Human Rights Writers’ Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, has advised President Muhammadu Buhari to cancel the recruitment into 2016 cadet officers of the Department of State Service (DSS) which favours his North West Katsina home state.
National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko described as puerile, unethical and unconstitutional, the reported defence by the presidency that the lopsided enlistment was done to redress past lopsidedness.
HURIWA said the breakdown shows that north-west got 165; north-east 100; south-south 42; north-central 66; south-west 57; south-east 44 and that Katsina State alone has 51 candidates enlisted.
HURIWA said “If we take the claim that because in the past Kano and Katsina States were reportedly shortchanged in the previous enlistment exercises (assuming without conceding), do we then say that the South East of Nigeria should produce the President of Nigeria for the next four tenures from 2019 because of the historical crime of systematically excluding the zone from producing any executive President of Nigeria since Independence?
“This gross breach of the constitutional Principles of Federal character as occasioned by the lopsided enlistment exercise carried out by the Lawal Musa Daura led DSS must be reversed so as to preserve our much cherished unity as a country.
“We in the human rights sector are by this media statement calling on the Northern hawks that have constituted the presidential cabal under the Buhari’s administration to stop their longstanding implementation of pro-Northern regional agenda which are signposted by the heavily lopsided appointments into key national Defence and Economic departments of the Nigerian government with only Nigerians from the Hausa/Fulani section of Northern Nigeria.
“This longstanding rape of the Nigerian Constitution would inevitably have significant negative impacts on the unity of this very highly fragile and fragmented nation-state known as Nigeria.
“Those who have constituted themselves as political demi-gods and are waging vicious campaign of total capture and occupation of all vital security institutions and other juicy economic positions must know that power is ephemeral and that they can’t subject and subjugate forever without resistance the rest of the Nigerian population to this enslavement and forceful occupation of national offices and key positions that by constitutional right belongs to each and every Nigerian citizen irrespective of Ethno Religious beliefs and Orientations”.
HURIWA called on the National Assembly to wade in and set up an investigative hearing on the dangerous violation of the Nigerian Federal character principle in the enlistment exercise recently carried out by DSS with a view to ensure that equity, fairness and constitutionalism takes overriding place.
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