The International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, a non-governmental organisation, has urged democratic forces to rescue Imo State from political gangsters causing turmoil in the southeastern State.
The society’s board chair, Emeka Umeagbalasi, and other officials criticised the State’s rising political banditry and brigandage ahead of the November 11, 2023, gubernatorial election.
It dismayed that the State was dangerously moving “through political gangsterism, killings, abductions, disappearances, home burnings and other property violence”.
The statement stated: “We are also profoundly worried by the increase of military and police terror throughout the State, to the degree that over half of the State’s 27 Local Government Areas and most of their ‘autonomous communities’ are under military and police siege and terror.
“We are very disturbed that conventional security personnel assigned to the state have totally turned into terror squads and become more criminals than those they were legitimately checking.”
The group said that the security forces are corrupted and hard to distinguish from non-state entities.
The worst is the state government’s participation in helping, abetting, and utilizing taxpayer dollars to ground the state and degrade, repress, and persecute its citizens. “The sum-total of the aforementioned is judged to be politically motivated, ill-conceived, and dangerously targeted at ‘retaining the gubernatorial seat’ at all costs in the November 11, 2023, state governorship poll,” the group said.
The organization asked democratic forces to save Imo State from another four violent years under the incumbent governorship.
“The democratic forces in Imo and its outside friends, particularly uncompromised CSO and media leaders or activists, must be frightened and concerned by continued sponsored political defections and organized killings, maiming, abductions, disappearances, and property violence.
APGA, PDP, and Labor leaders must avoid transactional/money politics and work together to save Imo State. The panel stated that political defections had damaged Nigeria’s main political actors.
