Buhari orders Nigeria Customs to distribute seized items to IDPs

President Buhari has directed the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) to transfer relief items in their warehouses to designated officials to be shared to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).

NCS spokesman, Wale Adeniyi, disclosed this to reporters in Abuja yesterday.

Mr. Adeniyi said the Comptroller- General has set up a national committee that would coordinate and manage the movement and transfer of the items.

He said the relief items currently in government warehouses for distribution to the IDPs included goods that had been forfeited to the Federal Government.

“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 essentials like soap, used clothing materials, mosquito nets, beddings and others,’’ he said.

According to him, members of the committee were drawn from NCS, Army, Air Force, Police, Immigration Service and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

He said besides the NCS boss, there are also some NGOs, civil society organisations CSOs and the media to give the committee a measure of transparency and credibility.

He said Customs had taken an initial step to determine the locations of the IDP camps and that the Service had thought that the camps were only in Borno and Adamawa states, but discovered that there were over 20.

However, he said the distribution of relief items to the IDPs would slightly be different from the previous ones the NCS 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 the Service learnt that some of the IDPs were returning to their communities and they 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 Nigerians were displaced by Boko Haram insurgency that has ravaged North-East.