The Oriental Lawyers for Justice (OLJ), a leading civil society organisation in the Southeast, has called for a detailed psychiatric examination of every person seeking an elective office in Nigeria.

In a statement in Enugu on Friday signed by its chairman, John-Bosco Aninwede, and the publicity secretary, Mrs Ifeoma Ejike, the OLJ explained that in making the recommendation, it was merely following in the footsteps of a former World Health Organisation (WHO) Deputy Director General, Professor Thomas Adeoye Lambo, who famously in the 1980s called for psychiatric tests on African leaders on account of their outrageous conduct.

The CSO said that the immediate context of its proposal is the ongoing prosecution of Ogbete Market traders and other businesspersons in Enugu by the Governor Peter Mbah government before a magistrate court in the coal city over the observance of the Monday sit-at-home order imposed by non-state actors.

“The nation can only ponder the emotional stability of a state regime which can shut down the businesses of poor traders for not opening their stalls on a day the government did not provide buses to convey them from their homes in various parts of the city to the Ogbete Main Market, nor did it provide security forces to protect them from their homes through the roads to the market on abweekday that Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) terrorists kill people with reckless abandon in the entire Southeastern part of the country”, the lawyers declared.

Worse, according to the attorneys, when the non-armed traders protested against the government’s action, they were mowed down in broad daylight by trigger-happy soldiers acting on the government’s instructions.

The activists regretted that the state government has neither apologised for its action nor even commiserated with the families of the killed or the injured.

“This action is reminiscent of the colonial government’s massacre of 21 coal miners in Enugu protesting against the racism of the government on November19, 1949, a sad chapter in Nigeria’s colonial history”, they observed, contrasting the traders’ killings with the non-harassment of members of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) protesting recently against the removal of petrol subsidy by the President Bola Tinubu administration.

“If Tinubu couldn’t use the Federal Might against Nigerian workers, we wonder why Peter Mbah should launch an all-out war against poor Enugu traders and people”.

The OLJ accused the state government of “doubling down by arresting, brutalising and persecuting innocent traders and other business people under the guise of fighting IPOB terrorists over the weekly sit-at-home order”.

The lawyers counselled Mbah against further terror acts.

“He should rather borrow a leaf from other Southeast governors who are not brutalising their people, despite facing the same challenge”, they stated.

“The origin of all this terror in Enugu is that all Nigerians know that Mbah was never elected by the Enugu people last March 18, but rather by a handful of extremely corrupt Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) officers who wrote a result that they could not defend anywhere”.

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