YWC insists Amotekun can’t be subsumed under police

• Community policing is a smokescreen, HURIWA tells Buhari

The Yoruba World Congress, yesterday, expressed its support for Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State and Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State on the decision not to put the regional security outfit, Amotekun, under the control of the Inspector-General of Police, saying the body should not be subsumed under the police.

In a statement by its President-General, Prof. Banji Akintoye, the group said that the decision by the governors was in the right direction.

“We support the stand of Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State and Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State that the South-West security outfit, code-named Amotekun, shall not be subsumed under the control of the Nigeria Police Force.

“Amotekun, as rightly posited by the governors, is an independent security outfit necessitated by the clear danger of murderous herdsmen, internationally accepted as terrorists, heartless bandits and sundry criminals who have turned Yorubaland into killing fields.

“It was also the failure of the existing security architecture to tackle the menace and secure lives and property in the South-West region that led to the clamour for Amotekun by the generality of our people.

“It makes no sense, therefore, to put the same Amotekun under an organisation that has proved incapable and inadequate to provide the much-needed security in the first place.

“Putting Amotekun under the Nigerian Police hierarchy is a ploy to weaken it and sabotage the strident clamour of the people of the South-West for peace and security in their homeland. It must be noted that the entire Southwest rose like one man to demand and support Amotekun and to resist all efforts to truncate its birth.”

In a related release, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has lamented that the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration was seriously not interested in achieving holistic and sustainable reforms of the near moribund Nigeria Police Force, saying that the so-called community policing is a mere smokescreen to stop the much needed constitutional reforms that could lead to the formation of functional state and local policing architectures for effective and efficient policing of the country.

In a statement signed by its National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, and the National Media Affairs Director, Zainab Yusuf, HURIWA asked Nigerians to demand accountability from President Buhari on why his administration announced an N13.3 billion take-off of the community policing project about the same time that the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria (MACBAN) announced the formation of quasi-national policing outfits all across the country, which absolutely offend the constitutional provision that prohibits the setting up of a parallel national policing institution.