Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), on Friday, decried the twin monster of power outage and fuel scarcity that have crippled many businesses in the first quarter of 2022.
HURIWA, in a statement by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, said it was pathetic that the Federal Government led by President Muhammadu Buhari and his ministers gathered in Abuja for the All Progressives Congress Convention while ordinary Nigerians suffer perpetually due to erratic power supply and unending collapse of the national grid as well as fuel scarcity.
The group also said it was very unfortunate that all university students have been at home for over six weeks as a result of the strike embarked upon by the Academic Staff Union of Universities due to the failure of the Federal Government to accede to the demands of the striking lecturers while government officials send their wards to study overseas with taxpayers’ money.
HURIWA’s Onwubiko said, “It is alarming that the persistent twin social evils of fuel scarcity and erratic electricity power shortage have crippled hundreds of thousands of businesses in the country with the attendant joblessness, high crime rates, hunger, starvation afflicting millions of Nigerians as a result of this fundamental display of profound ineptitude and inefficiency by the Federal Government.
“The fact that the fuel crisis has been allowed to fester shows either that the APC Federal Government instigated the fuel scarcity to breed the virus of street urchins who are largely from either Niger Republic or Kano State and who are the main agents selling fuel in jerry cans, especially in the FCT.
“These same thugs voted for APC in Kano, Zaria, Sokoto.
“Is it that the APC government wants to reward the political thugs that the party used to thumbprint ballots in many northern states during the 2019 poll or that the Federal Government lacks what it takes to put to an end the biting scarcity or that the Federal Government wants Nigerians to react so it can call out troops to kill as many as possible?”
