Challenges Facing Our Human Rights Campaign
- The Intersociety’s key leaders including our founder, Emeka Umeagbalasi have received and still receiving several security threats including threats of arrest, abduction, disappearance, and setup or frameup. They have also been psychologically or mentally tortured and made a victim of state actor heinous crimes and severally singled out for attack and possible elimination for defending thousands of victims of heinous state crimes and other conduct-atrocities which is in accordance with the United Nations Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Office (1985).
- In April 2009, an attempt to frame our founder, Emeka Umeagbalasi was hatched and unsuccessfully executed. He was not only arrested by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad of the Anambra State Police Command, drawn from Ekwulobia, Nneni, Nnewi, Umunze and Awkuzu Units, but also eight other members of his Family were arrested in their Family Compound located in Ezinifite, Aguata, Anambra State. Umeagbalasi and other Family members had returned for traditional marriage of his younger brother, Chimezie, when six Police SARS Hilux Vans loaded with dreaded SARS operatives stormed the Compound before 6.am in the morning, surrendered the House and rounded them up. They were moved to the Ekwulobia SARS Unit (Aguata) where Umeagbalasi and his relatives were accused of “snatching an AK-47 Rifle at gunpoint from a Police SARS officer on night duty”. It took several distress calls from the Office of then Governor Peter Obi and Commissioner of Police, CP Amusa Bello, etc., for Emeka Umeagbalasi and his eight relatives to be released and taken back home. The Police later made an official apology and claimed that “it was a mistake from a drunken SARS Police Officer who drank to stupor and abandoned his AK-47 Rifle at a liquor joint within Ezinifite Community”.
- Our pioneer leaders including Emeka Umeagbalasi, Justus Uche Ijeoma Esquire, etc., have severally been dragged to various police and spy police formations in the South-East and beyond including Anambra SSS and Police headquarters. Their tormentors had included then illegitimate Anambra Governor, Chris Ngige, violent market leaders, etc. For questioning the electoral legitimacy of then Government of Chris Ngige, our leader, Emeka Umeagbalasi was sued and dragged before an Anambra High Court of Justice in 2004, where Ngige accused him of “defaming his character and sought to be compensated with N2billion”. The matter was abandoned in 2006/2007 after the Enugu Division of the Court of Appeal had on March 15, 2006, unanimously affirmed the August 2005 decision of the Anambra State Governorship Election Petitions’ Tribunal which judicially confirmed our advocacy position that the Government of Chris Ngige came to power through illegitimate means. The Enugu Appellate Court Division also returned Peter Obi as winner of the Governorship Poll of April 2003 and ordered that he should be sworn in as the rightful Governor of Anambra State.
- For sustaining our advocacy campaigns against violent and troublesome market leaders engaging in sundry rights abuses and violations in collusion with compromised senior police officers including then AIG in charge of Police Zone 9 in Umuahia, the Commander of Awka MOPOL 24, then Anambra Police Commissioner and top ranking others; our leader, Emeka Umeagbalasi nearly lost his life, forcing him to move to Abuja for safety, from where he organized several petitions and campaigns that later paid off and led to their massive transfer; thanks to then Chairman of the Police Service Commission, Chief Simon Okeke.
- Many attempts have been made and still being made to compromise our advocacy stance and activities through attempts to bribe our leaders and have our leadership ranks infiltrated with moles and ‘strawmen’.
- The common criticism which has become a steady occurrence by intolerant and troublesome political and security actors and their hired non-state actors is that “we are being sponsored”. Our advocacy works have also become ‘a source of living’ for some compromised media practitioners including ‘hatchet writers’ and ‘internet warriors’. The above is to the extent that some compromised media practitioners have formed a habit of rushing to their paymasters with our reports to be ‘bribed to kill the reports’ or give them “newsroom blackout”.
- Our website has been attacked more than Fifty (50) times and taken down more than ten times. Some political hirings have severally held media conferences and openly called for the arrest of our key leaders; a clear case in point was sometime in May 2024 when a group of political defectors holding brief for the rigged-in Government of Imo State addressed a media conference; calling for arrest of our leaders over our advocacy insistence that the Imo Governorship Election of Nov 11, 2023 was shambolic and a daylight armada of electoral fraud.
- During the era of Retired Lt Gen Tukur Buratai as Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff, particularly between 2018 and 2021, more than Fifty (50) Government-procured fake ‘NGOs’ were recruited to counter our cracking and explosive reports on Nigerian Army conduct-atrocities under Buratai as Army Chief. Millions of naira, suspected to be ill-gotten public funds was deployed to sponsor compromised service-officers from the legal departments of the Nigerian Security Forces (NSFs) and career staffs of the country’s Rights Commission, etc., to travel to the international headquarters of key Nongovernmental and Intergovernmental institutions including ICC, UN, etc., to submit counter-petitions aimed at watering down, falsifying and doctoring detailed our reports on Police and Military conduct-atrocities during “internal security operations”; with intent to cover-up and protect the perpetrators.
- Other major challenges facing our advocacy works in Nigeria or any part thereof are paucity of funds, inadequate technical supports and inaccessibility to international linkages including funding supports, funded-fellowship programs, seminars, conferences, training workshops, nominations for international merit awards and other recognitions, etc.
- We also consider it as a major challenge whereby various state actors in Nigeria and their public offices especially those occupying elective and appointive executive and legislative offices and others holding forth as public justice and security and safety providers or policy makers have entrenched a culture of incorrigibility and impunity in the discharge of their public functions. This is to the extent that they hardly take good and informed pieces of advice or publicly act on recommendations arising from our several detailed or well-investigated reports and those of other highly respected non-state actor social justice groups or bodies. Having identified serial corruption and high-profile transactional culture in public governance in Nigeria or any part thereof as one of the factors frustrating our consistent advocacy works, we at the Intersociety are emboldened and unmoved. This is more so when it must be understood that non-state actor human rights, democracy, rule of law and citizens’ security and safety campaigns fundamentally exist all the times for imperfect societies including Nigeria or any part thereof. It is therefore ‘no retreat, no surrender’ and Aluta Continua, Victoria Acerta!