Conveners of the organisations, Ezenwa Nwagwu, Awwal Musa Rafsanjani, Jaye Gaskia and Samson Itodo,said this in a joint statement yesterday.
Gaskia and Rafsanjani said the deployment of troops to communities with a high level of mutual distrusts could trigger violence.
“Whereas it has been argued by some that the heavy and intimidating deployment of the Armed Forces during elections serves to ensure security and guarantee the sanctity of the electoral process. Nevertheless, regardless of its seeming immediate and disputed short term advantages, this trend witnessed on increasingly overbearing and overwhelming scale from the Anambra elections, through the Ondo, Ekiti and the recent Osun elections is not a sustainable antidote to electoral violence and electoral fraud,” Gaskia said.
Rafsanjani said: “The over-whelmingly militarisation of politics, engenders a consequent politicization of the military, that may lead to a situation where a politicized military strikes and cashes in on a general crisis partly created and partly reinforced by the militarization of politics and civic life, and truncates the democratic experiment. It is for these reasons that we insist that the trend be reversed, and that the police be adequately prepared to play its policing roles and functions instead of substituting a failed and failing police force with the Armed Forces.”
The group also asked the Federal Government to ensure that funds meant for the cointainment of Ebola disease were not mis-managed.
