President Muhammadu Buhari’s speech at the ongoing 72nd United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has been described as contradictory, bearing in mind the current state of Nigeria, the giant of Africa.
A cross-section of Nigerians, including members of the House of Representatives, have lambasted the president and his delegate for shielding Nigeria’s reality from the entire world.
In his speech, Buhari, before world leaders, spoke about the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and how his government contained the spread of the disease, saying that his administration built COVID-19 isolation centres across the country.
This, according to Reps Minority Leader, Ndudi Elumelu, was a false statement from the president as many state governments took the initiative which led to the siting of isolation centres in their respective states.
The Lagos State Government in partnership with Guarantee Trust Bank, converted the Onikan Stadium, now Mobolaji Johnson Stadium, to an isolation centre to accommodate COVID-19 patients in the state, as Lagos was a high-risk state.
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Also, the president failed to mention cases of human rights abuses, undemocratic governance, injustice, insecurity among other menace ravaging the country, instead, he said that the “Boko Haram terrorist group, though fragmented by internal strife and weakened by our defence forces, is still active and preying on soft targets.”
This statement comes on the heels of several abductions of school children in the northwestern part of the country. Buhari’s speech is also coming a few weeks after the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna, was attacked by gunmen; a development that left two persons dead while a senior officer was abducted.
Also, there is an ongoing ethnic cleansing in the middle-belt states of Benue and Plateau States, while armed Fulani herdsmen are ravaging locals in the southwest of Nigeria. The president excluded this from his list of giant strides.
Continuing, Elumelu stated that the president’s speech did not reflect on the closure of schools and the crippling of education in many parts of our country, where normal life has been destroyed by terrorists, neither did it show any empathy towards the victims of terrorism attacks.
Buhari’s address failed to convey any personal commitments that can guarantee an end to poor and undemocratic governance, human rights abuses, poverty, ignorance, injustice and inequalities, that are prevalent under his watch, even after identifying such as the causes of conflicts.
The stand taken by the Rep members, a section of Nigerians who spoke with Talestim9ja, said it echoed their thoughts about the current administration and its “show of shame” at the United Nations General Assembly, 2021.
