Civil Rights movement, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has challenged politicians to de-weaponise hunger, make public corruption a punishable offence by hanging and re-establish grassroots democratic governments at the 774 local council areas of the 36 states of the federation to end these cocktails of aggressive attacks by hungry masses of Nigeria targeting warehouses of government and private enterprises in Nigeria.

HURIWA also cautioned the governments at all levels to find a better way to dissuade the people from looting public warehouses to loot foods instead of relying on the routine policing methodology of arrests, parade of suspects and prolonged, meaningless and time wasting prosecution in the court that moves with the speed of snail.

“Arresting hungry people who loot warehouses for food is a nullity because a hungry man being an angry mam would rather opt to loot foodstuffs and get shot by police than to die in the silence of the crushing, pathetic and cruel poverty in their homes. Government must be humane, empathetic and sympathetic and ensure that Nigerians do not start dropping dead from hunger which is politically motivated by virtue of the fact that public officers’ corruption breeds mass hunger of citizens,” HURIWA said.

The rights group described the current state of hunger in Nigeria as deadly and abysmal. It warned the Nigerian state “to take concrete, decisive, evidence based steps to bridge the widening gaps between the very few extremely wealthy elites connected to the powers-that-be and the aggressively hungry, impoverished, jobless and hopeless millions of citizens who are roaring round like roaring lions looking for foods warehouses to invade and loot. Nigerian state must end hunger now or be prepared to have the private homes of any affluent Nigerian invaded even if battalions of armed security are procured to protect such exotic housing assets. It is now or never.”

HURIWA in a statement on Monday by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, stated that although no amount of explanations or theorising can justify the attacks on government stores by the people to cart away foodstuffs, but the truth remains that when political office holders have so much weaponised hunger and don’t give a hoot about accountability and transparency, the outcome is that those who are starving to near-death would exercise their fundamental human right and will to overpower the deadly hunger so as to preserve their lives. Government must come up with real time economic bailout measures to ameliorate the extremely high costs of living including providing a transparently organised transportation or foods coupons to the real poorest of the poor. Soup kitchens should be established all across the federation now to stave off the revolution of the hungry and dying population.

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