It is with great delight that we join millions of well-meaning Nigerians to applaud the reported decision by the Federal Government to reopen some of the most painful unsolved murders in our history.
Reports have it that President Muhammadu Buhari has directed the Acting Inspector General of Police, Mr Ibrahim Idris, to dust the abandoned murder case-files of late prominent political leaders, Chief Bola Ige (SAN) and Chief Aminasoari Dikibo.
Ige was the Attorney General and Minister of Justice when he was gruesomely murdered right under the noses of state security operatives attached to him in his private residence in Ibadan on December 23, 2001. Dikibo, the Deputy National Chairman of the then ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) was assassinated on his way home from Abuja via Asaba to Port Harcourt, also by unknown assailants, on October 22, 2004.
Such was the spate of unsolved murders of politicians around that period of our renascent democracy that left many Nigerians speechless.
The unwillingness of successive regimes to fish out the killers and bring them to justice made many Nigerians lose faith in the justice system. Some of those who also lost their lives to assassins around this period included: All Nigerian People’s Party (ANPP) chieftain in Rivers State, Chief Marshall Harry (March 5, 2003 ); ANPP’s hot-shot candidate for the Orlu Senatorial Zone in Imo State, Mr Uche Ogbonnaya, alias OGB (April 10, 2003); the governorship candidate of the PDP in Lagos State in 1999 and 2003, Engineer Funsho Williams, who was murdered in his Dolphin Estate, Ikoyi home on July 27, 2006 when he was warming up to run again, among others.
Unfortunately, successive regimes did not have the political will to wade into these murders. Given the other unsolved assassinations that were there before this inglorious era, the impression has already gone down that Nigeria is a place where your enemy can eliminate you and get away with it. This perception has gone a long way in militarising our politics. Politicians brazenly arm their followers.
In our democracy, power flows from the barrels of guns instead of the ballot boxes according to the people’s choice. We commend the Federal Government under President Muhammadu Buhari for picking up the courage to revisit these murders.
We urge Ag. IGP, Idris, to prove his mettle with this and other cases, expose all those behind these murders and put them in the dock. This will definitely repair the broken arms of the law in Nigeria and return vitality to its famished hearth of justice.
It gives us hope that all other cold cases, including the murder of ace journalist, Dele Giwa (October, 1986), will one day be reopened and solved.
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