Peter Obi, the 2023 Labour Occasion presidential candidate, has voiced robust opposition to the Edo State authorities’s dealing with of the 52 college students from Ambrose Alli College (AAU), Ekpoma, who had been arrested and remanded following a protest in opposition to insecurity.
Obi, in a agency assertion, criticized the authorities for what he described as a “disturbing inversion of priorities.”
He argued that it’s basically incorrect to penalize residents for exercising their democratic proper to talk out in opposition to the rising tide of kidnappings and banditry, whereas the true criminals stay free.
In response to him, the arrests symbolize a troubling response to a respectable civic motion. He emphasised that these college students had been merely drawing consideration to the extreme insecurity that has brought on widespread devastation of their native communities.
The previous Anambra State governor expressed deep concern over stories that the scholars had been seized from their hostels in the midst of the evening.
Condemning the incident, Obi famous that the federal government’s motion sends a harmful sign to the nation’s democracy.
He insisted that the vitality utilized in suppressing protesters ought to as a substitute be directed towards tackling the bandits and kidnappers terrorizing the state.
Sharing his ideas on X, Obi wrote:
“I’ve simply been made conscious of the alarming arrest and remand of 52 college students in Ekpoma, Edo State, who bravely known as for an finish to the phobia of kidnappers and bandits plaguing their group. Combat bandits not college students.
“We can’t and should not punish residents for voicing respectable grievances, particularly when they’re standing up in opposition to the very actual threats which have devastated our neighbourhoods.
“It’s past perception that college students had been taken from their hostels at evening merely for protesting, solely to be handled as criminals. In the meantime, the precise perpetrators, the bandits and kidnappers wreaking havoc, stay at giant, unaccountable for his or her actions.”
The arrest of the 52 people follows a protest held on Saturday in Ekpoma over the incessant kidnapping of scholars and residents.
Whereas the scholars preserve the protest was peaceable, the state authorities and police alleged that the demonstration was hijacked by hoodlums who vandalized properties, together with the palace of the Onojie of Ekpoma.
The suspects had been subsequently arraigned and remanded on the Ubiaja Correctional Centre on expenses of malicious harm and theft.
Nevertheless, rights {groups} and scholar our bodies like NANS have countered this, claiming a lot of these arrested had been picked up from their beds and weren’t even a part of the protest.