By Felix Kassim
A constitutional lawyer and human rights activist, Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN) has proffered some solutions to the ongoing debate over a British court’s decision ordering the seizure of Nigeria’s foreign assets to satisfy a judgment debt.
A British court had recently ordered the Nigerian government to pay the sum of $9billion judgement debt to a British company over failure of the federal government to fulfill its part of an agreement it entered into with the latter in 2014.
According to Ozekhome, the order if executed would cripple the country whose entire 2019 budget is put at N8.92 trillion.
In proffering solutions to the problem, the human rights campaigner said, “The best option thus open to the federal government to halt the looming disaster of attaching her foreign assets to the tune of $9 billion is to immediately appeal the judgement and ask the court for stay of execution.”
He notes that to allow execution of the judgement would plunge Nigeria’s already “battered, pilfered and mismanaged economy into irreversible doldrums and recession of unimaginable proportions.”