LITTLE ENDS: Whither Nigeria's human rights community

A few months ago, a ‘court' in Taraba state sentenced citizen Shuaibu Bakari to prison for embarrassing Danbaba Suntai, the state governor.

Citizen Bakari had called the governor a liar in public for depicting in glowing terms ‘achievements' that the people only see in paid advertorials in newspapers.

His case barely registered as a blip in national discourse: one or two newspapers gave it a few lines, I wrote about it in this column, and that was it.

Today, a citizen of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is in jail for heckling a governor in the 21st century! Sadly, there is more.

From Elizabeth Udoudo to Uzoma Okere, the men of power in Nigeria seem to have discovered a new way of making the public appreciate the importance of their convoys and sirens: strip and brutalize the occasional female driver for not getting out of their way quickly enough.

Mrs Udoudo and Miss Okere were lucky: their cases generated some noise. Mrs Udoudo and the Nigerian public earned the privilege of a press release from the governor Ikedi Ohakim's press secretary, essentially a justification of the woman's brutalisation and a lecture to the Nigerian public on road etiquette and good behaviour in the presence of a Big Man's convoy. Miss Okere was even humoured with presidential ‘sympathy' and ‘consideration'.

Then came Agge. If Ibrahim Babangida razed Umuechem, if Olusegun Obasanjo razed Odi and Zaki Biam, surely, there must be some value that those two derived from wiping out entire Nigerian villages.

President Yar'Adua was determined to get his share of whatever benefit devolves from armed invasions of the Nigerian people by the Nigerian army/police. Mr Yar'Adua added the village of Agge in Bayelsa state to the tally.

Last year, his soldiers invaded Agge, destroyed the entire village, raped, maimed, and killed. Like the case of Shuaibu Bakari, the tragedy of Agge registered as a faint blip in the media and national consciousness.

These cases raise troubling and embarrassing questions about the condition of the organised human rights community and the state of human rights advocacy in the country.

This community has lost so much steam as to leave one with an irresistible feeling of nostalgia for the heyday of such organisations as the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO),

Campaign for Democracy (CD), and Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR).

The heady 1980s-1990s are increasingly looking like the finest hour of human rights organisations and advocacy.

Even organisations like the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities (ASUU), Women in Nigeria (WIN), the National Council of Women Societies (NCWS), the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), the Nigerian Medical Association, and the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) extended their briefs to be part of the amorphous atmospherics of human rights advocacy in the 1980s.

Herein lies the paradox - and a tinge of irony: the human rights community had more bark and bite under the military despotism than it seems to have now.

Is it complacency? Has this community perhaps mistaken the simulacrum of democracy we have for the real thing? Exhaustion?

Depletion of the ranks? Beko Ransome-Kuti is dead. Gani Fawehinmi is ill and not getting younger. Abdul Oroh is better left unmentioned.

Festus Keyamo is on sabbatical on the other side of the coin - ensconced somewhere between Farida Waziri and Michael Aondoakaa. Olisa Agbakoba, Clement Nwankwo, and Mike Ozekhome are no longer the fire-crackers we used to hear from. That leaves Ayo Obe and Bamidele Aturu.

These two gems are still visible and active but even the most generous observer would have to admit that their undaunted voices have been rendered somewhat inaudible by the thunderous and deafening silence of the broader human rights community over an increasing number of issues that would have sent them to the streets in the 1980s -1990s.

Could Shuaibu Bakari have been sent to jail for heckling a military administrator in the 1980s-1990s without so much as a whimper from the human rights community?

The same community that went for the jugular of Colonel Ahmed Usman, the then administrator of Oyo State, who arrested pro-democracy advocates and announced gleefully that he had captured "prisoners of war"?

Could Agge have happened in that decade and escaped the radar of the human rights community?

When Agge happened, I had expected a cacophonous clamour for President Yar'Adua to be given the Omar Bashir treatment so he could potentially be arrested after leaving office and be made to join Charles Taylor in the Hague. There was no whimper from the human rights community. Where are their statements?

Their outrage? What exactly is going on?