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Vice President Kashim Shettima has affirmed Nigeria’s unwavering stance against nuclear weapons testing.
He made this known during a meeting at the Presidential Villa with a delegation from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation, CTBTO, led by its executive secretary, Dr Robert Floyd.
According to Shettima, Nigeria, like many other African nations, is grappling with numerous socio-economic challenges, including widespread poverty and the adverse impacts of climate change.
He stressed that Africa’s immediate priority is to confront these existential threats, not to engage in the pursuit of nuclear weapons capability.
“The outcome of any nuclear conflict is never a win-win situation; it is always the opposite. We are fighting poverty; we are fighting a war against the relationship between the economy and ecology in sub-Saharan Africa. We have no business dabbling in anything that has to do with nuclear weapons,” he said.
The Vice President also commended CTBTO for its broader civilian contributions, such as detecting tsunamis and seismic volcanic activity, and for supporting global ecological stability.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has condemned a Russian drone and missile attack against Ukraine this week that has been described as the largest such assault in the three-year war.
In a statement on Saturday, Guterres’s spokesperson said the Russian strikes “disrupted the power supply to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, once again underlining the ongoing risks to nuclear safety”.
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“The secretary-general is alarmed by this dangerous escalation and the growing number of civilian casualties,” the statement read.
Ukrainian officials said Moscow fired more than 500 drones and 11 missiles at the capital Kyiv overnight into Friday in an attack that killed one person, injured at least 23 others and damaged buildings across the city.
