Deaconess Olawale and Bridget Agbahime: One year after

Group Calls On Attorney General Of The Federation To Prosecute Killers
Though her preaching was harmless, but her enemies perceived it as a threat. Little wonder on that fateful July morning last year, when she embarked on her journey to propagate the gospel of Jesus Christ, she never returned to her husband and children.

She was hacked to death by some people believed to be Muslim fanatics in Kubwa, Abuja. It is exactly one year now, when Deaconess Eunice Olawale of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Divine Touch Parish, NEPA Line, Kubwa, was killed.

When this gruesome murder occurred, well meaning Nigerians, including the international community, reacted to her death. But unfortunately, Deaconess Olawale’s killers are yet to be apprehended.

It would be recalled that a similar fate last year June befell Mrs. Bridget Agbahime, who was killed in Kano near her shop. These and many more are some of the impunities Nigerians are faced with.

At the just concluded inaugural Pan-African Peace Summit, which hosted stakeholders and delegates from various African nations, Europe and United States in Washington D.C. Metropolitan area, from June 23 to 24, 2017, African Christians in Diaspora remembered the late Deaconess Olawale and Mrs. Agbahime and called for urgent and concerted action to be taken against their murderers.

In the Gaithersburg communiqué of the Pan-African Summit on peace, security and synergy, international human rights lawyer Emmanuel Ogebe, of the US Nigeria Law Group, alerted the summit to the impunity in Nigeria, where Agbahime was killed in Kano and Deaconess Olawale was murdered in Abuja by Muslim mobs.

He said: “No one has been convicted for their deaths one year later.”

African Christians in Diaspora and Emmanuel Ogebe are, therefore, calling on the Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami to prosecute the killers.

The communiqué reads: “One year after the brutal murder of a Nigerian Christian woman, Eunice Olawale, by her Muslim neighbours in the nation’s capital, authorities are yet to prosecute anyone. Nigeria’s government has failed to grant permission to human rights lawyers to prosecute the individuals, who admitted murdering Eunice on July 9, 2016. Under Nigerian law, private lawyers can request the Attorney General to prosecute a crime, and if he chooses not to, and request permission to privately prosecute the crime.

“To mark the one year anniversary of Eunice’s murder, the letter to the Attorney General of Nigeria is being released to the press for the first time. Eunice was a member of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a denomination in which Nigeria’s acting president is an ordained minister.

“Failure to protect in Nigeria is compounded by failure to prosecute heaping injustice upon injustice. This cannot make for peaceful coexistence in a country bedeviled by religious tensions. The justice imperative is a predicate for peace and injustice is the fountain for violence.

“The killers are not faceless terrorists and Nigeria has no excuse for not prosecuting nor permitting private attorneys to prosecute those behind this heinous crime in the heart of the nation’s capital. As Dr. King said ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Ogebe said.