Six Nigerian human rights groups on Wednesday served a notice of intent to carry out an independent assessment of the performance of local government councils in Rivers State .
The groups met with the State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Magnus Abe, in Port Harcourt and said they were in the state to assess the performance of all the local government areas in the state and come up with an unbiased verdict.
The spokesman for the group, Mr. Richard Akinnola, said that the earlier Human Rights Watch report on the state gave the impression that nothing had happened in the 23 local government areas of the state and fortified the erroneous impression that everything about human rights group was negative.
The six groups are the Centre for Free Speech; Social and Economic Rights; Accountability Project; Democracy and Empowerment Initiative; Heda Resources and Legal Resources.
The move, the groups said, was to verify whether or not the performance of the councils in the state was in line with the verdict turned in by the American-based HRW report on the state released on January 31, 2007.
The report, which examined the performance of five out of the 23 local government areas in the state, castigated the council heads for paying more attention to their personal interests than using the funds at their disposal to provide health and educational facilities for the people.
Addressing the delegation, Abe faulted the HRW report, describing it as a political weapon to embarrass the state for no just cause.
The commissioner noted that the report was not even made available to the state while opponents of the administration had copies ahead of its presentation in Lagos .
He also wondered why the state was singled out for analysis out of the 774 local government areas in Nigeria, insisting that the motive was not ordinary.