Chief Olabode George, a former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has supported the establishment of Operation Amotekun by Southwest governors.
Recall that governors from Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ondo, Ekiti, and Lagos States had last week Thursday in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital launched the security outfit.
The governors had said Amotekun was set up to curb security challenges in the Southwest.
But, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, on Wednesday, said that Operation Amotekun outfit was illegal.
Reacting in a statement titled the ‘Hues and Cries about Amotekun.’ Bode George said Amotekun is necessary and a proactive response to the widening insecurity, the seemingly loose banditry and the marauding licentiousness that have ravaged virtually all parts of Yorubaland.
The PDP leader while calling for Amotekun support, warned that it should not be used as an agenda to push the country to war.
He said,
“The initiative is a product of over six months deliberations by various stakeholders on how best to protect their people who are murdered in their farmlands, savaged on the roads, kidnapped on the fields, cudgeled and ravaged in the sanctity of their private hearths.
“Indeed Amotekun is not some unthoughtful fancy of the governors trying to create a nebulous counterforce to the existing security structure as some uninformed would put it. It is largely to enhance and strengthen the subsisting law enforcement agencies as it is already well established in most parts of the North.
“Our nation is already on the very edge of tenterhooks. The drumbeats of suspicions, the vile alarm about some secret agenda or the vain recourse to some ethnic national appropriation do not augur well for anyone.
“Amotekun is not a challenge or a threat to anybody save the wandering marauders, the murderous goon-squad and all kinds of assorted outlaws whose actions make the Nigerian Union itself vulnerable and wobbly. We should all support Amotekun in that pristine design as a deterrent to roguish outlaws roaming Yorubaland.”