By Sunny Anderson Osiebe
The Deputy President of
the Senate, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, has charged the Federal Government to
extend its whistle-blower policy in the anti-corruption war to the efforts to
arrest the proliferation of arms and consequent incessant killings in various
parts of the country.
Ekweremadu, who
maintained that the right to life remained the single most important human
right, said unless such illicit arms were mopped up, the mass killings and destruction would continue.
This was even as he
called for the respect for human rights in the implementation of whistle-blower
policy in the war against corruption and proliferation of arms.
He spoke while paying
host to a delegation of the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria,
HURIWA, which paid a courtesy call to him in his Office today.
Ekweremadu said: “Life
has lost meaning in Nigeria and people are killed every day and everywhere in
Nigeria and the Senate is very worried about it.
“We just considered the
report of the Senate Committee that investigated conflicts in many parts of
Nigeria, especially the killings in Southern Kaduna. We asked the Committee to
go back and do more work because the matter is such a very serious one.
“I also made it clear
that it is important that just as we have addressed the issues of money
laundering and corruption with the whistle-blower policy, it is time for us to
bring that to bear on the issue of arms proliferation in the country.
“People keep arms all
over the place and some people know where they are. It is time that those who
know where these arms are should be able to blow the whistle on them so that
the security agencies will be able to go after them and ensure that they are
seized and destroyed. So long as we have arms all over the place, the killings
will continue”.
While commending the
Nigerian human rights community, especially HURIWA, for consistently standing
up for the rights of Nigerians, the lawmaker said human rights were at the
heart of democracy, insisting that all legitimate steps must be taken to
preserve them as well as uphold constitutionalism and rule of law.
Senator Ekweremadu,
however, said that while he remained a proponent of whistle-blower policy, the
invasion of people’s privacy without due diligence was completely unacceptable.
He noted that the Constitution
guaranteed the protection of the people’s privacy, including their phones, and
decried a situation where the courts, especially the magistrates courts, collude
with security agencies to invade peoples homes on some spurious warrants,
saying such growing culture was “taking Nigeria back to the dark old days because
for you to go into peoples houses and search, there must be concrete evidence, due
legal process, and not mere speculations”.
The Senator also called
on the Nigerian Civil Society community to leverage on the CSOs Desk at the
National Assembly to partner with the apex legislative body for good governance
of the nation.
In his address, the National
Coordinator of HURIWA, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, extolled the efforts of the
Senate to deepening Nigeria’s democracy and defending the separation of powers.
Onwubiko said the
recent amendment to the Electoral Act approving electronic voting was a cardinal
move that would entrench democracy.
He condemned what he termed
as orchestrated attacks on the institution of the National Assembly, noting
that attempts to undermine the legislature would not augur well for the nation’s
democracy.
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