Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has dragged a Mass Communications lecturer of the Bayero University Kano, Malam Bala Mohammed to President Muhammadu Buhari, Education Minister Malam Adamu Adamu for what it called “spreading hate message against Igbo ethnicity”.
HARIWA also petitioned the National University Commission (NUC) and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and demanded the suspension and prosecution Mohammed.
A statement signed HARIWA’s coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, said the association had also resolved to further drag the said lecturer to all “law enforcement agencies should the relevant education authorities fail to do the needful” of sacking Mohammed and taking him to court “for attempting to instigate ethnic genocide against Igbo people in the North whom he blamed for causing drug abuses by Northern youths”.
The petition reads in parts: “May we write you this urgent letter to call your attention to a statement in the press attributed to one Malam Bala Mohammed who was identifi ed as a lecturer in the mass communications department of the Bayero University –which is a federal university under the charge of the federal ministry of education with His Excellency Mr.
President as the visitor.
“Sir, in a publication carried by a popular national newspaper – Vanguard, the said Malam Bala Mohammed was quoted without any shreds of empirical proofs to have heaped the blame on the entire Igbo race for the spread of drug addiction in the North.
” “This self-acclaimed lecturer in a very strategic federal educational institution in a region bedeviled by inter-ethnic and inter religious crises was sensationally quoted as spreading this hate filled stereotype against Igbo nation as if to say crime has an ethnic colouration.
” “As journalists, we can emphatically state that this fallacious affirmation by this Malam Bala Mohammed was made in bad faith with the aim of instigating hate crime targeting all members of the Igbo ethnic group resident in Northern Nigeria”.
