In the wake of the chaos that trailed the March 9 gubernatorial polls in River State and an Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] report which indicted its officers, Nigerian Army has commissioned a fact-finding mission to ascertain whatever role its officers played in the saga. The mission which is led by Major General Taritimiye Gagariga visited all the flashpoints in the state, talked to stakeholders and is expected to report back to Chief of Army Staff Lt General Yusuf Burataisoon. Buratai has vowed that any soldier indicted in the crises would not go unpunished.
The fact-finding mission itself is coming on the heels of an earlier response by the Army, where it expressed regret over what it considered to be the tendentious tone of INEC’s report. The INEC report outrightly indicted the Army whose officers were reported to have engaged in unwholesome activities. They were said to have abandoned their legitimate assignments of perimeter protection of electoral premises to engage in rigging of the electoral process in favor of parochial interests. INEC said it based its report on evidence obtained from eyewitness accounts by its officers and video recordings, many of which had gone viral on social media.
In one instance which went viral on social media, a group of chanting and protesting women in Okrika Local Government area were filmed trying to prevent some men dressed in army uniforms from scaling a fence in order to gain forced entry into a collation centre. It is gratifying that the Army’s stance on the Rivers State polls saga has evolved from its earlier tone of rejecting INEC’s findings to actually sending a high powered fact finding mission to establish what actually happened. It also significant that in the course of a review of the crisis in the state, the Army also denounced the so recorded actors in military uniform as not being regular soldiers under its command. It said they were fake soldiers. This angle more than many others introduced a fresh and unique angle to the entire security architecture in Rivers State with implications that go beyond the conduct of elections.
While the initial concern may have been confined to the reported misdemeanor of officers and men of the Nigerian Army, the likelihood of fake soldiers bearing arms complicates the task facing the security agencies in the state and should attract premium attention from the military hierarchy. In the circumstances, nobody is safe in the state including the military personnel as their ranks could easily be infiltrated by undesirable elements.
It is in this context that the deployment of a fact-finding mission by the Army high command to Rivers State is timely and appropriate. Themission of the fact-finding team should go beyond unravelling the immediate and remote factors that spawned the electoral crises in the state. The mission should commit itself to recommending measures pursuant to a complete make-over of the security architecture in the Rivers State. Right now, it is facing a meltdown, especially in the light of the widespread proliferation of firearms in the hands of faceless individuals who can even appear in illegally procured army uniforms.
The immediate lesson from this development is that the military and other security agencies in Rivers State are not on top of their game, and therefore need to put in additional effort to do so.
No stone should be left unturned by the fact-finding mission to establish what happened and who was it that mobilized and deployed illegal armies to do dirty election work in Rivers State. Anyone found to have been connected remotely or proximately with insecurity in the state especially the proliferation of firearms and fake soldiers should be fished out and brought to book. While other parts of the country have been bedeviled by the activities of thugs during the election season, illegal armies are fingered in the mayhem in Rivers State. The Army high command must bring a speedy end to this.
