Nigeria, 14 others constitute 40% of refugees globally –ECOWAS

                           
Nigerians and other nationalities from the 14 West African sub region, constitute 40% of the 70 million refugees globally, the Secretary-General of ECOWAS Parliament, John Azumah, has revealed.

Azumah, who made the disclosure yesterday in Abuja during the official inauguration of the West African Parliamentary Press Corps and Senate Press Corps Day, said humanitarian situations in the region are caused by “bad and unimaginative governance.”

Painting a bad picture of the region on humanitarian crises and poverty level in his key note address read on his behalf by the director of Parliamentary Affairs and Research of the ECOWAS Parliament, Azumah said in Nigeria alone, 2.1 million people are displaced by Boko Haram insurgency.

He said: “It is regrettable that despite the efforts being made in West Africa, the region is plagued with multiple crises.

“For instance, Nigeria’s North-East, North – West and North – Central are ravaged by Boko Haram terrorism and farmer-herder clashes, which has resulted in the killing of over 20,000 people and with about 2.1 million people displaced.

“This carnage has caused huge humanitarian crisis, such that there appear to be a lethargy of addressing the crises with funds by the international agencies. “In Mali, insurgency has run down the country and displaced many. These crises are replicated in many parts of the region.

“According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), West Africa is one of the regions of the world with the highest number of refugees and internally displaced persons, estimated to constitute about 40% of the 70million refugees and displaced persons in the world.” He blamed the sorry state of the region on bad governance, which according to him, has rendered many affected countries financially impotent to the point of depending on funds from donor agencies to implement their yearly budgets.

“The political crises that trigger these humanitarian situations in the region are products of bad and unimaginative governance, which has plunged a great number of our citizens into poverty and untold hardship. “The poverty level is so high in the region such that many member states largely depend on donor agencies and international humanitarian agencies to fund their activities and programmes because their streams of revenues can no longer fund the national budgets,” he lamented.


As a way out of the bad situations, he tasked the media and civil society organisations across the 15 countries in the region to hold their various governments accountable.