Nigeria becoming an open prison, HURIWA alleges
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has called on Nigerians not to resign to fate and jeopardise their lives following what it called “President Muhammadu Buhari’s failure to find direction in the fight against the spread of COVID-19 in our country despite the huge resources at his disposal.”
The party charged Nigerians as well as states not to drop their guards but “must intensify their personal and community protection strategies, seeing that the Buhari-led Federal Government has reached its wits’ end and has no plans to rescue Nigerians from the throes of this pandemic.”
The PDP, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, lamented that the Presidency and its Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19 had “compounded the situation by crippling the economy after which they are now leaving Nigerians to their fate without providing any therapeutic or operable containment strategy to stem the rising spread and fatalities of COVID-19 in our country.”
The main opposition party further claimed: “it is disheartening that officials of the All Progressives Congress (APC)-led government is more interested in TV shows, self-praise, photo-ops, corrupt diversion of palliatives as well as needless political parochialism at the expense of the lives of Nigerians.
“Our party notes that the inept leadership of the Buhari Presidency failed to engage our indigenous medical experts and manufacturers for homegrown solutions in therapeutics, test kits and ventilators, leading to an avoidable spike of the pandemic in our country.”
It recalled its earlier warning against over-reliance on foreign solutions “at this time when every nation is more interested in its own challenges, a situation that even put our nation at risk of serving as guinea pigs for medical experimentations.
Meanwhile, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has described as “unprecedented suffocation and suppression the dimension of whittling down and the systematic oppression of alternative views and freedoms of expression generally in Nigeria under President Muhammadu Buhari.’
The group said there was need for the international community to step up the campaign globally to stop the “forced disappearances and arbitrary incarceration of Nigerians only because they hold different views from those of President Muhammadu Buhari and some dictatorial governors.”
In a statement yesterday by its National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, and the National Media Affairs Director, Zainab Yusuf, the organisation stated:
“HURIWA regrets to state that since the last five years, the current administration has turned Nigeria into a big prison yard with all sorts of arbitrariness, extra-judicial executions of persons by security forces and the clampdown on political views that are diametrically opposed to those of the powers that be.”
“It is sad that many critics and journalists have disappeared, and or arrested and detained by security forces for years without fair trials.”
