Media Rights Agenda (MRA) and the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) have condemned the September 3 directive of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to telecommunications companies to immediately shutdown all telecommunications services in Zamfara State.
MRA’s Communications Officer, Mr. Idowu Adewale, noted that the directive was a violation of the rights of Nigerians, arguing that “Such purported exercise of power without safeguards to deny communications services to the residents of Zamfara State, but also to other people everywhere who have family members, friends, loved one as well as other social or business relations in the State of the right to communicate with them, without judicial or any other form of independent oversight, cannot be justified under any circumstance.”
Mr. Adewale recalled that in 2013, there was no deterrent to Boko Haram communication capacity and terrorists attacks when the government shut down telecommunications services in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe States.
“The experience from that period was that not only did terrorist attacks by Boko Haram insurgents continue throughout the period when telecommunication services were cut off, but in many instances the attacks actually appeared to have intensified,” he pointed out.
Mr. Adewale therefore called on the NCC to immediately rescind its directive to the telecommunications companies and urged security agencies to find innovative and effective ways to address the security situation.
[n a related development, the Director, Publicity and Advocacy of NEF, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, said the shutdown of communication in the Northern part of the country, the suspension of weekly markets, restrictions on the sale of petrol, curfews and movement of cattle will worsen the living conditions of residents.
“Measures being taken and plans to restrict communication will compound the desperate conditions of living of many communities in the North. While it will be unhelpful to criticize these measures without adequate knowledge of their potentials to relieve the desperation under which people live’’, he said .
“These measures represent virtual economic and social lockdowns on people who had been at the mercy of criminals for a long time. Unless they are accompanied by an aggressive and effective assault on the banditry and kidnapping industry, they will merely add to the misery and hopelessness of our communities,” Baba-Ahmed noted.
“Communities themselves will lose even more faith in the capacity of the Nigerian State to respond to their desperate circumstances,’’ he added.