Nigeria risks status of failed state, totalitarianism, HURIWA warns

The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has warned that the nation risks falling into totalitarianism and a failed state should the present government be left alone and not compelled to discharge its obligations to the citizenry.

 In a statement signed yesterday in Abuja by its National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko and National Media Affairs Director, Zainab Yusuf, HURIWA also disclosed that Nigeria faces the possibility of a slide into dictatorship if the trends of rapid surrender by the Judiciary and Legislative arms to the Executive arm are not effectively and speedily arrested clinically.

It expressed the fears that both the Legislature and the Judiciary are now effectively in the hands of lackeys and bootlickers of the Executive arm of government through some orchestrated machination and manipulation of the internal organs by the Executive of those two key arms of government.

HURIWA argued that if the decline of autonomy by the Judiciary and the Legislature is not immediately addressed and restored by some progressives internally and externally, then Nigeria may lose all the gains of constitutional democracy that have been made since 1999 when the military dictators handed over to civilians after decades of military interregnum.

It, therefore, called on the international community not to allow the imminent collapse of constitutional democracy to happen because the import of the vicious attacks by the Federal Government against fundamental freedoms of citizens and the shrinking of the civic spaces is the emergence of totalitarianism, which may spiral into breakdown of law and order and anarchy.

“As a civil rights body with total and patriotic commitments to the principles of rule of law and respect for human rights, we view the attacks by the government using the compromised Judiciary to illegally outlaw Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) and Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) as terrorists groups whereas the killer Fulani herdsmen are allowed to continue with their mass murders, as a grave threat to the constitutional democracy that we fought so hard to attain.

“It is an undeniable fact that civic space is the bedrock and the fundamental of any open and democratic government, which is guaranteed under chapter four of the Nigerian constitution of 1999 (as amended); all other global human rights conventions and laws do also support the fundamental freedoms as espoused in chapter four of the constitution,” the statement added.