Of Public Protests And Accidental Discharge

One of the hallmarks of true democracy is the right of the citizens to be heard on issues they consider unacceptable or retrogressive. It is from this civilized conduct that Nigerians derived the right to stage peaceful protests, naturally intended to attract public attention to a given issue and engineer healthy debate before arriving at a just end.

Strangely, successive Nigerian governments had often considered such public protests as an indictment and or outright condemnation of their programmes and projects. With that mindset, every reaction, not grounded in vain praise and was pre-judged as the product of the wicked machinations of opponents or enemies  must be crushed.

To that heavy-handedness, have countless Nigerians lost their lives, their offence being, an unarmed protest against what they considered wrong, as they are entitled to, in a civilized society.

The worst era in the usage of such brute force to suppress dissent were the overlapping regimes of the Buhari/Idiagbon duo through the President Ibrahim Babangida years and later the Abacha/Diya’s all of which peaked with the protests against the annulment by General Ibrahim Babangida of the June 12, 1993 general elections, largely believed to have been won by Late Chief Moshood Abiola.

However, with the turn of the new democratic dispensation in May 1999, violent hostility as official response to unarmed protests abated considerably with only isolated cases of police assault against protesters. In fact, the state’s attitude to such internationally acclaimed conduct has over the years, changed for the better.

Indeed, it was for that relieving re-think and conducive environment thus provided for dissent that the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and other pressure groups, at various times, between last year and this, protested against various government actions without a single incident.

This is why, it came to The Tide as a huge shock that unarmed youths from the nine states that make up the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) who staged a peaceful protest, to press home alleged deprivations by the interventionist body, were last Wednesday dispersed with brute force by the Military Joint Task Force (JTF).

According to independent media reports, there was pandemonium at the Aba Road office of the NDDC in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, when men of the JTF shot sporadically to disperse about 1,000 unarmed and defenceless youths who had staged a peaceful protest to the NDDC headquarters, over alleged failure of the Commission to Implement the Youths’ Skills Acquisition Programme commenced 2005.

Apparently, denied audience by their unfriendly hosts, the protesting youths, according to reports, displayed placards and briefed newsmen of their disappointments, key among which was the failure of the commission to provide the graduate trainees starter packs, as part of a credit scheme promised them before and during their Training.

Rather than address the issues, the JFT was called in the raid which allegedly ensued, as many of the protesting youths were said to have sustained gun-shot wounds, some of them critically, although no deaths were reported at press time.

That is not how it should be. When, for instance a protest tilts towards the likelihood of getting violent, any reasonable police would disperse protesters with minimum force, using less life threatening weaponry like tear-gas canisters, but certainly not live ammunition.

That is why The Tide is reluctant to believe wholly that such arrogant display of military grand-standing could be staged against armless protesters but we also find it difficult to accept that the gun-shot wounds sustained by some protesters were faked by the victims themselves.

This is why we consider it most instructive to call for a thorough investigation to ascertain, among other things those who invited the JTF to quell a civil protest, employing the kind of force alleged, who, infact authorised the use of such live ammunition instead of plastic bullets as often advised as a last resort and above all, the authenticity of the allegations leveled against the NDDC by the youths.

We say so because such tackless accidental discharges and the likelihood of reprisals that normally ensue are expensive distractions that the relatively peaceful city can ill-afford.

In the future therefore,  the Police or any Security Agency engaged to check the likely excesses of civilized protest must demonstrate maturity and great measure of responsibility to avoid any return to the past, when,  police carried out accidental discharges in a brass culture of impunity, while, the hopeless citizenry stayed dump and afraid.