Part of the recommendations contained in the 69 page report of the Senator Ibrahim Gobir, chaired Senate Joint Committee on National Security and Intelligence; Defence; Police Affairs; Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Matters on the mayhem visited on Calabar during the EndSARS Protest on 23rd and 24th of October, 2020, and published February 1, 2022, disclosed that:
A. The financial value of the vandalized properties were submitted by the affected persons and verified by the Committee set up by the Governor and everything amounted to N73,069,634,615.70 ( Seventy-Three Billion, Sixty-Nine Million, Six Hundred and Thirty-Four Thousand, Six Hundred and Fifteen Naira, Seventy Kobo only).
B. The Senate resolved to transmit the cost of N34,255,427,822.44 billion Naira; and N10,927,321,757.50 billion Naira to the Cross River State Government as amount to defray the cost of rebuilding and reconstructing vandalized and looted property belonging to private individuals and federal government agencies, respectively.
These were some of the beneficiaries and how the money was allocated by the Senate:
1. Donald Duke – N200,000,000.00
2. Senator Liyel Imoke – N506,989,380.00
3. Senator Victor Ndoma Egba – N1,500,000,000.00
4. Senator Bassey Ewa–Henshaw – N9,302,660,000.00
5. Senator Gershom Bassey – N4,089,780,000.00
6. Honorable Eta Mbora – N150,000,000.00
7. Other Victims – N12, 137,455,655.90.
I have no evidence whether these monies were transferred as stated in the committee report.
But in his presentation, Chairman of the Joint Committee, Senator Ibrahim Gobir said that investigative hearings by the Committee revealed that the violence in Calabar metropolis during the protest was “largely spontaneous and a free reign for amorphous groups, gangs and criminals.”
One of the victims of the protest, Senator Bassey Ewa Henshaw, who appeared before the Committee said the attacks were deliberately orchestrated by some politicians who perceived them as political enemies. He also attributed the violence to the displacement of the people of Bakassi as a result of ceding their homelands to the Republic of Cameroon, a situation that turned some of them into militants.
The Joint Committee findings also revealed 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. The report stated that the Police claimed that 106 suspects were arrested, 90 percent of which were indigenes of Akwa Ibom extraction including 2 females.
There is nowhere in the report of the Senate Joint Committee investigative findings, where the cause of the mayhem during #EndSars in Calabar was attributed to protesters. Nowhere! Those who are now attributing the cause of the mayhem, which the report said was sponsored by politicians and failure of security agencies to respond promptly, to peaceful protesters are the real enemies of our State.
Those who sponsored some of the activities of the #EndSars in Calabar are senior officials in the current State government.
Where are the 106 suspects that the Police say they arrested? Were they prosecuted to serve as deterrence or did their backers all negotiate their freedom behind closed doors? Or were they all sent back to Akwa Ibom?
Who are the greatest beneficiaries of the destruction that happened?
Let’s stop criminalizing people’s rights to peaceful assembly under any guise, and start going after criminals who are the actual cause of trouble in our State.
Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo is the Publisher of CrossRiverWatch and a rights activist, a Cross Riverian, and writes from Lagos.
NB: Opinions expressed in this article are strictly attributable to the author, Agba Jalingo, and do not represent the opinion of CrossRiverWatch or any other organization the author works for/with..
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