The Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to declare a two-month lockdown of the country after it emerged that many Nigerians were violating safety directives.
Recall that the President directed the gradual easing of COVID-19-induced lockdown in Lagos, Ogun and FCT which commenced on March 30 from May 4.
However, different videos emerged Tuesday of scores of Nigerians struggling to gain access to banks in Abuja and Lagos, in clear violation of social distancing and other directives.
Sagay stated that this could cause an exponential increase in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country and overwhelm the nation’s health facilities.
Advising the president to lock down the country for at least two months, he added that soldiers must be deployed to arrest anyone found on the streets that was not an essential worker.
“Nigerians are the most undisciplined people on earth. I went out after six weeks today and in spite of all that have been said, the pleas by the government, I saw them in their thousands and hundreds of thousands, more than 50 percent of them without wearing masks.
“Out of the 50 carrying masks, 25 percent had it on their necks instead of their faces. Only about 25 percent were wearing the masks properly.
“Buses were filled, people were in crowds and they were just behaving as if nothing has happened, as if there is no Coronavirus pandemic in the country, as if everything is normal.
“So, it is an impossible country because these people are so massively indiscipline. Unless we have a government that decides to use power and authority without any constraint, we won’t achieve any result.
“The way I see it, with the way Nigerians are behaving, we may have to be quarantined for like two months by force. Aside the lockdown, we should have security men patrolling the streets and inflicting the worst type of punishment on anybody who violates the directive,” Sagay told Daily Independent.
Read Also: Suspected herdsmen shoot pastor, wife, children in Plateau