- Soldiers who dehumanised dreadlocks for no just cause deserve to be prosecuted
What happened in Aba, the commercial hub of Abia State on Saturday should worry us as Nigerians, and it should be a source of concern to the military authorities, too. Some masked soldiers reportedly arrested some young people indiscriminately on some major streets in the town, simply on account of their being dreadlocks, or because they tinted their hair, made them to serve punishment on the road before driving them to unknown destination, without offering any explanation. Eyewitnesses said they were too scared to intervene for fear of being brutalised by the soldiers.
One of the eyewitnesses described the incident thus: “Their targets were young men, who wore dreadlocks and those who tinted their hair. The masked soldiers flogged many of their victims and used scissors to cut off the hair and then threw the victims into their vehicles and zoomed off. It was a very sorry sight. We were all afraid to get close. The soldiers came unannounced and started arresting, flogging, maltreating and cutting the hair of any young person sporting dreadlocks as well as long and tinted hair.”
Another eyewitness who identified herself simply as Mrs. Mba, said she witnessed a scene at the Afor-Une Market in the Umungasi area of the town. Indeed, Mrs. Mba rightly likened what she saw to a scene from a Nollywood movie. Or, how else could one have described a situation where soldiers asked young men to sit on the floor and started shaving their hair? “Honestly, the people around were afraid to ask any question, because no one knew actually what crime the victims had committed. After shaving the boys, the soldiers eventually bundled them into their vehicle, packed the hair and drove off,” Mrs. Mba added.
This is uncalled-for; it is unacceptable. It is a breach of the personal liberty of the affected youths. No one has the right to decide how the other person looks. There is nowhere in our statute books where dreadlocks are supposed to be treated in that manner. As a matter of fact, we view these incidents as the continuation of the siege on the youths, some of whom are becoming rebellious and expressing their anger in all kinds of ways, including how they dress or their kind of hairstyle. Real or perceived, many of them have one grievance or the other against the system that they feel is unfair to them.
Let us even assume that the youths have broken any law, is it the duty of soldiers (and hooded ones for that matter) to arrest and prosecute them? That soldiers are now being drafted into internal security duties does not mean they have to concern themselves with mundane matters such as arresting dreadlocks.
The military authorities should not underestimate the harm done by these incidents. By now, they should be telling us the soldiers involved. It should interest them and indeed our security agents generally to note that incidents like this worsen the country’s ranking on human rights. Yet, when Transparency International (TI) comes up with a damning report on human rights abuses in the country, the government and the security agencies always want to contest it. Where the military authorities do not see this as embarrassing enough to warrant a thorough investigation with a view to identifying the soldiers who participated in this show of shame, then the Federal Government should wade into this matter. Soldiers or security men cannot continue to go about hooded without the government feeling sufficiently concerned. The last time we saw something like that was in the Goodluck Jonathan era when hooded State Security Service (SSS) personnel actively played partisan roles in the 2015 general elections. This does not augur well for national security.
Even policemen who have responsibility for internal security have no right to treat suspects the way the soldiers treated the dreadlocks. Even where there is a trend between certain crimes and people behaving in one way or the other, it is not enough ground to punish the suspects in such an extrajudicial manner. Profiling people based on emotions is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. It should not be tolerated.
