HURIWA’s clannish rights
By Hardball The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), by declaring Nnamdi Kanu a “prisoner of conscience”, just launched a hare-brained campaign: illiterate, dishonest and laughable! Kanu, jailed for
By Hardball
The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), by declaring Nnamdi Kanu a “prisoner of conscience”, just launched a hare-brained campaign: illiterate, dishonest and laughable! Kanu, jailed for life for terrorism, is now at a Sokoto correctional – and it’s early days yet!
Indeed, it shows how, since the high days of the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO), at the height of military misrule in 1987, human rights campaigns have plumbed into an all-comers racket, like the Shakespearean tale by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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What’s HURIWA’s blather all about? Is Kanu “unjustly” incarcerated or lawfully jailed? What does HURIWA want from the government: to spring Kanu from jail because he committed no crime, or because HURIWA harbours base sympathies for Kanu, the president must free the criminal via his prerogative of mercy? Who craves mercy, without committing a crime, anyway? Jaundiced thinking! Arrant illogic!
Even more damning is HURIWA’s opening thesis – that because the Court of Appeal had found for Kanu on 13 October 2022, the Nigerian government should have frozen the case. Pray, is the Court of Appeal Nigeria’s final court? Didn’t the government exercise its right to appeal – as Kanu himself would have done – to the Supreme Court? Didn’t the Supreme Court nullify the lower court’s verdict and ask that the case be retried?
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Didn’t HURIWA gut its own essence – for which rights lobby worth its name would display the dumbest ignorance of the court system – by flying with such crippling illogic? No surprise, though: it’s the old resort to raising your voice, instead of raising your logic! In Kanu and his IPOB terrorism, most of the victims being the Igbo themselves, the HURIWA logic was dead as dodo!
Then, the sheer illiteracy – or is it gangling mischief? – of false historical parallels to fob the naïve: comparing Fela with the hate-belching Kanu! Did Fela ever turn his music into a stream of scalding hate against anyone, as Kanu freely abused, traduced and cursed everyone outside the South East?
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Even the Sunday Igboho parallel, as stark as that one was, in his silly campaign for his Yoruba “Nesan”. Did Igboho ever tell his Yoruba “Nesan” mob to go on an arson spree, outside his South West as “international terrorist” Kanu did, hiding behind the End-SARS protests? Were all these arson and murder of security agents not directly traced to him at the open court?
And the mother of all lies: HARIWA’s claim of “deep-seated hostility and discriminatory animus against the Igbo people” is rather hackneyed as a blackmail tool. HURIWA should play a fresh card. Everyone was there when Kanu was throatily insulting the presiding judge: “Omotoso, show me the law”! Perhaps, he thought he was in the zoo he christened Nigeria outside the South East!
HURIWA should stop making a fool of itself; and leave Kanu to serve his life jail in peace. He fully earned it. Prisoner of conscience, my foot!
