A leading pro-democracy and non-governmental organisation, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has come down hard on the country’s security agencies, wondering why they have paid deaf ears “to the widely reported leaked audio of a meeting by the National Leader of All Progressives Congress (APC), Ahmed Bola Tinubu, in which he was heard promising to offer monetary rewards to potential voters who would have voted for the incumbent president.”

According to the National Coordinator of HURIWA, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, “the security agents are playing double standard and behaving like slaves of the ruling APC by not inviting the party chieftain for questioning since financial inducements in anticipation of votes are same breaches of electoral Act outlawing votes buying.”

“It is sad that the institution of the law enforcement have become like armed guards of the party that produced the incumbent President by either chasing after his leading political opponents or engaging in the illegal profiling of Igbo-speaking officials of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) since after the botched February 16 election even when the niece of President Buhari in INEC, Mrs. Amina Zakari, reportedly heads the logistics and operations committee in the electoral commission blamed for the surreptitious eleventh hour’s postponement of the presidential and National Assembly polls,” HURIWA said in a statement issued on Thursday in Abuja, a copy of which was made available to News Express.

The rights group advised voters to reject all entreaties/enticement to be bribed by politicians but to cast their votes on Saturday based on clean conscience bearing in mind that Nigeria has become the world’s capital of poverty and also very unsafe.

The rights group said it was regrettable that Nigeria with the global reputation as a nation with the most religious people is at the same time deeply entrenched in the criminal and the morally reprehensible acts of accepting bribes from rogue politicians as to mortgage their consciences to vote for such bribe givers.

HURIWA then challenged the electorate to consider the issues of ballooning poverty; high youth unemployment and widespread insecurity including unrelenting terrorists attacks and armed Fulani killings in the last three years as necessary factors that should govern their choices before they cast their votes given that the future of Nigeria is at stake.

HURIWA recalled that armed Fulani killer gangs have continued to carry out mass killings even as the central government had in recent times spent government resources to appease these killers by contemplating the establishment of cattle colonies thus violating the Land Use Act of 1978 which vests all ownership of lands in the respective states.

HURIWA said the latest attacks by armed Fulami terrorists belonging to the Miyetti Allah cattle owners Association of Nigeria has just happened in Agatu Benue state even as all the previous mass murderers are walking free and enjoying Presidential protection by the current administration with predominantly Hausa/Fulani Moslems controlled internal security team appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari in clear violations of the constitutional principle of federal character.