Group Condemns Use Of Police Against Journalists

A group, Media Rights Agenda (MRA) has called on the inspector-general of police (IGP), Mr. Kayode Egbetokun, to end the growing trend of public officials and other powerful individuals using the police to silence and punish journalists.

The MRA’s deputy executive director, Mr Ayode Longe made the call in a press release he issued yesterday.

He said some erring public officials use the police to intimidate and shield themselves from scrutiny by journalists.

“Section 22 of the Constitution imposes a duty on the media and also gives it the freedom to uphold the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people and it is certainly not the function of the police to prevent the media from performing this duty or exercising this freedom.

“The recurrent pattern of the police being used to impede the media’s performance of a constitutionally mandated function constitutes an egregious abuse of Police powers,” he said.

Longe said it was unfortunate that “this abuse of the powers of the police is sometimes done in the name of the IGP’s Monitoring Unit of the Nigeria Police Force) thereby bringing the highest office in the Nigerian Police into disrepute.”

He said in the latest of such abuse of police powers, the IGP’s Monitoring Unit in Abuja, in a letter signed by DCP A. A. Elleman, Head of the Unit, invited three journalists – Mr. Petrus Obi of Everyday NewsNgr, Mr. Ignatius Okpara of the African Examiner, and Mr. Clinton Umeh of Journalists 101, who are all based in Enugu, to report in Abuja yesterday, to answer to allegations of “criminal conspiracy, cyberstalking, injurious falsehood, conduct likely to cause breach of public peace and criminal defamation with intent to incite levelled against them by Dr. Monday Nwite Igwe, the medical director of the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital in Enugu.”

Longe said the invitation followed news stories and articles published by the journalists about happenings at the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital in Enugu, including the closure of the hospital’s School of Post Basic Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing in Enugu, both of which Igwe exercises supervision over.

He argued that it is hard to understand how reports published by journalists in Enugu about a public institution based in Enugu has become a matter over which the journalists are being summoned to Abuja and is a priority for the IGP’s Monitoring Unit in a country plagued by thousands of violent and other serious crimes.

MRA called on the Inspector-General of Police, the Police Service Commission, the National Human Rights Commission, and the National Assembly, in the exercise of their oversight functions, to launch an investigation into this pattern of Police abuse of their powers to silence and punish journalists and media organisations carrying out their constitutionally assigned duties.