The Nigeria Police Force, the Nigerian Army, the Department of State Services, and other security services were criticized by the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) on Wednesday for failing to defend indigenous villages in Enugu State against herdsmen invasion.
According to HURIWA, these security agencies have failed despite receiving massive and ongoing logistical and financial support from the governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi administration for the past 7.5 years.
The unrelenting attacks by marauding herdsmen on Enugu, the political center of Igboland, are an attack on the entire South-East geopolitical zone, according to Emmanuel Onwubiko, the national coordinator of HURIWA, and should be treated as such by the more than 60 million Igbo people in Nigeria and around the world.
The committee reaffirmed the use of local Igbo people to lead security services in the five South-Easterly states of Enugu, Abia, Anambra, Imo, and Ebonyi.
Armed herdsmen are believed to have massacred dozens of residents of the unrest-plagued Ebor, Eha-Amufu town in Enugu’s Isi-Uzo Local Government Area on Sunday.
Remember that on December 8, 2022, the most recent attack on the towns of Ebor and Umujiovu took 25 deaths, despite the fact that the Enugu State Police Command notified the media that only four persons were murdered.
According to reports, armed Fulani herdsmen and their allies from the Agala community in Benue State have been responsible for at least 120 verified killings in four communities in Eha-Amufu since January 5, 2021.
HURIWA’s Onwubiko said,
“It is creditable that both the police and the military hierarchies have lauded Governor Ugwuanyi’s unalloyed support to security agencies.
“But the Army and the police chiefs need to tell all the good people of Enugu why insecurity still persists in the state, especially kidnapping-for-ransom and invasion of villages as well as killings of Igbos by armed Fulani terrorists.
“The South East states must declare security emergency and take effective, efficient and far-reaching measures to crush terrorists infiltrating the South East to wreak havoc.”
