A law lecturer at the Ghana institute of management and public administration (GIMPA) has fired the current ECOWAS chairman over the brutalities and killings of protesters in Nigeria.
The law lecturer, Dr. Rainer Akumperigya took to his Facebook handle and expressed his dismay at the shocking but not surprising response from the ECOWAS chairman His Excellency Nana Akuffo Addo the president of Ghana on the killings and brutalities of Nigerian protesters, who are only demanding an end to their Special Anti-Robbery Squad, popularly known as SARS.
This Special Anti-Robbery Squad which is a unit of the Nigerian Police Force turned the unit into a Force of Kidnapping, murder, theft, torture, rape, unlawful arrests, humiliation, unlawful detention, extortion and extrajudicial killings, this sparked demonstrations in almost all the States of Nigeria demanding an end or dissolution to SARS, which has also been met with violent repression and killings of the demonstrators.
Notwithstanding all these atrocities the ECOWAS chairman His Excellency president Nana Akuffo Addo of Ghana is mute over it not even a massage on his social media handles.
However it is against this background that Rainer Akumperigya fired the ECOWAS chairman President Nana Akuffo Addo, saying he is a “selective reactionary leaders”, he said “The issue itself is bizarre-that a country’s official armed forces turns against its own citizens exercising the democratic right of peaceful protests against yet another insidious police unit who brutalized innocent citizens, can only be asking for disloyalty towards that country. The Nigerian state has lost all moral authority once it turns against its own citizens.
The response by the sub-regions leadership is shocking but not surprising. In four years, President Akuffo Addo (current ECOWAS Chairman) has shown himself to be a selective reactionary leader who basks in official titles.
Many examples will illustrate this–he never showed revulsion or any reaction at all when measles was killing his own citizens in the Upper West region neither did he show outrage in the killing of a citizen during the EC New voter registration process. He did not openly stand or mourn with the families of the flood victims in many parts of northern Ghana this year. When Para-military forces turned against citizens at
Ayawaso West Wuogon, he was not outraged–the subsequent WHITE PAPER he issued on the AWW Commissions’ report serves as vindication. Journalists were killed and there have been high profile murders in Ghana–no reaction from our president.
He however found time and showed solidarity towards African Americans who faced similar police brutalities and even organised a mock funeral for one of them and rightly so.
The Nigerian state has failed, but so are the leadership at Sub-regional and Regional levels. It is time to question the existence of these institutions and their leaders” he concluded.
The Hashtag end SARS (#ENDSARS) has taken over social media across the world with over 28 million hashtags.
Filed By : Agaatorne Douglas Asaah
