A one-time United States Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr John Campbell has declared that the arrest of Mr Omoyele Sowore in a courtroom has damaged the reputation of Nigeria across the world.
In two blog posts on Wednesday and Thursday, Campbell deplored the rearrest of Sowore by the State Security Service (SSS) expressing the hope that the Buhari government would release him soon.
“The SSS assault on a courtroom and the re-arrest of Sowore has already damaged the country’s international reputation,” Campbell wrote in a post on the blog of the US Council on Foreign relations.
A day earlier, he had expressed the hope that Buhari would act quickly to resolve the Sowore crisis.
“The Sowore re-arrest is consolidating opposition to the president by civil society, the press, international opinion and now religious leaders. It is to be hoped that the Buhari administration is looking actively for a way to defuse the Sowore issue, perhaps by allowing him to return to the United States,” he said.
A highly regarded voice in the United States on foreign issues, especially on Nigeria, Campbell is the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC. He is the author of Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink, and also co-authored along with Matthew Page, the book: Nigeria: What Everyone Needs to Know, which was published in July 2018. He edits both the Nigeria Security Tracker and the Sub-Saharan Security Tracker.
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