Mandate: The Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission was created to establish the causes, nature, and extent of human rights violations - in particular the assassinations and attempted killings - between January 15, 1966 and May 28, 1999, to identify perpetrators (individuals or institutions), determine the role of the state in the violations, and to recommend means to pursue justice and prevent future abuses. The commission was initially asked to investigate the period from 1984 to May 1999, covering four military governments, but this period was later extended back to 1966, the year of Nigeria's first military coup following independence.





[b] Buhari ? need one remind anyone – was one of the generals who treated a Commission of Enquiry, the Oputa Panel, with unconcealed disdain. Like Babangida and Abdusalami, he refused to put in appearance even though complaints that were tabled against him involved a career of gross abuses of power and blatant assault on the fundamental human rights of the Nigerian citizenry.

Prominent against these charges was an act that amounted to nothing less than judicial murder, the execution of a citizen under a retroactive decree.

Does Decree 20 ring a bell? If not, then, perhaps the names of three youths – Lawal Ojuolape (30), Bernard Ogedengbe (29) and Bartholomew Owoh (26) do. To put it quite plainly, one of those three Ogedengbe – was executed for a crime that did not carry a capital forfeit at the time it was committed.

This was an unconscionable crime, carried out in defiance of the pleas and protests of nearly every sector of the Nigerian and international community religious, civil rights, political, trade unions etc.

Buhari and his sidekick and his partner-in-crime, Tunde Idiagbon persisted in this inhuman act for one reason and one reason only: to place Nigerians on notice that they were now under an iron, inflexible rule, under governance by fear. [/b]