EBUBEAGU: You can’t secure S’East without our participation —Ejimakor
Posted by FN Editor | 3 years ago | 775 times
An Owerri-based legal practitioner, Barrister Aloysius Ejimakor, yesterday, said it would be impossible to secure South East without the participation of the people.”
Ejimakor, who took the position after doing a postmortem of the attacks in the region, recalled that “before Nigeria became a unitary state, while still pretending to be a federation, regional security was mostly within the purview of regional authorities, not the federal government”, adding that it worked pretty well.
He said: “This arrangement was not by chance but by design. Nigeria’s indigenous founding fathers and the departing British colonialists knew too well that you cannot internally secure a people without their participation.
“In other words, Eastern Nigerians shouldn’t be the ones internally securing Western Nigeria or Northern Nigeria and vice versa. When you do that, it becomes counter-intuitive to security and begins to look like an occupation, a conquest or worse. And it might breed popular resistance, overtly or covertly.”
Ejimakor argued that “the historical dangers of a tribally-imbalanced security leadership for Nigeria, even in its present unitary form, terrified the framers of the 1999 Constitution to the point that they enacted at Section 217(3) that the composition of the officer corps and other ranks of the armed forces of the federation shall reflect the federal character of Nigeria.”
He further explained that in plain terms, no region, including the South East, shall be excluded from securing Nigeria or any part thereof, especially its own part.
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