Isaac Anumihe, Abuja
With over 376,000 drug users and the increasing rate of crime and corruption in Nigeria, the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) yesterday embarked on massive sensitisation of Nigerian youths to refrain from drugs and drug-related crimes such as corruption.
Speaking during the launch of the programme—-Education for Justice Initiative— the Country Representative of UNODC Nigeria, Dr Oliver Stolpe , said that the aim of the launch was to make young people become more resilient against the temptations of crime and victims of crime.
“So, our mission here today with the launch of education for justice initiative is really to bring the education sector and all the stakeholders in that sector together and engage them in a conversation of how we can use education more effectively to prevent crime”, he said.
Stolpe said that corruption and insecurity has a direct impact on the nation’s economy. About 10 years ago, we did a study in Nigeria among the business community in terms of their own assessment of the extent of the impact of crime in the economy and what we found is that security and corruption are the two main obstacles of doing business in Nigeria, both in terms of cost imposed on them in their businesses and also in terms of actually not making new investments because of the problems of crimes and corruption”, he said.
According to Stolpe, during the United Nations conference in 2015 in Doha, Qatar, the international community observed an increasing spate of crime in the world and decided to prevent it through the education of the youths.
Following the launch, UNODC would work with the Federal Ministry of Education as well as the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) towards promoting the integration of crime prevention and other rule of law-related topics into the education curriculum at all levels through the sensitisation of teachers, policymakers and other stakeholders active in the education sector at federal and state levels, he said.