: : CLEEN FOUNDATION. Justice Sector Reform

CLEEN FOUNDATION ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL

INTRODUCTION

It was Hans Thoolen who wrote that “ones fondest memories relates to events that are further back in the past. Perhaps because the frustrations at the time have faded into insignificance compared to the friendship made and successes obtained.” This statement mood as peed into the past of CLEEN to answer the multiple questions about how the organization began, its activities over the past five years, challenges it has face and plans for the future. The first hunch is to say, it’s a long story!.

How it all began

The ‘biased’ history of CLEEN could be traced back to 1994, precisely June organization (CLO) held the first national workshop on law enforcement and human rights in Nigeria in collaboration with the Nigeria Police Force (I was the coordinator of CLO’s Police Research Project at the time). The workshop brought together superior police officers and representatives of human rights groups to discuss ways and means of enhancing police respect of human rights and cooperation with civil society in the discharge of their duties in Nigeria. Naturally, the police participants were apprehensive about the kind of reception they would receive from civil society groups. This feeling was captured in the keynote address delivered at the workshop by then Inspector General of Police, Alhaji Ibrahim Comasie, when the stated, “some quarters may consider me as having been trapped coming here, an area where the police have already been convicted without being heard for the violation of human rights.

However, to the pleasant surprise of everyone the workshop was successfully concluded without any fracas as was feared. The deliberations were frank even though occasionally tensed and a consensus communiqué calling for more of such interactions between civil society and law enforcement agencies in the country among other issues was produced and widely circulated. However, the workshop could not be followed up under the platform of the CLO as a chain of events that took place between 1995 and 1997 made it impossible. Less than six months after the proceeding of the workshop was published in May 1995, Nigerians and indeed the whole world woke up on November 10, 1995 to hear the Ken Saro-Wiwa, and eight other Ogonis had been killed by the Abacha’s government after a kangaroo trial. This singular event contributed immensely in making Nigeria almost a total pariah state between 1995 and 1997. Expectedly, it threw mainstream human rights and pro-democracy groups in the county into sustained agitation for an end to military rule and enthronement of democratically elected civilian government, as a sine qua non for observance of human rights in Nigeria. This was forcefully argued by then executive director of the CLO, Abdul Oroh, who stated that “unless the military were forced out of power any discussion of respect for human rights in Nigeria would be merely academic”.
The fall out of this new phase of human rights work was that all programmes that emphasized engagement with agencies of the state suffered severe setbacks. State agencies in turn became reluctant to collaborate with mainstream human rights advocacy groups as they did not want to be seen to be working with organizations that were portrayed as ‘enemies’ of the government. The lesson became clear that it is difficult to engage state institutions, especially law enforcement agencies, on human rights issues under a non-governmental organization whose mandate includes monitoring and reporting abuses of human rights, as its advocacy work would often lead to straining of relationships with its partners agencies, which might affect access to and trust of the agencies. This would also invariably affect long term planning in the implementation of such programme.
The foregoing lesson drawn from working with the CLO was the guiding principle that led to the formation of CLEEN in 1998 and its decision to use the tools of empirical research and collaborative demonstration programmes in executing its mandate of promoting respect for human rights and cooperation between civil society and law enforcement agencies in the lawful discharge of their duties in Nigeria. The formation of CLEEN was also informed by the fact that the mainstream advocacy groups in the country had been hugely successful in exposing human rights violations by the security forces to the point that the Nigerian state accepted that it has a problem with human rights hence, the establishment of the National Human Rights Commission. The challenge for civil society, therefore, became how to engage state institution to foster change of their human rights record from within. The cliché used these days is working on the supply CLEEN’s beginning was very humble! We opened up shop on January 5, 1998 with a staff of two (myself and Akpan John). Our initial office was a desk-space located in living room of my apartment and the only office equipment we had was a refurbished 286 desktop computer and Epson printer donated by the East West Foundation, through the recommendation of the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C. I can’t count the number of times the aging computer hanged while in use. Sometimes, it required gentle tapping of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) for it to pick up form where it stopped. To its credit however, it did all the basic word processing we needed to do.