The shocking murder of Comrade Chidi Nwosu, 39, married with a kid (6yr old daughter), after the mid night, on December 29,  2010, in his home town, Amaeke-Abam, in  Arochukwu Local Government Area of Abia State, Southeast Nigeria is dastardly and purely politically motivated as well as ill-conceived.

Nwosu before his recent joining of the Abia State government, Southeast, Nigeria as General Manager of the Abia State Rubber Company Limited, was involved in a number of human rights and pro-democracy activities, especially in Abia State and Southeast Nigeria. He was the Southeast Nigeria’s chairman of the Campaign for Democracy, nationally headed by Dr. Josephine Odumakin. He was also a founding member of the Southeast Nigeria’s coalition of civil rights and pro-democracy activists as well as founder of the Human Rights and Justice Foundation.

Nwosu was a leading dissent voice, challenging the excesses of the present government of Abia State, on issues of insecurity, including serial abductions and other violent and property crimes that enveloped the State in recent months.

Late Comrade Chidi Nwosu

At a point, he, alongside his family members, fled the State and temporarily settled in Abuja, the Nigeria’s capital for fear of being harmed by the killer-state agents. He was at a point, wrongly arraigned in court alongside others over stage-managed criminal charges and had severally cried out over fears of being harmed by the Abia State Government.

He reportedly spearheaded a campaign, including a legal battle against the illegitimate sale of the State Government-owned Abia State Rubber Company Limited, allegedly to the mother of the former Governor of the State.

He successfully won the campaign, which partly earned him the general managership of the Rubber Company, at the instance of the government of Abia State, said to be meant to woe him to the government side. It was barely few months after his acceptance of the post in the Company, said to be located in his locality that his murderers came calling.

He barely came back from a night outing than the assassins swooped on him at his residential premises, bundled him into his apartment, rounded up his wife and other family members, locked them up inside their toilet, before mass-beaten him. He was reportedly shot at close range and dragged from one room to the other, after which he was further shot twice, before he was abandoned in the pool of his own blood.

The murderers reportedly escaped unmolested and abandoned one of their guns, which is now reportedly in the custody of the Nigeria Police Force.

Clearly and unambiguously, this is assassination too many and well directed by the state agents. In security parlance, this is a counter-intelligence sort of killing. Other elements of this counter-intelligence terrorism include: sex and honey, system break-in, sabotage, poisoning, espionage, close circuit monitoring, intra-counter-intelligence killing, among others.

We fear, reasonably, that Mr. Nwosu might have been trapped with the said government appointment so as to be easily and cheaply eliminated, or  he might have been killed through intra-counter-intelligence methodology (i.e. from camp B segment of the State apparatus).

It is an incontestable fact that the present government of Abia State is  rooted in two political camps; one controlled by the former Governor and the other by the present Governor, who was single-handedly installed as Governor by the former when he was in the EFCC custody after his arraignment in court for sundry financial crimes charges.

If proper and conclusive investigations powered internationally are conducted, certainly, either of the two camps powering the present government in Abia State will likely not go scot-free. Since 1999, there had been over 160 high profile political murders in Nigeria, which had largely remained unresolved.

Nigeria had been facing mountainous challenges in her criminal justice system, especially in the areas of criminal investigations and prosecutions. The challenges range from continuing use of outdated and ineffective tools of criminal investigation to compromised and ineffective prosecutorial mechanisms, all powered by chronic corruption and serial abuse of public office.

Over 80% of criminal prosecutions in Nigeria do not go beyond”committal proceedings”. In other words, they do not go beyond the arraignment of the accused in the courts of inferior criminal records or magistrate courts, which are barred from entertaining felonious matters.

Apart from the fact that the quality of criminal investigation  in Nigeria is very  poor, the office of the DPP (Directorate of Public Prosecution)/Attorney General both at the state and  the federal levels usually pervert the cause of justice by arbitrarily making “no_case” submissions in favour of the defendants or by preferring lesser charges(statements) against the defendants.

These they usually do after collecting huge amounts of bribe, among others, from the alleged masterminds and their accomplices. In some cases, they turn down legitimate requests from the families of the slain for private prosecution (fiat).

In view of the foregoing therefore, we vehemently reject any so-called “investigations” to be carried out by the Nigerian security forces led by the Nigeria Police Force. Experiences have shown that the Force had never successfully investigated any felonious crimes in Nigeria, especially the violent crimes, not to talk of successfully prosecuting any.

This is especially when a state government is being fingered in the instant case.

We demand for the UNO backed investigations into the cruel assassination, akin to those associated with the state_oiled assassination of Prime Minister Hariri of Lebanon, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and the political killing of aid workers in Gaza-Palestine. Such investigations should be directed from the office of the UN Secretary General or the UN Human Rights Council or their subordinates’ offices.

It remains our resolute position that the human rights and pro-democracy activists in Nigeria must strive towards enthroning credible and popularly elected political leaderships in various Nigerian states, including Abia State, as experiences have shown that human rights fare better under such leaderships than the contrary. Human Rights Defenders also feel less threatened under such circumstances than the contrary.

* Emeka Umeagbalasi, is of International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, Intersociety.