Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has condemned the re-introduction of the Bill on National Water Resources 2020 to the National Assembly.
In a statement issued yesterday, Soyinka warned that the bill, if passed into law, would hand the president “absolute control over the nation’s entire water resources, both over and underground.”
“A roundly condemned project, blasted out of sight by public outrage one or two years ago, is being exhumed and sneaked back into service by none other than a failed government, and with the consent of a body of people, supposedly elected to serve as custodians of the rights, freedoms and existential exigencies of millions,” Soyinka said in the statement titled MLK’s Mighty Stream of Righteosuness,’ in reference to the late Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech.
The Premium Times reported that the bill, which failed to get a concurrent passage by both Houses in the Eighth Assembly, has passed second reading in the House of Representatives and has been referred to a House committee.
The leaders of the southern Nigeria had kicked against the bill, alleging that it is ploy by federal government to hand over the waters and river banks to the killer-herdsman and the earlier attempts to annex their ancestral lands through RUGA programme failed.
Civil society groups had also argued that the bill would breach Nigerians the right to water.
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