Nigeria’s worsening human rights record

Nigeria received another slap yesterday after it was downgraded by the World Justice Project (WJP) in its rule of law adherence, dropping one position to 97 out of 113 countries. T h e WJP released its 2017/2018 Rule of Law Index, which measures rule of law adherence across 113 countries worldwide. The Washington-based organization’s report placed Nigeria behind other emerging market economies like Mexico (92), India (62) and Ghana (43). Amongst the MINT countries, Nigeria ranked higher than Turkey (101) but was below Indonesia at 63 and Mexico at 95. “Nigeria still practices a justice of patronage, where the rich are hardly convicted for crimes the justice system is heavily favouring the rich.
According to the report, Nigeria has a declining rule of law indicated by its below average score of 0.53 – a one point drop from the 2016 edition of the report. Nigeria’s drop in position and score can be attributed to a statistically significant decline in the country’s order and security indicator, as Nigeria was 18th out of 18 in “order and security”. This can be linked to increases in Boko Haram activity, Fulani herdsmen massacres, extrajudicial killings and, detention without trial incidents.
Over the last few years, Nigerian has been ravaged by a series of conflicts – the Niger Delta insurgency, the Boko Haram insurgency and killings, kidnapping, armed robbery, communal clashes and herdsmen-farmers killings across the country. But While the Boko Haram insurgency and other killings have subsided a bit, the herdsmen-farmer conflict have spiralled.
True, over the past two years, precisely since the coming to power of President Mohammadu Buhari, Fulani cattle rearers have virtually replaced the dreaded Boko Haram as the new terrorists on the bloc. They have literarily gone amok, killing and destroying communities all over the country. From Benue to Plateau, Taraba, Enugu, Delta, and Ekiti, Oyo, Niger, the story has remained the same. Fulani gunmen invade communities at the thick of the night or when the men have gone to farms in the mornings, killing defenceless and innocent women, children, the old and infirm, looting and burning the communities for fun.
Shockingly, the reaction of the government to these killings have followed one trend: deafening silence at first and only half-hearted response that fails to stop the killings and refusal or inability to apprehend the killers and bring them to justice. What is worse, anytime the president has responded, it is in such terms as to create moral equivalency between the herdsmen and their victims. Thus terms like “farmers versus herdsmen clashes” and “attacks and reprisal attacks by one group against the other” have come to dominate official government response to such frequent killings.
Equally, the government has a penchant for disobeying court orders and rulings.On Tuesday, October 4 2016, the court of the Economic Community of West African State (ECOWAS) court declared the arrest and detention of the former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, as unlawful, arbitrary and a violation of local and international rights to liberty. The court also held that both the initial arrest and the further arrest and detention of Mr Dasuki by the government even after he was granted bail by a court of law in Nigeria amounts to a mockery of democracy and the rule of law. It therefore ordered the immediate release of Dasuki and ordered the federal government to pay a sum of N15 million as damages to Mr Dasuki.
The government has refused to comply with the ruling just as it also ignored several Nigerian court orders granting bails to Dasuki, Sheikh Ibrahim El-Zakzaky and his wife, Zeenatudeen. Interesting, the courts, on December 2, 2016, ordered the immediate and conditional release of the Sheikh and his wife while awarding them N25 million each for their unlawful incarceration.
We are afraid that the current administration is turning the country into a jungle and destroying all the structures and institutions that go into making a democratic country viable. We recall how during the electioneering campaigns and amid concerns that he was an unrepentant dictator, president Buhari was at pains to explain that this time around, he will govern according to the rule of law and there will be no draconian measures or abridgement of the rights of citizens.
We are at pains to remind the regime that prosperous and sustainable societies are built around respect for the rule of law and on strong institutions. This administration must not set a bad example of trampling on and consequently destroying institutions while trying to build a prosperous society. It never works.