The brickbat over the South West’s Amotekun security outfit continues to climax as former governor of Osun State, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, on Friday took the federal government to task, asking President Muhammadu Buhari to look beyond ethnic politics and jingoism and key into the initiative rather than kill it.
Oyinlola, a retired Brigadier General said the Western Nigeria Security Network (WNSN) codenamed Operation Amotekun was Yoruba people’s response to “the escalation of insecurity around us and the apparent inadequacy of the security forces.”
Also, Chief Bode George, a retired Navy Commodore while drawing fury over the matter said: “The drumbeats of suspicions, the vile alarm about some secret agenda or the vain recourse to some ethnic national appropriation do not augur well for anyone.”
According to Oyinlola in a statement, “security is a very personal matter and the first basic service a government must provide for the citizenry. Where a government is failing in this regard, it is natural that the people will react by evolving new strategies to survive. That is what we have with Amotekun and it has the backing of everyone in Yorubaland.
“I pioneered the establishment of special joint forces to combat crimes in this country with the establishment of Operation Sweep on May 15, 1995 in Lagos when I was military administrator there. My successors have kept to that template and almost all states have copied it under different code names but the introduction of Amotekun, I am sure, will infuse new ideas into these structures and fill the gaps in our security ecosystem. The Federal Government should just key into the system instead of seeking to kill it.
“I advise the Federal Government to look beyond ethnic politics and actively support the initiative in the interest of the unity and peace of the country.
“Nothing must be done to create the impression that the Federal Government is on the side of criminals. It is dangerous for the Federal Government to ban or criminalise what governors who are constitutionally recognised chief security officers of their states have put in place.
“The other option would be self help by individuals and communities who are daily attacked by kidnappers, robbers and other violent criminals. If you ban Amotekun and still refuse to protect the people from criminal elements, they will rise in self help which will definitely wreck this country. We must prevent that,” Oyinlola said.
Similarly, Bode George who was a former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), described Operation Amotekun as a necessary and proactive response to the worsening insecurity marked by banditry and other crimes in states of the South-West.
George, in a press release he personally signed and made available on Friday stated that the South-West governors took their time to study the situation and did not jump into the fray to establish Operation Amotekun for the protection of the region.
“Amotekun, a security outfit established by the six South-West governors, is largely a necessary and proactive response to the widening insecurity, the seemingly loose banditry and the marauding licentiousness that have ravaged virtually all parts of Yorubaland.
“The governors did not jump into the fray in some hurried unreflection in the creation of this self-protective, self-preservation security umbrella across their region,” the PDP chieftain said.
He said the security initiative is a product of over six months deliberations by various stakeholders, including the six state governors on how best to protect their people “who are murdered in their farmlands, savaged on the roads, kidnapped on the fields, cudgeled and ravaged in the sanctity of their private hearths.”
George added: “Indeed, Amotekun is not some unthoughtful fancy of the governors trying to create a nebulous counterforce to the existing security structure as some uninformed would put it. It is largely to enhance and strengthen the subsisting law enforcement agencies as it is already well established in most parts of the North.”
He declared that Amotekun is not a challenge or a threat to anybody in the country but “the wandering marauders, the kidnappers, the bandits and all criminal elements whose actions make the Nigerian Union itself vulnerable and wobbly.”
The retired naval chief called on all South-West people to support Amotekun so as to enable it to curtail the activities of the “outlaws roaming Yorubaland.”
“Our nation is already on the very edge of tenterhooks. The drumbeats of suspicions, the vile alarm about some secret agenda or the vain recourse to some ethnic national appropriation do not augur well for anyone.
“Amotekun is not a challenge or a threat to anybody save the wandering marauders, the murderous goon-squad and all kinds of assorted outlaws whose actions make the Nigerian Union itself vulnerable and wobbly. We should all support Amotekun in that pristine design as a deterrent to roguish outlaws roaming Yorubaland.”
