TheCable

Legal practitioner and human rights activist, Femi Falana, has opposed the decision of President Muhammadu Buhari to solicit assistance from G7 in solving the Boko Haram challenge or any other.

The lawyer said the assistance that Nigeria sought from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank nearly three decades remains a contributory factor to the high level of poverty recorded in the country.

He was speaking on Wednesday during a programme organised by the Nigerians United for Democracy, a Lagos-based civil society group.

“Our president went to the G7 and we are happy. He went there with a bowl, asking doing this for us,’” he said.

“Has our situation become so bad that we have to ask for external support? We have not mobilised the energy, the potentials of our people to turn this country around.

“Let the new regime know that the dangerous prescriptions of the IMF and the World Bank and the G7 that we have followed since 1986 that the structural adjustment programme was imposed on Nigeria, those prescriptions have reduced Nigeria to a banana republic. We have been managing poverty since then.

“What they call poverty alleviation, not poverty eradication, because this system can never abolish poverty. There are alternative economic programmes to the ones that are forced on Nigerians every time.”