Reps Supports Senate, ask PMB to declare bandits as terrorists

President Buhari must declare bandits as terrorists, House of Representatives clamours. The House of Representatives moved this motion as a way of backing the Senates.

They have  asked the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), to designate bandits, who have spread across the North-West and parts of the North-Central geopolitical zones, as terrorists.

The Senate had made the demand earlier on Wednesday.

Chairman of the House Committee on Defence, Babajimi Benson, at the plenary on Thursday, moved a motion of urgent public importance to urge the chamber to back the Senate.

The motion was unanimously adopted through voice vote.

October 2020, protests against alleged police brutality of a special police unit of the Nigerian Police Force the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) erupted in Lagos and other major cities. The End SARS movement with no centralised leadership beyond the small assembly that organized the initial protests, share similarities with the 2012 Occupy movement.

On 12 October, a day after demonstrators declared their demands Buhari announced the disbandment of SARS and promised “extensive police reforms”. Since independence in 1960, the Nigerian Police Force has been at the forefront of tackling organised crime in Nigeria with the recent spate of banditry, cultism, drug trafficking, fraud and kidnapping drastically affecting its personnel capacity,leaving a vacuum for SARS members to exploit and commit extrajudicial killings