Salis Seeks Law To Prohibit Use Of Thugs For Elections

Pioneer Nigerian Astronaut, Owolabi Salis, has appealed to President Bola Tinubu, and the National Assembly to enact a law prohibiting the use of thugs and hooligans by politicians.

Salis, in a statement insisted that politicians who are in need of security should source their services either from the police or registered security companies who can always be held liable for any criminal offence either committed on their own volition or at the behest of their principal.

He said that in the developed polities of Europe and America,the use of thugs and hooligans are often rare to come by and that is why the culture of sanity prevails in their political life and governance.
The Astronaut and Polar Traveller urged individuals, pressure groups and NGOs to put pressure on the presidency and legislature to set the necessary process in motion in order to put the law into effect in view of the urgency it deserves.

He blamed the mounting tide of criminalities like banditry, terrorism and kidnapping on politicians who use thugs and hooligans to harass and torment their opponents and also forment chaos as well as confusions.

“It is this same nagging issue of thuggery and hooliganism that deters quite a huge chunk of the electorates who are often afraid to come out and vote for fear that their safety may be on danger,” Salis said.

According to him, some unscrupulous politicians would recruit these thugs as their private army, equip them with guns, arms and ammunition, buy drugs and intoxicants that turn them wild vicious and enraged because it is believed that the more violent they are, the more effective they will be in discharging their errands with untamed audacity.

“However after using them, they dump them because they never had any enduring interest in them in the first place beyond using them to achieve their ambition.

“The consequences of getting them dumped and not usefully engaged is that they turn their weapons into self-serving tools for criminal activities like terrorism,banditry, kidnapping,armed robbery and violence.

“Apart from the fore-going according to him, political thugs and hooligans are often used to snatch ballot boxes manipulate the voting processes and numerically distort voting figures.

“It is against this background therefore that the criminal use of thugs could be seen as the number one bane of democracy in Nigeria. Therefore, until we remove the use of thugs and hooligans from our political culture,we may never know democracy. I am saying this because it is politics that drives other sectors. If the polity is sane every other sectors will be sane but if not same it will redound accordingly to affect every other sectors of the society,” Salis said.

According to him, quite a lot of competent and highly qualified men of integrity abound at home and in the diaspora who are eagerly willing to join the political fray but they are being deterred by the brazen violence occasioned by the indiscriminate use of thugs and hooligans.

“On an extremely disappointing note, it is lamentable that it is these same politicians unto whom the preservation of social sanity is predicated that act as pillars and mentors of thugs, hooligans, miscreants and bandits who perpetrate evils like armed robbery, illegal extortion of money,land grabbing amongst several instances of violations of the law

“They are also the ones sponsoring bandits to cause confusion, destabilise the polity and engage as economic saboteurs for foreign interests who indulge in illegal mining thereby undermining the economic progress of the nation.

“What these Politicians don’t know is that there are spiritual repercussions to perpetrating evils which tells with adverse effects on the generations of those involved just as it also affects the society, because a society ruled by the unjust can never know peace or sanity,” he said.