KPODO’S JIBES AT BAYELSA LEADERS

Perekeme Kpodo, former security adviser to former Governor of Bayelsa State, Chief Timipre Sylva, is in a hurry to return to the consciousness of the good people of the state. In a recent media chat, Kpodo, who was also head of the infamous and defunct internal security outfit, Operation Famou Tangbe (OFT), attempted to denigrate his former boss, Sylva; Minister of State for Agriculture and Rural Development, Senator Heineken Lokpobiri, and the former Managing Director of Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) Mr. Timi Alaibe.

In an incoherent bid to pose as one with a political voice, he told his listeners that none of these men would be allowed to vie for the governorship of the state under the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2020. According to him, the three men have lost their political value and the trust of the people and members of the APC in the state. “All these persons cannot win election in the state. They have offended a lot of Bayelsa people,” Kpodo said.

How laughable! On the contrary, Kpodo is the person that has offended every adult Bayelsan because his Operation Famou Tangbe, intended to protect the people, became so high-handed that it turned into an instrument of oppression.

As a Bayelsan who had a front row view of his infamous reign, I find it most disgusting that he thinks that Bayelsans had forgotten so soon his high-handedness, which had made them sworn that his ilk will never rear up their ugly heads in the state again. Witnesses to his strong arm tactics were a legion of civil society organisations (CSOs), including the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), which documented not a few of his overbearing attitude towards his job as an internal security operative.

One of such was the curious arrest and detention of three youths from Amassoma, relations of one Dr. Azebi, the Chairman of NMA Bayelsa State at the time, on September 12, 2011. Even the medical doctor himself was molested and threatened with detention that same day. At the end of their ordeal, operatives of OFT allegedly collected the sum of N1million from them before they were released. Azebi can easily be reached to confirm this unfortunate and traumatising experience. The CLO also wrote several damning reports about Kpodo’s OFT, accusing it of human rights abuse of suspected criminals, who ought to have been presumed innocent until their quilt was proved.

According to the human rights body, judging from the way operatives of OFT handcuffed and loaded their Hilux vans with victims and taken to their high-walled premises, the internal security outfit exaggerated the crime rate in the state, especially in the capital, Yenagoa and was, therefore, unjustified in stripping thousands of its victims of their dignity and human rights.

Ebiowei Tolofari, Yenagoa