Politics
THE Civil Rights Advocacy Group: HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA, HURIWA, has said that the National broadcast by President Bola Tinubu in the wake of the nationwide #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria protests, is silent on the fundamental economic miscalculation of the government in floating the national currency thereby eroding, devaluing the Naira, creating price instability and instigated the immediate erosion of purchasing power of the currency.
Arguing that the policy of letting the Naira to float as was done by President Tinubu’s administration in a bid to satisfy the conditionality imposed on his administration by the World Bank and the IMF so as to continuously award frivolous loans and credit facilities, which are frittered in powering the ostentatious lifestyles of the persons in the corridors of power and pay allowances to political appointees, is a fundamental breach of the extant law that sets up the Central Bank of Nigeria just as the Rights group argued that the adoption of the IMF and World Bank’s idea of devaluation of the Naira has diluted the sovereign rights of the federation.
According to the statement by HURIWA, no nation can comfortably claim to be a Sovereign state when its national currency is left to the vagaries of the so-called market forces and that the mandate of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, is derived from the 1958 Act of Parliament, as amended in 1991, 1993,1997,1998,1999 and 2007.
The CBN Act of 2007 of the Federal Republic of Nigeria charges the Bank with the overall control and administration of the monetary and financial sector policies of the Federal Government.
HURIWA said that the ill-conceived policy of floating the Naira against the dollar/pounds, which is at the root of the costs of living crisis in Nigeria was never addressed just as the Rights group said the statement that the price of 50kg rice is being brought down to N40,000 is a phantom story meant to deceive gullible Nigerians.
It added that the statement that the protesters have a political agenda as claimed by the President is inaccurate because the mass hunger, deprivation and poverty that have pervaded millions of Nigerian households have no political connotations.
The Rights group said it expected the president to speak on the unconstitutional deployment of lethal weapons to disperse crowds in places like Kano State where looting of public and private property took place instead of the use of rubber bullets, water cannons and canisters, but the President chose to forget about this major violation of the right to life of the citizens.
“The fact is that as we speak, the Nigerian people are facing unprecedented instability of prices of basic commodities to such a criminal extent that what you pay for an item wouldn’t be the same in another hour and the entire country runs in autopilot because the agencies of government that are statutorily created to maintain commercial sanity and price regulations have abandoned their mandates and since the value of the Naira keeps going down the drain, it is difficult for any sort of order to be in place in the regular markets that are frequented by Nigerians.
‘’This is the issue coupled with the inability of government to confront corruption that has made petrol unavailable and extremely high for millions of Nigerians to buy and power both their domestic and commercial activities,” the statement signed by Emmanuel Onwubiko, National Coordinator, HURIWA, said.
A.I
July 5, 2024
Tags: HURIWA President Bola Tinubu
