A Civil Society Organisation, Resource Centre for Human Rights and Civic Education (CHRICED) said millions of Nigeria citizens are groaning due to bad roads, poorly funded and ill-equipped health centre and dilapidated school buildings.
Addressing pressmen on State of the Nation in Abuja on Monday, the Executive Director of the organisation, Ibrahim Zikirullahi, charged the Federal Government to use proceeds of corruption to alleviate sufferings of the poor and the vulnerable Nigerians.
Zikirullahi said apart from the Abacha loot, disbursed through the Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT), other recoveries made by anti-corruption agencies are idly sitting in the National Treasury of the country.
He said CHRICED on several occasions had called for the recovered funds to be used for the execution of high impact intervention projects across the nation.
On the just-concluded Kogi and Bayelsa state elections, Zikirullahi said the elections left behind a trail of sorrow tears and blood and cannot be considered as democratic elections because they fail to meet the minimum standards of free and credible polls as universally accepted.
“Nigerians witnessed how thugs sponsored by Politicians overran the election terrain which caused the deaths of innocent citizens and disrupted the process of the election.”
The Department of State Services (DSS), depriving citizens of their freedoms in defiance of court orders should understand the damage their impunity is doing to the stability and orderly governance of the country, he said.
CHRICED further condemned the emerging culture of abuse and abridgement of citizen’s right and attacks on free press.
He called for the release of Omoyele Sowore and Dadiyata including Agba Jalingo whom he said is being hounded by the Governor of Cross River, Ben Ayade.
Speaking on the burden of multiple taxations borne by Nigerians, he said: “For us, the idea of taxation without a bold and imaginative effort to create wealth and lift citizens out of poverty is a recipe for economic disaster,” he said.
He added that between 1999 and 2018, over N67 trillion naira has been budgeted by the Federal Government and within that period, the number of out of school children has risen from nine million to ten million in Nigeria.
Lukman Abolade is an Investigative reporter with The ICIR. Reach out to him via labolade@icirnigeria.org, on twitter @AboladeLAA and FB @Correction94