N/East humanitarian crises: We failed to learn from our past —Ekweremadu

THE deputy president of the Senate, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, has traced the raging humanitarian crisis in the North-East to the nation’s failure to draw lessons from the civil war to build her internal capacity and mechanisms for managing such situations.

This was even as he reaffirmed the National Assembly’s commitment to going the extra mile to bring succuor to parts of the country facing humanitarian challenges.

Ekweremadu spoke when he received a delegation of the Princess Modupe Ozolua-led Empower 54, which paid him a courtesy visit in Abuja.

The deputy senate president in a statement by his media aide, Uche Anichukwu, observed that as a country that had gone through armed conflict and humanitarian crisis, Nigeria ought to have learnt from such experience and strengthened her capacities at peace-building and managing humanitarian challenges.

According to him, “As a young boy in the 1960s, I experienced firsthand humanitarian crisis in the Eastern part of Nigeria occasioned by the civil war. Then, we had to depend on international donors and humanitarian organisations.

“Unfortunately, from the developments so far in the North East, it is clear that, like virtually every other thing in our history, we did not learn from that experience. We remain heavily dependent on humanitarian organisations and donors.

“If we had learnt from the experience of the civil war, Nigeria would have needed little or no external support. We would have built our internal capacity and mechanisms to manage the North East situation.”