Government refuses to fight crime with ethnic militia

Nigeria’s federal government will not accept plans by the Lagos administration to use an ethnic militia to fight crime in the country’s biggest city, Minister of Information Jerry Gana said on Wednesday.

The minister, briefing journalists at the end of the weekly federal executive council meeting, said that apart from the federal government’s determination to discourage the growth of ethnic militias in the country, the Oodua Peoples’ Congress (OPC) remained a banned organisation.

“If we make the mistake of elevating them, we may have temporary successes, but if we are not careful, it can create a new order of problems. We want to run away from that danger,” Gana said.

The OPC is an organisation that purports to fight for the rights of the Yoruba, one of the country’s three main ethnic groups. President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government banned it in October 2000 after it was blamed for ethnic riots that led to the death of more than 100 people in Lagos.

Lagos State Governor Bola Tinubu said recently he was considering deploying the OPC to cope with a recent upsurge in crime in the city of some 12 million people, which is considered to be heavily under-policed. In the past, the group had taken on the task of battling criminals in Lagos, often lynching suspects by setting them ablaze on the streets.

A vigilante group popularly known as the Bakassi Boys uses similar methods to fight crime with the backing of two state governments in the southeast.