President
Buhari has directed the Nigeria Customs Service, to transfer relief items in
various customs warehouses to designated officials for onward distribution to
Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs.
The Service Public Relations Officer, Wale Adeniyi, said this in
an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria in Abuja on Sunday.
According to Mr. Adeniyi, the Comptroller General has set up a
national committee that would coordinate and manage the movement and the
transfer of seized relief items to give effect to the President’s directive.
He said the relief items currently in government warehouses for
distribution to the IDPs included goods that had been forfeited to the Federal
Government of Nigeria.
“It is important to stress that these items are only those that
have been condemned properly in the competent court of law and have been
forfeited to the Federal Government of Nigeria.
“They include food items like rice, vegetable oil, spaghetti and
essential items like soap, used clothing materials, mosquito nets, beddings and
others,’’ he said.
Mr. Adeniyi said that members of the committee were drawn from
Customs Service, Army, Air Force, Police, Immigration Service and the EFCC.
According
to him, the customs boss also included some NGOs, civil society organisations
and the media to give the committee a measure of transparency and credibility.
He said that customs had taken an initial step to determine the
locations of the IDP camps.
He said that the service had thought that IDPs camps were only
in Borno and Adamawa states, but discovered that there were over 20 of such
camps.
However, he said that the distribution of relief items to the
IDPs would slightly be different from the previous ones the service had done.
“This time around, our targets are not the IDPs camps; our
targets are the IDPs themselves who are in these camps.”
He said that the service would go beyond the IDPs camps to
communities and villages where Nigerians had been displaced.
Mr. Adeniyi said that the service learnt that some of the IDPs
were returning to their communities and these IDPs also lacked the essential
relief items.
“We expect that the exercise will take a period of about eight
weeks and the trip will start very soon.
“The exercise is going to be slightly different from what we
have been doing before because we want these things to end up directly with the
end users.
“We are going to be working with state governments, community
leaders and other relief agencies to ensure that these items get to the IDPs in
a secure and transparent manner,” Mr. Adeniyi assured.
Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by the Boko Haram
insurgency that has ravaged north-eastern Nigeria.
(NAN)
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