22 June 2009
editorial
On June 11, 2009, some seventeen persons, 14 of them members of a religious sect, suffered gunshot wounds during a clash with the police in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital. The three others were bystanders. Members of the sect were in a funeral procession to bury four of their colleagues who were killed in a traffic incident the day before.
Sect members, including their leader, Malam Mohammad Yusuf, said that the shooting was an unprovoked act of a state law enforcement agency on a harmless and defenceless minority group.
Not so, said the police. The Borno State Commissioner of Police, Mr Christopher Dega, observed that he did not think the policemen involved in the incident were reckless, but had acted in self-defence.
As the Trust reported it, in the funeral procession were a number of sect members riding on motor-cycles without protective helmets. There are existing rules in Borno State, and a number of other states in the country, that require those using that mode of transportation to wear helmets. The regulations also specify penalties for violations, like confiscation of the motor-cycle and prosecution of the offending rider. If the report of the helmetless mourners is correct, it would appear that they were in breach of the law; the assertion that their mood at the time, that is grief at the loss of four of their colleagues, ought to have been taken into account, and probably exculpate them from responsibility, should not be an excuse.
On the other hand, was the method deployed by the police in enforcing what they saw as an infringement of the law the appropriate one, given the circumstances?
We think not.
The incident, and the different interpretation give to it, illustrate the continuing gulf of mistrust between security agencies and the public they are meant to watch over and protect.
The enforcement of the crash helmet rules should not be the responsibility of the Operation Flush, the special anti-crime squad of the Borno State police command. In fact, from the description of its modus operandi, the squad's main focus is anti-robbery. Given the facts of the Maiduguri incident that have been made public, the police authorities exercised poor judgement in the deployment of members of the squad to deal with a sensitive matter such as this one.
It is amazing, that after experiencing similar incidents in the country in the past two decades, beginning from the 1984 Maitasine uprising in Jimeta, Yola, in the then Gongola State, the police authorities and other security agencies are apparently yet to devise strategies to tackle such sensitive issues, either before they occur, or managing them when they do, in order to prevent their escalation.
The Maiduguri incident should not have taken the dimension it did, and the potential for further conflicts that it threatened, if both parties, the Mohammed Yusuf group and the police, had played by the rules. There is no society governed by laws that would sit by and watch those very laws being ignored and trampled on, no matter the condition, including a funeral procession.
Those who enforce the laws must also recognize whether enforcing them at any given time and circumstance would achieve results that would ultimately advance the well-being of society. The Maiduguri incident must not be allowed to escalate further. This behoves both Malam Mohammed Yusuf and his followers, on the one hand, and the law enforcement agencies on the other, to maintain the peace.
We recommend that the state government, as a measure of kind gesture, pick the bills for the treatment of all the persons wounded in the incident. It should begin a process of educating members of the various religious groups, particularly those who now consider themselves as aggrieved minorities, on the need to operate within the law for them to press for the concessions they crave.
The police authorities should be wiser by now. We expect them to bolster their intelligence services, backed by a policy of persuasion and dialogue to deal with such issues; resort to the use of force as a first line of attack, only makes matters worse, and the society is the loser.
Read comments. Write your own.
Copyright © 2009 Daily Trust. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
Assalamu alaikum sunana salihu suleiman salihu jimeta yola adamawa state,kuma dalibi a alahar university egypt.wato abun da nakeso nafada shine duk wanda keda hannu chikin wannan harin da akai domin ama mallamin mu mohammad yusuf sharri to insha allah haka zaka gansu zasuta mutuwa a saye.saboda haka sharana gareka mallam da kuma sauran yan uwana wanda aqeeda yahadamu dasu da muyi hakuri insha Allah bawani abun da zai faru damu sai abunda Allah ya kaddara mana.wassalamu alaikum daga dalibin mallam muhammad yusuf maiduguri. idan akwai karin bayani yanzu haka ina masar wannan shine number na.+20144332515.don Allah duk mutumin dakeda karin… [Read Full Text]