A group of civic, political and business leaders from 40 African countries known as Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellows (“Tutu Fellows”), have asked President Muhammadu Buhari to tell the men of the “armed forces to stand down and stop shooting at or killing unarmed Nigerians”.
This is as the past 24 hours have seen rising tensions in Africa’s largest economy, after men of Nigeria’s security forces opened fire on unarmed protesters who are demanding an end to police brutality and bad governance, killing and injuring many.
In an open letter, yesterday, directed at the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, members of the Tutus Fellows, expressed dissatisfaction, saying the armed forces should never be said to harm or kill its unarmed people.
In the letter which was signed by 20 of its members, the group noted that the rot in the Nigerian system was undeniable and that the democracy which President Buhari swore to uphold necessitates that the people speak.
Condemning the killings, it said “in the last two weeks, Nigeria has seen an intergenerational call for a better country through better governance. It was led by the youth. It was peaceful. As you know, given your experience running for office where there is a crowd there are opportunists that seek to infiltrate and cause havoc. This was not the protesters. They remained peaceful,”.
The group, who are concerned with the governance and development of the African continent, noted further that Nigerians at home and abroad were expressing their displeasure, as the same groundswell that gave President Buhari his mandate was speaking to him but he greeted their cries with a bloody flag.
“Despite the denials, we are in a new age of social media. Some of us were on the ground and on social media. Nigerians watched what transpired. The world watched alongside us that the lives of young Nigerians are being shed in hopes of a better Nigeria, which the president himself chose to serve,” they said.
The group, however, appealed to Buhari to see it as a duty as the Commander-in-Chief, a democratically elected president, and as a father, to “stay the bullets of the armed forces
