TUESDAY April 22, 2025 |
By thenewsdesk.ng
The United States, US, has been urged to re-designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern, CPC, and subsequently place her on the US watchlist over the rising spate of killings by bandits and criminal herdsmen.
The call was made by a delegation of American Veterans of Igbo Descent, AVID; and Rising Sun & Ambassadors for Self Defense; during its recent visit to Capitol Hill, Washington DC, where it met with some US congress members to lobby for the release of the incarcerated leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.
Recall that US President Donald Trump, in his first term, had designated Nigeria as a CPC nation, but his successor, Joe Biden removed Nigeria from the watchlist when he assumed power.
Addressing the press after the Capitol Hill engagement, the President of AVID, Dr. Sylvester Onyia, said they also sensitised the congress on the rising violation of human rights, calculated ethnic cleansing, and religious atrocities perpetrated in Nigeria by those bent on dispossessing the indigenous people of their ancestral lands.
Onyia, in a viral video clip of the press interview monitored by Vanguard, decried the barbaric activities of the killer herdsmen and bandits slaughtering indigenous Nigerians, mostly Christians “while the government has failed to protect the hapless people”.
The AVID President also recalled the killing of 27 unarmed Biafra agitators celebrating the inauguration of President Trump, in 2017′, by the Nigerian security operatives in Port Harcourt Rivers State, and demanded US action.
He further said the delegation was at Capitol Hill to sensitise the US Congress on the plight of the IPOB Leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, who has been in solitary confinement since his abduction in Kenya and extraordinary rendition to Nigeria in 2021.
AVID and its allied group, renewed their demand for the immediate and unconditional release of Kanu, who they insisted, “is not Nigeria’s problem but part of its solution”.
“We are here to bring our concerns to the American folks that Mazi Nnamdi Kanu needs to be released now. He is unjustly incarcerated. We have told President Ahmed Tinubu, just as we told President Buhari who arrested him, to release him because he didn’t do anything to anybody.
“We also came to remind the world about what happened on January 20, 2017, when President Donald Trump was being inaugurated for his first tenure. The Nigerian security forces shot at and killed 27 youths of Igbo descent celebrating Trump’s inauguration in Port Harcourt. The innocent victims did nothing other than cheer a US President.
“This happened and nobody has been brought to account. So, we are asking the US Government, now under President Trump, to look into the matter because it was democracy that was being celebrated, and those innocent youths were slaughtered by the Nigerian security personnel as chicken.”
