ABUJA — Human rights activist, Femi Falana has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to pardon the seventy soldiers convicted of mutiny like he pardoned Boko Haram fighters.
In a letter directed to the president, Falana who is also a senior advocate of Nigeria (SAN) asserted that the soldiers’ offense was that they demanded to be well equipped to fight insurgency in the northeast.
In 2014, 70 military operatives were accused of rebelling against the authorities of their division in Maiduguri, Borno state, and had been subsequently convicted.
The soldiers were initially sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted to 10 years imprisonment by the military authorities following a case pushed by Falana in 2015.
In the letter, Falana argued that if the government could consider the rehabilitation of repentant Boko Haram insurgents, the soldiers jailed for asking for better equipment deserve to be pardoned.
The letter reads: “The Arms Procurement Panel instituted by Your Excellency has confirmed that the sum of $2.1 billion and N643 billion set aside for the purchase of equipment for the counter-insurgency operations was diverted by some military officers and their civilian accomplices. The coterie of military officers who cornered the fund deliberately sabotaged the counter-insurgency operations of the Government of Nigeria.
“In view of the criminal diversion of the huge fund earmarked for acquiring military hardware for the defence of the nation the indicted military officers and their civilian collaborators ought to have been charged with mutiny, sabotage, and other war crimes. But out of class solidarity, a few of the indicted military officers and civilians have been charged with the offence of money laundering at the Federal High Court by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
“In the same vein, Your Excellency had alluded to the injustice to which the convicted soldiers were subjected in an interview aired by the BBC Hausa service on December 28, 2015. On that occasion, Your Excellency made a strong case for the convicts when you rightly observed that ‘The government at that time sent the soldiers to the battlefield without arms and ammunition to prosecute the war. That was what led some of them to mutiny. They were arrested and detained because of this.’
“It is public knowledge that the Federal Government and some State Governments have recently granted pardon and rehabilitated hundreds of terrorists who had waged war against Nigeria and subjected unarmed citizens to egregious human rights abuse. The soldiers who were convicted of mutiny for demanding for weapons to fight such terrorists deserve to be granted pardon and rehabilitated by the Federal Government.”
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