Why Buhari Gave Executive Order on Gun Licence – Ozekhome
- Ozekhome says Buhari appears to have lost the larger picture of the citizens’ rights to life and self-defence.
- Says self-preservation is the first law of nature.
Constitutional lawyer, Mike Ozekhome has said the real reason behind President Muhammadu Buhari’s executive order on withdrawal of licenced guns of Nigerians was to curtail the self-determination aspiration of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), and Niger Delta militants.
Ozekhome said the order exposes some vulnerable Nigerians to the murderous activities of herdsmen, kidnappers and Boko Haram terrorists.
The human right activist in a statement he entitled ‘President Muhammadu Buhari’s Executive Order Withdrawing Gun Licences: The Legal and Social Consequences. maintained that Buhari would have been applauded ordinarily for such order with regards to the unbridled proliferation and possession of small and medium scale politically motivated and banditry-induced arms currently in circulation.
“However, Buhari’s sectionalistic perception of governance from the opaque prism of ethnicity and religious nuances do not give one such euphoric comfort of nationalistically induced decisions.”
While describing such measure as panicky, Ozekhome the president and his handlers appeared to have lost the larger picture of the citizens’ rights to life and self-defence.
“Section 33 of the 1999 Constitution provides for the right to life. Section 258 of the Criminal Code which operates in the Southern part of Nigeria and sections 59-60 of the Penal Code that operates in the North, all guarantee the right to self-defence and the defence of one’s property.
“What the Executive Order has unwittingly done is to leave honest and innocent Nigerians most vulnerable to the unrestrained murderous and blood-letting activities of marauders, herdsmen, Terrorists, armed robbers and kidnappers.
“People may now decide to possess these arms illegally and undercover as guerrilla tactics, since even a legitimate licence cannot guarantee same, after thorough screening by law enforcement agencies.”
Ozekhome who pointed that self-preservation is the first law of nature said the Executive order is also gravely flawed as those known and notorious to illegally possess these same arms, like herdsmen, were not even named at all.
“There now appears to be two sets of laws for Nigerians.
“Recall that the same government had incredibly set up a special radio network station for this over pampered set of ‘superior Nigerians.’
“No thought was given to the equally illiterate Nigerians of those communities whose wives are daily raped in their homes, children murdered in cold blood, farmlands invaded, crops eaten and such farms then set ablaze.
”I always wonder who advises Mr President. But as Harry Truman once declared: ‘buck stops here’.”
