Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to introduce quick economic rescue measures to stave off imminent mass resulting deaths from poverty and hunger.

The civil rights group accused Buhari of churning out policies that have continuously inflicted deep pangs of poverty on Nigerians.

“The federal government of President Muhammadu Buhari has since 2015 done nothing else but introduce one obnoxious economic policy or the other which have collectively made millions of Nigerians to become destitute and incapable of meeting up with their usual financial obligations of their families, thereby pushing young boys into organized crimes of advanced fees fraud, ritual killings for the illusive quick cash and girls into commercial sex and human trafficking,” the statement alleged.

In a statement, HURIWA said the incessant introduction of outrageously obnoxious policies by the President Buhari-led Federal Government that have occasioned high costs of living which have the capacity to instigate Mass revolts.

HURIWA said that the consequences of revolt by hungry masses could better be imagined than experienced.

The statement endorsed by HURIWA’s National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and the Media Director, Miss Zainab Yusuf, was in reaction to the recent proposal by the World Bank, urging the federal government to remove subsidy on petroleum products.

“Besides HURIWA has compared the World Bank to the Biblical serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden for its (World Bank) penchant for advocating the satanic withdrawal of petroleum subsidy in Nigeria. Such proposal remains a highly toxic and deceptive suggestion since the same World Bank has recently adjudged Nigeria as still the poverty capital of the world,” the statement read.

HURIWA protested that “petrol subsidy is not the cause of Nigeria’s high costs of governance but corruption amongst top flight government officials who are now treated by the anti-graft bodies appointed by them as sacred cows whilst poverty spreads exponentially amongst millions of deprived Nigerian citizens who now live like hostages only because they voted in a government in 2015.”

The statement said further: “HURIWA wonders how the global finance institution that knows that poverty is ballooning out of control, is at the same time urging the Nigerian government to hike purchasing prices of essential items which will come as a result of the withdrawal of petroleum products subsidy.

“HURIWA regrets that going ahead with the hike in pump price of fuel will not only churn out more poverty-stricken Nigerians but will automatically result in the folding up of millions of small and medium scale businesses; most of which rely on their own fuel generators to power their businesses.”

“It is unconventional that for seven years, Nigerians have only known their government for hiking pump prices of petrol, incapable of combating heightened State of insecurity, and being unwilling to realistically rebuild the broken down national infrastructures of national roads network, electricity power, collapsed health and educational institutions just as unemployment has now quadrupled since 2015.

“The aim of government, especially the type that is constitutional democracy, is to be able to enforce laws to curtail widespread insecurity, dispense affordable universal health care, implement and give to the populace sound education or to at least create the enabling environment for the thriving of people-friendly private sector made possible by functional State of social amenities,” HURIWA added.

The group observed that many a youth were unable to build houses because “the few government’s favoured manufacturers who are monopolizing the production of essential items like cements with lots of government import waivers, have continued to jerk up the market prices of their products thereby increasing the rate or homelessness and making the right to housing an impossible aspiration to attain in Nigeria.

“We ask President Buhari to fear God and show human kindness and civility by checking the excesses of his friends who are monopolizing the manufacturing of cements so that young Nigerians just starting jobs in both the public and private sector can afford to erect habitable shelters for themselves and their families to live like human beings in Nigeria.”

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