The National Association of Nigerian Youth in Development (NANYD) has commended the federal government’s committee probing the deaths of 33 miners in Minna for submitting its report but has sharply faulted its recommendation for an overhaul of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) leadership, describing it as a contradiction and a witch-hunt.
In a statement signed by its National President, Alhaji Bukura Ahmed (Ph.D.), the association noted that the report’s executive summary disclosed that the now-suspended Niger State commander did not inform NSCDC leadership of the operation, which was carried out without requisite approval. Yet, NANYD observed, the same committee recommended a complete overhaul of the leadership, directly contradicting its own findings.
“The committee deserves credit. Here is the contradiction and it is not a small one,” Dr. Bukura said. “The same report that recommends a total overhaul and restructuring of the NSCDC leadership also finds in its own words that the arrest operation was carried out without the requisite approval from NSCDC National Headquarters. No proper planning, no involvement of the mining authorities, no involvement of the NSCDC leadership in Abuja or its Zonal Headquarters. The operation was conceived, executed and concealed at command level, far from the eyes of the Corps’ leadership in Abuja.”
He stressed that the commandant who ordered the operation had admitted as much the operation was hidden from the leadership that would ordinarily have ordered a thorough investigation, profiled the suspects, shared intelligence, advised on the mode of operation, and brought in sister agencies had the scale warranted it. “None of that happened,” he said.
“The now suspended commandant acted on his own operational discretion and that discretion boomeranged with catastrophic consequences. If the report’s own findings are true, then the National Headquarters is not the architect of this tragedy. It is a victim of its own subordinates.”
The NANYD leadership argued that calling for the decapitation of the leadership is unfair when it has been established that it knew nothing about the operation that led to the miners’ deaths.
“So why, then, does the same report call for the decapitation of that leadership? Why should the National Headquarters take the fall for an operation it was never told about?” he queried. “There are over thirty-six state commands, plus the FCT and the zonal structures and one of them chose to go rogue, to bypass every laid-down channel, to conceal an operation from the very leadership that exists to supervise it and the remedy the committee proposes is to overhaul the leadership? What of the Niger command that failed to consult the proper channel before mounting such an operation? What of the officers who planned the raid, who crammed fifty human beings into a cell, who ignored their cries for help? What should their fate be, if the leadership that knew nothing is to be overhauled? The report rightly recommends murder charges against those officers. It should have stopped there or at least been honest that the two recommendations cannot comfortably coexist.”
While concluding, Dr. Bukura threw his weight behind the Commandant-General of the NSCDC, Professor Ahmed Abubakar Audi, praising his leadership for repositioning the agency over the years and cautioning anyone leveraging the tragedy to underplay his pivotal role. He insisted that calls for the CG’s removal are uncalled for and are based on pure sentiment from strong forces within the government.
“With the plenty of killings in Benue, Plateau and other killings across the country, we should as well recommend that all the service chiefs, the Police IG, Governors of the states who are the Chief Security Officers of the State, the Minister of Defence and also the President be overhauled because of the tragedies,” he said. “Leadership is not a tea party and overhauling a system that has over the years done well in its core mandate but because of a mistake made by someone who didn’t do his job diligently, making the leadership take the fall for that is just pure joke from the committee and those who recommended such.”
“There is a witch-hunt here and it is aimed at a leadership that the report’s own findings exonerate. Has this leadership ever been commended for the many good works it has done? Has any probe weighed the pipelines protected, the saboteurs stopped, the mining sites secured? But the committee is quick to recommend an overhaul knowing full well that the leadership was not complicit in the deaths of those thirty-three people. The motive behind a recommendation that contradicts the findings that precede it deserves to be unraveled as thoroughly as the deaths themselves. A committee that does good work in the findings and then undoes it in the recommendations has left the job half-finished and the half it left unfinished is the half that matters most.”