Thread by @D_Encourager

Part 2 -A 5-part serial on 30 Jun, 2 Jul, 17 & 29 Sept and 3 Oct, 2014 by Ibanga Isine @Ibykul @PremiumTimesng -‘The extra-judicial killings of seven members of Gboko’, the host community of Dangote Cement factory, by soldiers manning the company was a finalist in 2014. #EndSARS

Juliana Ebere’s @julianafrancis story, ‘Extrajudicial killings: story of SARS and robbery suspects’, published February 24, March 3, and March 10, 2014 in The New Telegraph Newspaper which was partly narrated earlier, also won an award that year. bit.ly/2IDRwhY

In the 2015 edition, @WSoyinkaCentre rewarded Ikechukwu Ibe of @daily_trust for his unnerving photo; ‘Soldiers punish a civilian at Mararaba, Nasarawa State’. The image published on 10 Aug 2015 went viral and attracted lots of criticism from local and international audiences.

Just last year, ‘Counting the dead by the gun’, a three-part report by Sebastine Ebhomhan @SebastineEbhuom of National Mirror made the shortlist as a finalist. The work chronicled cases of extra-judicial killings of Nigerian citizens by trigger-happy security officials.

The stories published on the 5th, 12th and 19th December 2015, by the National Mirror newspaper are compilations data from interviews of victims, civil society organisations, government institutions and other non-state actors by the reporter.

Ayodele Ojo’s work, ‘Police is your friend’; published on 4 Aug 2016 in Sun newspaper reminds us of a sad reality which negates the claim of friendship of the Nigerian Police Force. The photo shows a policeman bent on choking a tricycle rider, who had refused to give him a bribe.

These aforementioned examples are but a few of the thousands of documented incidences of abuse. The media is often blamed of underreporting many issues.

The documentation brutality depicted by the unruly behaviour of members of the Nigerian Police with emphasis on SARS as well as that of the Army is however one of the most well reported issues by the Nigerian media.

The media has screamed it until its voice has become hoarse and continues to do so. Fisayo Soyombo @fisayosoyombo, then editor of @thecableng’s story, ‘Forgotten Soldiers’, which won the overall prize in last year,

gives of a sneak peep into the fact that officials of the Nigerian police, army and suchlike institutions are also products of absence of value for human lives which pervades the country.

The 5-part series disclosed the state of Nigerian soldiers who were injured in battle with the Boko Haram and their appalling neglect. The poor welfare and neglect of the members of the @PoliceNG is also well known. As the cliché goes however, two wrongs never make a right.

Frustrated citizens have taken to social media and now promised to move to the streets to protest these aberrations. The harshtag – #EndSARS might be extreme. #ENDSARSBrutality and #ReformSARS may be more like it.

If we take the ‘END IT!’ advise as a way of resolving our plethora of aberrations of existence, there would be so much more to end including Nigeria itself. Yet, the hashtag depicts how deeply the people have been affected. Nigerians have had enough.

We hereby call the Buhari government @MBuhari, on this World Anti-Corruption and eve of the World Human Rights Day, to decisively make an end to these unacceptable continuous corrupt practices and unleash of terror, one change that will become a reality for the Nigerian people.

This harassment must stop. Nigerians deserve more.

I @D_Encourager, made this statement - ‘The need to reform security institutions’, on 9 December 2017 during the public presentation of Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Reporting of the @WSoyinkaCentre #EndPoliceBrutality

These aforementioned examples are but a few of the thousands of documented *incidents of abuse. The media is often blamed of underreporting many issues.