•Nigeria records 555 deaths, 267 abductions between May and July – Global Rights
From Wilson Okereke, Afikpo
An international non-governmental organisation, Global Rights, has said that 555 people were gruesomely murdered in Nigeria under the administration of President Bola Tinubu, between May 29 and first week of July 2023.
Project manager of Global Rights, Mr. Edosa Oviawe, made the shocking revelation in his lecture titled: “The realities of mass atrocities in Nigeria,” at a two-day training for select media personnel from across the country on Conflict Sensitive Reporting, in Abuja.
In addition, he said that 267 persons were also abducted in different parts of the country within the period.
He stated that Incident Centre for Election Atrocities (ICEA), another body established by Global Rights in collaboration with other agencies had verified and documented at least 137 election-related killings and 57 abductions between December 20, 2022 and March 20, 2023.
According to the document, 10 and 28 persons were also murdered during the presidential and governorship elections respectively while there was a total of 27 abductions in the same two days across some states. The affected states include Rivers, Benue, Delta, Osun, Katsina, Cross River, Nasarawa and Ebonyi, among others.
He disclosed that the fact that no section or region was usually spared in the mass atrocities, the citizens were gradually getting used to the menace as a familiar term mostly as there is hardly a time one would tune into a radio, television, print media or online media without seeing, hearing or reading a report on mass atrocities.
Oviawe further explained mass atrocities as the deliberate largescale infliction of extreme violence or attack against certain individuals, groups or people and mentioned some of the causes of the problem as ethnic and religious divisions, political interests and power struggles, corruption and poor regard to the rule of law.
He also disclosed other factors to include economic disparities, 20 million out-of-school children, 130 million multi-dimensionally poor, over 90 million absolutely poor, 33% unemployment rate and over 50% youth unemployment in conjunction with the fact that 12% of the world’s population in extreme poverty live in Nigeria.
He advised that the security and welfare of the people should be the primary purpose of the government as enshrined in the country’s constitution.
Oviawe noted that during the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration, about 22,431 people were killed between 2019 and May 2023, while 5162 abductions were recorded across the nation. He pointed out that out of the number of deaths, 844 persons were police, military and paramilitary personnel, who encountered their brutal end in 2021.
Editor-in-chief, Premium Times, Nigeria, Mr Musikilu Mojeed, who spoke on “Tapping sources for investigative conflict and atrocities,” said that the roles of the media during conflict and atrocities are to save lives, improve humanitarian effectiveness, provide vital psychosocial support, help to manage community expectations and expose corruption, among others.
He said that the journalists must have deep understanding of the crisis, locations of the communities affected by the problem, central characters in the conflict and the needs of the affected communities.
Mojeed further said that data is necessary during the period in the sense that it could help to know whether the conflict is increasing or decreasing in the location and how it relates to conditions as migration and malnutrition.
He said that the data for crisis and atrocity reporting could be sourced from the government, law enforcement agency, local aid organisations, personal research, scholarly studies, international NGOs, local media and the affected communities.
He listed some of the resources for humanitarian crisis reportage for Nigeria journalists to include the websites of the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons, North-East Development Commission, National Emergency Management Agency and others.
