HURIWA Cautions EFCC over Students Harassment in Owerri – TheNigerialawyer

A human rights advocacy group, Human Rights Writers Association
of Nigeria (HURIWA) has raised the alarm over alleged incessant
arrest harassment and extortion of students in Owerri, Imo State by
operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)
and asked them to desist.

The body said the students, especially those living in privately
built hostels were targeted by the anti-corruption agency and
insisted that they should be allowed to enjoy their
constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights and not hounded
based on assumptions.

A statement by the body signed by its Executive Director,
Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko condemned “a situation whereby armed
operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)
would constantly storm the living hostels of both female and male
students of the tertiary institutions in Owerri, the Imo State
capital and round up every students staying in those hostels even
without any shreds of empirical evidence linking such innocent
students to any suspicious activities linked to advanced fee fraud
or 419.”

The action, the body contended, fouled 34(1); 35(1) and section
37 of the Nigeria constitution which guarantees basic freedoms to
the citizens including students who must never be subjected to such
horrendous ordeals of frequent raids by the operatives of the
anti-graft body who have been accused of arbitrarily arresting
students only because they live in the same flats with some persons
who may be or not suspected at all of committing any criminal act
of fraud.

HURIWA accused the anti-graft agency of unduly subjecting these
students to unnecessary embarrassment which they reasoned may
impede on their studies and academic which calls for abiding by
rule of law in their operations.

In another development, the Rights group carpeted the Minister
of Health, for what it called “primitive, backward, and
retrogressive thinking of importing foreign trained doctors to be
employed to work in public hospitals.”

According to HURIWA, the plan by the current health minister had
shown the lack of adherence to standard policy implementation in
the administration of the health sector and asked him and his
minister of state to resign forthwith if they had run out of
workable solutions to the problems afflicting the public healthcare
system in the Country.

“It was this same Federal administration in the first tenure
that Nigerians were told loud and clear by the then health minister
Dr. Isaac Adewole that Nigeria is producing too many medical
professionals and doctors even as the minister then went ahead
comically to tell the doctors who are unable to find job slots both
in the private and public health facilities to embrace tailoring
and other vocational jobs.”

“We in HURIWA are disappointed that those running public health
policies in Nigeria are bereft of ideas that can turn around the
health sector. Thinking of employing white or foreign doctors or
even Cuban/Chinese doctors to work in Nigeria’s health sector is
selfish, irrational and an attempt by the ministers to populate the
public health facilities with ghost workers.”

“What we need in Nigeria are not foreign doctors but the most up
to date medical equipment and facilities that are in tune with the
advances in technology of the twenty first century and beyond. The
country has more than enough competent doctors but due to
corruption by the health institutions, virtually all the yearly
budgets for health in the public sector are stolen by politician,”
they insisted.

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