The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has lambasted President Muhammadu Buhari and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), “for flagrantly breaching a core electoral promise upon which majority of the suffering masses voted” for them during the March 28, 2015 ballot.

HURIWA in a statement issued yesterday in Abuja asked President Buhari “to immediately introduce measures for the payment of unemployment stipends and begin the public school feeding programme without further political gerrymandering.”

The frontline rights groups further asked Buhari and APC “to quickly search for ways and means of transparently implementing all the pro-poor electoral promises the party made to the poor electorate or the President should tender apologies and resign forthwith.”

Giving excuses, APC National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, had said recently: “They say we are yet to fulfill our campaign promises to Nigeria, but they have forgotten that if only the PDP/Jonathan administration had not stolen Nigeria blind, there would have been more than enough money to give school children in Nigeria not just one but three meals a day and even pay N5,000 to 50 million most vulnerable Nigerians, not just the 25 million we promised in our manifesto.”

But HURIWA in the statement jointly signed by the National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and National Media Affairs Director, Miss Zainab Yusuf, told the President and his party “to stop giving lame excuses, but to device innovative process of generating the needed revenue for use in fulfilling all the pro-poor electoral promises or risk rubbishing public trust and confidence.”

It declared that “the recent tepid attempt through a poorly crafted subterfuge by the to repudiate these sacred pledges made during the Presidential campaign by the now inaugurated President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria amounted to political fraud which must be condemned by all persons of goodwill irrespective of political party affiliations.”

The rights group therefore asked the Buhari administration “to hit the ground running by constituting the executive council of the federation or the federal cabinet so that it can very transparently fulfill all the obligations and promises the political party employed to canvass for votes at the last election because anything short of that is a fraud.”

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