The administration of Enugu State has issued a warning that it will shut down permanently any school, market, or shop that doesn’t open and run normally due to the illegal one-week sit-at-home edict imposed by anonymous non-state actors in the state.
The government threatened to immediately revoke the license of any school that refused to operate normally after expressing outrage over alleged instructions given by owners of private schools in the state to their students and pupils not to attend school starting on Monday due to the illegal sit-at-home order.
Additionally, it issued a warning that it would use all legal means at its disposal, including the Cybercrime Act 2015, to pursue and prosecute anyone found guilty of purposefully promoting the illegal sit-at-home order by “fear mongering residents, causing false alarm to cause public disturbance, etc. through sharing fake news and propagating falsehood connected with the illegal sit-at-home order on social media platforms.”
In a public service announcement, Prof. Chidiebere Onyia, the state’s secretary of government, reiterated the state’s ban on all forms of illegal sit-at-home, calling them evil and contrary to the values that the populace holds dear, such as the Igbo spirit of industry, hard work, creativity, and productivity.
Government warned that it would “no longer sit by and watch faceless groups and misguided individuals issue illegal orders, dictating to us how to lead our lives, when to go to work or market, and when our children go to school, while they ply their trade and their children go to school” while urging the public to go about their normal daily activities and stressing that it had put in place adequate security measures to protect lives and property. “With all of the tools and resources at our disposal, we must fight and defeat this because it is no longer acceptable.”
However, it stated that its intention to enforce specific laws was not an attempt to prevent individuals from using their legal freedoms of expression, adding that “this, however, is by no means, depriving citizens freedom of speech and information as enshrined in the constitution.”
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