Human Rights Writers Association Of Nigeria (HURIWA) has stated that the National Security Adviser to the President, Mr Nuhu Ribadu, should be ashamed that hostages spent seven months in the forests with terrorists.
HURIWA flayed Ribadu for praising himself and security forces for rescuing 22 abducted students of the Federal University in Gusau in Zamfara State, after spending months in captivity.
The rights group said if it were in civilised and advanced democracies, Ribadu and the service chiefs would have voluntarily resigned for heading security architecture that lacked the competencies to confront agents of destabilisation and insecurity, threatening national insecurity and sowing fear and lawlessness in the country.
Huriwa said: “It is an unmitigated act of lack of shame, that in a time that terrorists, kidnappers, armed militants and Fulani terrorists are emboldened to go on unleashing devastating violence all around the country, one of the key figures at the command position of the armed security services, is rather celebrating the rescue, or was it release of some Nigerian students abducted by terrorists and detained as hostages for a whole seven months.”
“Nigerians should, indeed, be concerned about the total lack of a sense of remorse and shame on the part of security chiefs, whose agencies have allowed terrorists to kill Nigerians at will and kidnap hundreds of citizens for payments of billions of ransom.”
HURIWA, in a media statement by the National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, lamented that Nigeria’s security architecture had deteriorated in standards to a shameless extent that the National Security Adviser, who should have been forced to resign for the failures of intelligence that occasioned multiple abductions of university students and mass abductions of primary school pupils in their hundreds, is appearing in the public media to jubilate over his unprecedented failure.
MEANWHILE, President Bola Tinubu will, today, declare open the African Counter-Terrorism Summit with the theme, Strengthening Regional Cooperation and Institution Building to Address the Evolving Threat of Terrorism’ in Abuja.
The high-level African counter-terrorism summit in Nigeria is being organised with the support of the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT).
The summit’s objective is to enhance multilateral counter-terrorism cooperation and reshape the international community’s collective response to terrorism in Africa, while emphasising the importance of African-led and African-owned solutions.
The Presidency, in a statement issued by Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, yesterday, explained that the programme would also aim at providing a platform to review the nature and severity of the threat of terrorism on the continent, to agree on concrete strategic priorities and measures to address the scourge.
