EndSARS: Senate calls for immediate police reformation

The Senate has urged the Federal Government to embark on the reformation of the Nigeria Police Force.

It implored the Federal Government to recruit more able-bodied personnel and inject more financial resources to procure arms, ammunition, and other gadgets, as well undertake regular training.

At the plenary on Wednesday, the Senate considered and adopted the 69-page report of its Joint Committee on National Security and Intelligence; Defence; Police Affairs; Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters on the mayhem that occurred in Calabar, the Cross River state capital, on October 23 and 24, 2020, during the #EndSARS protests.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the joint committee, Senator Ibrahim Gobir, during the presentation, said the panel discovered that the violence in the Calabar metropolis during the protest which led to the looting and destruction of private and government-owned properties was “largely spontaneous with no identified goals, leaders, sponsors or financiers.”

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“It was a free reign for amorphous groups, gangs and criminals”, he said.

Gobir disclosed that one of the victims of the protest and a former member of the National Assembly, Senator Bassey Ewa Henshaw, who appeared before the committee, narrated his ordeal and he, his wife and daughter escaped from a mob that vandalized its way right into his bedroom.

Gobir quoted Henshaw to have told the committee that the attacks were deliberately orchestrated by some politicians who perceived them as political enemies.

 The ex-lawmaker was also said to have attributed the violence to the displacement of the people of Bakassi as a result of ceding their homelands to Cameroon, a situation that turned some of them into militants.

Henshaw was further quoted to have told the panel that the #EndSARS protest was hijacked by the militants to unleash mayhem on the city of Calabar.

The former senator further disclosed that he lost properties to the tune of N9,302,660,000 to the protest.

In the report, the committee said a total of 41 government properties were vandalised by hoodlums during the protest around Calabar Municipal and neighbouring Bakassi, Odukpani and Akpabuyo Local Government Areas of Cross River State.

The committee also noted that at the time of the invasion of homes, the security agencies failed to promptly respond to distress calls from victims, adding that several victims got hints of the planned attacks before the actual acts.

According to the panel, the Nigeria Police, Department of State Services and the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps were “overwhelmed by the sheer number of the protesters who unleashed mayhem on the city of Calabar.”

The committee also said the Police claimed that 106 suspects were arrested, 90 per cent of whom were indigenes of Akwa Ibom extraction, including two females.