A civil rights advocacy group, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, (HURIWA) has faulted Monday night’s speech of President Bola Tinubu to Nigerians suffering the crushing economic effect of the abrupt removal of fuel subsidy.
HURIWA, in a statement by its national coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, described the president’s speech as academic, highfalutin and totally detached from the realities of the 130 million Nigerian masses who have been further mired in the bog of poverty and lack with the president’s assumption of office on May 29, 2023.
The group said the president failed to tell Nigerians his plans to resuscitate public refineries after the previous All Progressives Congress (APC) government of Muhammadu Buhari spent billions of naira renovating the four public refineries.
HURIWA dismissed most of the proposed palliative measures as empty rhetoric for as long as the government decided to punish poor Nigerians but has no strategy to catch and prosecute crude oil thieves who according to the rights group ensured that even as a broke nation, Nigeria lost $10 billion to crude oil theft in seven months between January and July of last year.
According to him, this occurred under a government of All Progressives Congress (APC) the same as the party that produced Tinubu.
HURIWA lamented that Nigeria, which is presumed as Africa’s biggest oil producer, lost an average of 437,000 barrels of oil a day to criminals.
HURIWA recalled that around September 8, 2022, the group managing director of NNPCL, Mele Kyari, headlined the State House media briefing, expressing concern about the menace of oil theft undermining Nigeria’s production and consequently fiscal capacity. The rights group alleged that this same head of NNPCL is the central character that pushed for withdrawal of subsidy by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu that has created an atmosphere of deep-rooted poverty amongst millions of Nigerians but the same government has allowed thieves of crude oil to continue to enjoy their loot.
He said Kyari had blamed various sections of the Nigerian society for being complicit in the theft of millions of barrels of crude oil.
