The Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), Wednesday, kicked against the proposed bill seeking the authority of the National Assembly to allow officers of the Federal Roads Safety Commission (FRSC) to carry arms while on duty.
THE WHISTLER reports that the bill, currently in the House and has passed the second reading, seeks to authorise FRSC officers to carry firearms like the police, Civil Defence, Directorate of State Services (DSS), Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) while discharging their duties on the road.
CLO described the bill as a “very conspicuous anti-people”, and urged the lawmakers to reject it. Comrade Ibuchukwu Ezike, Executive Director, CLO, reiterated that “Nigerians are suffering from the hands of the police and other arms bearing security agencies and wouldn’t want the government to add more salt to their injury by authorising the agency that deals with the citizens regularly to start bearing arms on duty”.
According to him, “We know how police and other security agencies, including the EFCC, NDLEA etc have grossly abused their legal right to carry firearms by carelessly killing unsuspecting, useful citizens through extrajudicial executions on the claim of accidental discharge.
“Nigerians have seen how citizens’ homes and offices, including those belonging to judicial officers, human rights organisations and defenders, and media houses have been invaded to threaten, arrest, loot, detain and torture them.
“There have been increasing cases of abuse of the rights of Nigerians as a result of the growing tendency to molest the citizens and intimidate them to submission without recourse to the law and due process in the last nine or 10 years the All Peoples Congress (APC) came to power.
“The ugly scenarios of the criminal invasion of the head offices of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Social and Economic Rights Action Project (SERAP) and the lawless arrest and detention of the NLC President, Comrade Joe Ajaero, on his way to attend an international congress overseas at the Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, and the recent illegal invasion of Urban Radio, a private radio station in Enugu to interrupt an ongoing programme to arrest its anchor by EFCC operatives without authorisation, are few instances.”
CLO claims that allowing the passage of the bill into law was equal to legalising FRSC “to carelessly lavish the lives of innocent Nigerians and residents alike”.
The group said there were several modern ways of addressing or managing road safety initiatives through the employment of science and technology throughout the world, rather than by the use of guns, urging the government to resort to maintaining death-trap roads littering the width and breadth of Nigeria as well as ensuring that buses and other vehicles on roads are roadworthy and that road users, especially drivers obey traffic laws and regulations rather that legalising the bearing of firearms by FRSC officers.
Ezike said, “The disheartening experiences of the End-Bad-Governance and End-SARS protests are few examples to mention in support of our total rejection of this bill. CLO warns lawmakers not to pass the bill into law because of the aforementioned reasons. Today, these lawmakers are protected because they are in government. Tomorrow, they will become ordinary citizens who will face the wrath of the same law they made.”
CLO therefore called on other civil society organisations, the media, women’s groups, workers, students, rational people in government and the international community to rise up to the occasion to condemn and reject the bill.