Sunday, 10 August 2025

CDHR Chieftain Wale Balogun Condemns Bad Governance, Ethnic Division, and Rights Abuse in Nigeria


Convener of Mekunu Koya, a former General Secretary of United Actions For Democracy UAD Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR), Comrade Wale Balogun, has delivered a stinging critique of Nigeria’s political leadership, accusing the ruling class of driving the country deeper into corruption, insecurity, economic hardship, and ethnic disunity.

Speaking on Sunday, August 10, 2025, during the monthly CDHR meeting in Lagos, Balogun lamented that 26 years into the Fourth Republic, democracy in Nigeria had been reduced to “rituals of imposition and manipulation,” with elections serving the interests of the powerful rather than the will of the people.

He condemned what he described as the “suppression of dissent” and the “targeting of activists,” warning that the harassment of journalists, freezing of civil society accounts, and deployment of security forces against peaceful protesters were “signs not of strength, but of fear, fear of an awakened citizenry.” Balogun also faulted the removal of fuel subsidies without adequate welfare measures for the poor, the plummeting value of the naira, and the deterioration of public infrastructure.

The CDHR stalwart further raised alarm over Nigeria’s worsening insecurity, arguing that the state was “gradually losing its monopoly on violence.” He called for a united front of the oppressed across ethnic, regional, and class lines to challenge elite domination and dismantle systems that “enable impunity, marginalisation, and injustice.”

On the rising ethnic tension in Lagos, Balogun accused President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s political dynasty of orchestrating anti-Igbo rhetoric for electoral gain. “The Igbo are not the enemies of the Yoruba in Lagos,” he said, stressing that the real enemy was “the corrupt political elite, Yoruba by name but anti-Yoruba by action, who have run Lagos like a private estate for 26 years.”

Balogun urged Nigerians to reject ethnic profiling, election time hate campaigns, and divisive politics, insisting that “Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and Ijaw must unite, not as ethnic blocs but as oppressed peoples facing the same hardship.”

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