COVID-19: Group urges South-East governors not to extend lockdown due to hunger

The Ndigbo Unity Forum (NUF), a pan-Igbo socio-political pressure group, on Saturday urged South-East governors to resist the temptation of extending the present lockdown in their states due to prevailing ravaging hunger.

The South-East governors had joined some of their counterparts in the country to embark on a 14-day boundary lockdown, closure of markets and stay-at-home orders.

The President of NUF, Mr Augustine Chukwudum, said the group wanted all governors in the zone to end the lockdown on or before 12 mid-night on Monday, April 13.

According to him, we are raising this alarm because people are dying daily of hunger due to the closure of road boundaries, markets and stay-at-home orders by our governors.

“We do not want the continued lockdown because of  the way they handled the situation without providing relieves and palliatives to the poor while they stayed-at-home.

“The governors know that some people get their daily bread on a daily basis. That’s is why we are condemning the actions of the South-East governors because they do not have the interest of the masses at heart, while carrying out their COVID-19 check programmes.

“”Let no governor think of extending this lockdown because it will be purely wrong  for any governor to do that,’’ he said in a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).

Chukwudum noted that the governors by their actions and inactions had added more hardship upon the poor people in their various states.

“NUF will not accept extension of this lockdown because our governors do not show human sympathy to the masses.