Centre for Human Rights and Anti-corruption Crusade (CHURAC) has taken a swipe at northern leaders for claiming that the #EndSARS protests in Nigeria were aimed at regime change.
Development Diaries reports that leaders from the northern region, including state governors and traditional rulers, had met in Kaduna, where they condemned the #EndSARS protests.
The northern leaders, in a communiqué read by the Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum (NGF) and Governor of Plateau State, Simon Lalong, dismissed the protests as subversive, adding that they had separatist agenda.
‘The meeting rejects and condemns the subversive actions of the #EndSARS protests’, they said.
‘The agitations and other change-regime actions outside the ballot box soon took advantage of the peaceful protests to push for their separatist agenda.
‘The meeting endorses the indivisibility, indissolubility and oneness of the nation’.
President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan, the Chief of Staff to the President, Professor Ibrahim Gambari, and the Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, attended the meeting.
Thugs were reported to have taken advantage of the protest against police brutality and extrajudicial killings, with police accusing people ‘posing’ as protesters of looting weapons, and torching police buildings.
Also, #EndSARS protesters were shot by soldiers in the Lekki area of Lagos on 20 October, with at least seven people reportedly killed and many others injured.
But CHURAC, in a statement signed by its Publicity Secretary, Oyinkedi Fuofegha, faulted the stance of the northern leaders.
‘The northern leaders are not sincere to our corporate coexistence’, the statement read.
‘For them to blame the End SARS protests on separatists means that the northern region is the biggest problem of the country.
‘They always tag every genuine struggle for the betterment of the country as a threat to breakup. What an impudence? It is very wrong to call the recent protests a separatist movement.
‘Even if some of the protesters called for Buhari’s resignation over his acute failure in leadership, we see nothing wrong in the protests. After all, the youths were very peaceful. That is a time tested practice known all over the world in democratic governance.
‘Nigeria is practicing a constitutional democracy and so people are allowed by our constitution to peacefully express their minds.
‘We are not surprised after all for northern leaders to say #ENDSARS protests were to dismember the country. That has always being their trademark’.
Protests, with hashtag #EndSARS, were triggered by the killing of a young man by operatives of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in Lagos on 03 October.
The police unit, which has been disbanded by the Nigerian government, had long been accused of harassment, unlawful arrests, torture and killings.
Source: CHURAC
Photo source: The Cable
