Assaultive Security Operatives In Osun And The Rest Of Us

By Afolabi Ismail Marble ‎
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‎Security operatives in Osun State have a history of assaults against good people of the state so much that one can only imagine the number of times they had put up show of shame and irrelevant hegemony especially against students of the state owned institutions and many other individuals unconstitutionally. ‎
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‎Threats, tear-gas and many uncivilised approaches such as intimidation and brutalisation have long been their repressive elements mostly in unwarranted situations that only required an advanced application of common sense!
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Years back, men of the Nigerian Police were the thorn in the flesh of ‎the students in the state. They beat, teargassed and brutalised comrades drawn from the Osun State Polytechnic, Iree; Osun State College of Education, Ilesha and others while advocating for improved educational standard and affordability as well as reopening of their closed campuses.
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Early this year, they opened fire on some students of the Osun State University, Osogbo while playing football on a Sunday morning. Abiola Kazeem and one Ibrahim ‎were hit by their bullets.‎

Similarly, not long ago, some retarded men of the Nigerian Airforce in the state stormed another campus of the state university and brutalised both students and staff of the institution severely. They were reportedly said to be on a mission to arrest internet fraudsters.‎ But in the process, they became wild bulls knocking down everyone including the university staffers who waded in to ask what was going on.

‎On Monday, it was the turn of “the voice of the voiceless.” Some strayed men of the operatives of the Directorate of State Service (DSS) in the state repeated the trend and in a manner that could have triggered serious civil unrest if not for nobility of journalism, battered and molested Mr Timothy Agbor of The Point Newspaper and Toba Ajisafe, an online reporter‎.

Like the security operatives usually trashed students and others during protests, the Journalists were disparaged and seriously assaulted while covering a peaceful protest by the Nigeria Union of Local Government Employees in the state and their working tools including smart phones were equally damaged beyond repair by the marauding men of DSS. Same way, Mr. Bamigbola Gbolagunte of the Sun newspapers was illegally arrested and detained by the police years back.‎

Timothy Agbor, of The Point Newspapers, One of the Journalists Attacked.

While crisis is a natural state of human organization or institution, that the dastardly act of rascality by some men of the security operatives in Osun is fast becoming a norm calls for moderation. And it is better done now that a number of the personnel of the agencies saddled with the responsibilities of securing people’s lives and properties appear to have lost touch with their core values, gallivanting with hegemonic affront and assaulting the citizenry. ‎
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In whole, the deconstructed implications of the happenings point  to the rot in our society and represent the disgusting state of human rights in the estimation of power that be. Otherwise, Timothy Agbor that I know very well would not have been assaulted.‎

Because, he is a well trained, cultured and sound journalist who is violent-free and an apt response to the question, “who is a journalist?”. The assualt on him and Toba was purely another repetition of the barbaric hegemony and overzealousness of some personnels of the security operatives in Osun.
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Therefore, if the Nigeria Union of Journalists, other concerned institutions and authorities fail to collectively check the excesses and abuse, no one should be surprised if another journalist(s), student(s) or aggrieved person(s) is battered or brutalised by the marauding men in no distant future. ‎

“when they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. Then they came for the Jews, And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”‎

-‎Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller,   protestant pastor and social activist‎.