Garba Shehu, a Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari, has accepted a challenge posed to him by the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, to travel on Nigerian roads without his security details.
HURIWA, as DAILY POST earlier reported, had challenged Shehu to embark on a road journey from Abuja to any of the Northern states with security men.
The challenge followed Shehu’s public claim that Buhari, as Nigerian President, deserves credit for his efforts in tackling security issues in the country.
HURIWA dared him to embark on the trip or cover his face in shame for dancing on the graves of hundreds of innocent citizens whose lives have been cut short on Nigerian roads especially in the North West by Fulani terrorists in the last 6 years.
The prominent human rights organisation went on to list numerous pieces of evidence of such incidents where innocent travellers were either slaughtered or maimed, insisting that the presidential aide lacks decorum and respect for the memories of those hapless and innocent citizens whose lives were deliberately taken away by different armed non-state actors.
Accepting the challenge, HURIWA noted that it appears that Shehu mistook the challenge made out of altruism and patriotism to mean that we had ‘betted’ out or fixed some amount of money to be paid to him should he take up the challenge.
“We made our challenge based on empirical evidence that insecurity is still rife and that unless killers are brought to trial and published which is not the case now, we can’t say that government is successful with the fight against mass killings,” HURIWA said, adding that it has been advised by a senior lawyer to ignore Garba Shehu and his antics.
“Garba Shehu had called us on the phone to accept the challenge on the condition that within 48 hours we should bring our lawyer so his lawyer sign agreements that something untoward won’t be orchestrated whilst he embarked on the journey in line with our challenge,” the group explained in a statement signed by its national coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and made available to DAILY POST on Monday.
HURIWA noted that by accepting the challenge on conditions, Shehu had already contradicted himself, adding that all that he needed to do was to go ahead and travel to the aforementioned and show evidence that he actually did a road journey without security details.
“He has to do it with credible television stations who should also be brave enough to cover it since they reported him saying that security has improved,” HURIWA maintained.
