President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday sought the assistance of the global community on his administration’s efforts towards fighting corruption and recovering stolen assets. The president made the demand in his statement at the general debate of the 72nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the United States.
“Through our
individual national efforts, state institutions are being strengthened to
promote accountability, and to combat corruption and asset recovery. These can
only be achieved through the international community cooperating and providing
critical assistance and material support,” he said. Buhari assured that Nigeria
would cooperate in addressing the growing transnational crimes such as forced
labour, modern day slavery, human trafficking and cybercrime. He said while
these cooperative efforts should be sustained, strategies must be collectively
devised to stop fleeing ISIS fighters from mutating and infiltrating into the
Sahel and the Lake Chad Basin “where there are insufficient resources and
response capacity is weak.”
President Buhari
assured the international community of Nigeria’s firm and unshaken commitment
to democracy in the country and the African continent. He said the frontiers of
good governance, democracy including holding free and fair elections, and
enthronement of the rule of law were expanding everywhere, especially in
Africa. “Our faith in democracy remains firm and unshaken. Our regional
organisation ECOWAS came together to uphold democratic principles in The Gambia
- as we had done previously in Cote D’Ivoire,” he said.
Buhari said new conflicts should not make the global
community lose focus on ongoing unresolved old conflicts. “For example, several
UN Security Council Resolutions from 1967 on the Middle East crisis remain
unimplemented. Meanwhile, the suffering of the Palestinian people and the
blockade of Gaza continue. “Additionally, we are now confronted by the
desperate human rights and humanitarian situations in Yemen and most tragically
in the Rakhine State of Myanmar.
“The international
community cannot remain silent and not condemn the horrendous suffering caused
by what, from all indications, is a state-backed programme of brutal
depopulation of the Rohingya inhabited areas in Myanmar on the bases of
ethnicity and religion.” Buhari described the widening inequalities within
societies, and the gap between the rich and the poor nations as part of “the
underlining root causes of competition for resources, frustration and anger
leading to spiralling instability.”
He also stated
that “The most pressing threat to international peace and security today is the
accelerated nuclear weapons development programme by North Korea. Buhari
said Nigeria proposed a strong UN delegation to urgently engage the North
Korean leader, canvassing that the delegation, led by the Security Council,
should include members from all the regions. He commended the UN’s role in
helping to settle thousands of innocent civilians caught in the conflicts in
Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dailytrust
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