These ‘Boko Haram suspects’ in Abia

Soldiers attached to the Nigerian Army’s 144 Battalion at Asa, Ukwa West LGA of Abia State had intercepted the bus convoys along the Enugu-Port Harcourt expressway.  They were stopped at a point between Aro-Ngwa and Imo Gate. A total of 33 buses were stopped in the night and most of the men aboard them were […]

Soldiers attached to the Nigerian Army’s 144 Battalion at Asa, Ukwa West LGA of Abia State had intercepted the bus convoys along the Enugu-Port Harcourt expressway.  They were stopped at a point between Aro-Ngwa and Imo Gate. A total of 33 buses were stopped in the night and most of the men aboard them were youngsters.
Briefing the media on Monday at the headquarters of the 144 Battalion, Asa where the suspects are being detained, commander of the battalion Lt. Colonel Rasheed Omolori also said two buses escaped with their occupants. Chief press secretary to the Abia State governor Mr. Charles Ajunwa and the Abia State commissioner for information and strategy Dr. Eze Chikamnayo, who were at the briefing, said “the sheer size of the movement made it suspicious.” The authorities said the men and a few women among them were suspected to be members of the dreaded Boko Haram sect. They were held in an army barracks and were paraded before newsmen the following day.
Security agencies in the state had a reason to be uneasy because earlier that Saturday, the police said they defused some Improvised Explosive Devices [IEDs] in Owerri alleged to have been planted by Boko Haram. That, plus the large number and also the youthful age of the travellers, was enough to raise to soldiers’ suspicions. Yet there were almost no other reasons to link these men and women to Boko Haram beside the fact that most or all of them are Northern Muslims dressed in customary Hausa dress. The soldiers admitted that no weapons were found on the travellers. They also had no money; none of them had more than a thousand naira on him.
All the men and women had boarded the buses from Jigawa State and were travelling to Port Harcourt, a city with a large number of residents of Northern origin. It turned out also that the buses were not really a convoy but were moving separately; it took the soldiers several hours to apprehend all of them on the highway.
Two days later, security agencies raised the stakes by saying that a wanted Boko Haram kingpin had been found among the detained persons. However, this ‘kingpin’ was neither paraded nor identified, though the authorities said they would do so later. Inevitably, controversy soon embroiled the whole episode. Leaders of Northern communities in the South East and South South states said the detained men were traders and artisans who do various menial jobs in Port Harcourt.
Spokesman of the Northern traders in the region Alhaji Musa Sa’idu said the men were not Boko haram members but were traders from Jigawa and Bauchi states who sell foodstuff in Port Harcourt. He said they go to the North, purchase foodstuff, load it into trucks and return to the south by buses. This is not a curious arrangement because Igbo traders resident in Northern cities essentially do the reverse; they go to Onitsha, buy spare parts and other goods, load them into trucks and return to the North by luxurious buses. Sa’idu said some of the men were cobblers and wheel barrow pushers who like to move across the country in groups for safety reasons.
The affair of the detained persons spilled over into the National Conference as last week ended. Trouble started when South-South delegate Chief Sergeant Awuse moved a motion urging the conference to call on security agencies to beef up security around oil installations in Port Harcourt and other parts of Rivers State due to the arrests in Abia State. Awuse also said a situation where 486 ‘traders’ were traveling in 35 buses at night claiming to be looking for jobs was questionable. However, Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu hotly challenged Awuse’s account, saying the arrest of the suspects could lead to serious crisis in the country because Northern states may retaliate against Southerners travelling in the region.
 There are several issues begging for answers in this episode. The first has to do with the treatment of the detainees. Given the likelihood that they could innocent travelers, it is regrettable that they are being held in an open air facility with little food and no access to toilets or a bath, as the Northern traders’ leaders who visited them said. Secondly, in the absence of any weapons discovery or of other tangible evidence of criminal intent, it is important for the security agencies to explain why persons should be rounded up in some huge numbers and detained for so long in the name of screening and interrogation.
While the large number of buses in which they were travelling could give room for suspicion, it is important to determine if this was unusual. This could be done within hours by checking at bus terminals in Port Harcourt and at the departure points in Jigawa State to find out how many buses regularly commute on this route and at what times. The trouble is, if no evidence is adduced soon of anything untoward, many Nigerians will conclude that these persons were victims of ethnic profiling, suspected to be Boko Haram members simply because they are Northerners.
What is required in this case is a very quick screening of the detained persons and anyone of them upon whom there is no reasonable ground for suspicion should be released immediately to pursue their means of livelihood. We advise that in future, our security agencies should sharpen their intelligence gathering apparatus and obtain concrete and verifiable information before making arrests. They should also refrain from describing anyone as a Boko Haram suspect, with all the stigma attached to it, until there is a very reasonable ground for doing so. Otherwise, if they proceed with such crude methods of mass rounding up of travelers, they could create a problem in this country potentially bigger than even Boko Haram.