By George Mgbeleke <\/p>\n
Prominent pro-democracy and civil rights advocacy group HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA) has alerted the newly sworn in minister of Defence General Christopher Gwabin Musa that soldiers did not respect his order withdrawing them from mounting ROADBLOCKS so as to be deployed purely for counterinsurgency and other internal security operations. <\/p>\n
The Rights organisation regretted that whilst the enthusiastic minister of defence may have been deceived into believing that his order withdrawing soldiers from ROADBLOCKS was obeyed, HURIWA said contrary to the expectations that soldiers fundamentally are trained to obey the orders of their commanders, it is unfortunate that in all of South East of Nigeria, it was observed during the Yuletide season that it was business as usual in the hundreds of ROADBLOCKS vexatiously set up by soldiers and police bearing arms and ammunitions but who were noticed been busy extorting drivers passing through these ROADBLOCKS and constituting severe traffic difficulties for road users.<\/p>\n
HURIWA recalled that the new defence minister stated that the withdrawal of soldiers from checkpoints is amongst his most important strategies for fighting insecurity and insurgency.<\/p>\n
HURIWA recall that Nigeria\u2019s new Minister of Defence, Christopher Musa, had said one of his key strategies for tackling insurgency is to withdraw soldiers from road checkpoints and redeploy them into the bush to directly confront terrorists.<\/p>\n
The defence minister Musa, a retired general, said police officers and personnel of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) would take over checkpoint duties from the military.<\/p>\n
He said this while responding to questions during his screening at the Senate.<\/p>\n
He was responding to a question on how he plans to enforce discipline among military officers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can assure you that we\u2019re going to address them totally. We\u2019re going to have independent patrol teams that will go and make sure that we do, and what we want to do again is to withdraw basically all military men out of checkpoints and let the police and civil defence corps handle those aspects so that we can go into the bushes and take out these criminals wherever it is they are. It\u2019s important,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For decades, soldiers have manned checkpoints across Nigerian roads, especially in volatile areas, to support civil authorities in maintaining security.<\/p>\n
Contrary to this directive, HURIWA\u2019S teams of researchers noticed significant presence of armed soldiers and police manning the hundreds of checkpoints across South-East of Nigeria which these armed security forces use for extortion of drivers and road users and were not seriously involved in any sort of security activities to protect the population of South East of Nigeria. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By George Mgbeleke Prominent pro-democracy and civil rights advocacy group HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA) has alerted the newly sworn in minister of Defence General Christopher Gwabin Musa that soldiers did not respect his order withdrawing them from mounting ROADBLOCKS so as to be deployed purely for counterinsurgency and other internal security operations. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[449,3721,549,5788],"class_list":["post-9890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-expectations","tag-fundamentally","tag-soldiers","tag-trained"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9891,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9890\/revisions\/9891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyechoes.ng\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}