process.

The Ooni of Ife and Osun State governor subsequently intervened to douse the tension while a senator from Kano State, Musa Kwankaso, left his official business in Kano and Abuja and pronto zoomed into Ife demanding compensation for his people. Nothing bad in that especially since his major duty is seeing to their welfare. But that is where the narrative gets awry especially when other supposedly non-partisan actors got involved. Abdulrahman Bello Dambazau, our interior minister, whose claim to fame under this government stems from asking one of the civil defence corps men to clean his shoes in public, proceeded to Ife in company of the foreign affairs minister only to proclaim magisterially that the crisis had no ethnic colouration.  For goodness sake, this is a man with a doctorate in criminology who rose to become a lieutenant general and who actually commanded our military police at a time pronouncing without investigation or inquiry that even though the mayhem was between two nationalities, yet it had no ethnic flavor.

I guess there must be something with those who once put on military uniforms in Nigeria that even while in retirement, they still see the country as their fiefdom where the citizens must be subjugated. The same Dambazau who suddenly remembered that security is important and whom has neither visited the eastern part of the country where agents of the government he works for have massacred citizens protesting peacefully nor showed sufficient concern about the perennial crisis in the middle belt where herdsmen whether Fulani or ghosts as we are usually told, now decided that the Ife crisis is worthy of not just attention but a visit.

The police too must join in the show of shame blatantly displaying their partisanship in arresting 31 people, all Yoruba, before releasing 13 and parading 18 publicly in Abuja. Ostensibly the naked show of power was to intimidate and cow these suspects taking them from Ife, bypassing Osogbo, the state capital, and could not even stop at the zonal police headquarters but straight to Abuja. Just as popular lawyer, Femi Falana, recently wrote, it’s amazing that only poor suspects are paraded and not rich thieves. The media is culpable too in the trial by showing people whose guilt is yet to be established as those responsible for particular crime.

A major deterrence in policing is punishment of offenders and so crime perpetrators must have their day in competent courts but when two sets of people battled each other with guns and arrows, true justice is jeopardized with only one set of combatants arrested. Presently too, no Yoruba has been given any relief material and neither are they on the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) records of beneficiaries after the mayhem.

The regular occurrence of skirmishes and mayhem under its watch should be a major concern for the Buhari government. Across the country, from the north to the east and west, lives are lost regularly at the twinkle of an eye. True some are age long conflicts but the government too is not laying the foundation of true justice as its officials’ partiality is so evident that attempts at intervening could only lead to further problems. Let justice be done though the heavens fall, says a legal maxim, which should ring loudly in the minds of our government, otherwise the present peace in Ile Ife, is that of a graveyard.