Use intelligence, host community to find Avengers, Buhari told
(Nigeria) President Muhammadu Buhari has been asked to focus
more on intelligence gathering and collaboration with host communities in
identifying the location of the resurgents Niger Delta Avengers who have been
taking credit for blowing up pipelines and grinding oil and gas production of
the country to a halt.
Chairman of Grassroots Initiative for Peace and Social
Orientation and one of the facilitators of the amnesty programme, Mr. Richard
Akinaka, who condemned the renewed attacks as not representing the intention
and interest of the Niger Delta blamed it on protection of individual business
interests of some unscrupulous people from the region.
To avoid collateral damage and hurting innocent, villagers
whose lives he said had been battered by neglect and lack of development,
Akinaka said soldiers should desist from mass arrest but focus on identifying
where the Avengers were located and take them out.
According to him, “What is happening in the region does not
reflect the common interest of the people of the Niger Delta. It is
orchestrated by few disgruntled people for their selfish interests. We just
finished six years of a presidency headed by one of us, former President
Goodluck Jonathan, why didn’t the Avengers carry out their agitation during his
regime? We produced a president who did nothing in six years to better the lot
of his people, not even the road to Otuoke was touched under him while the
East-West Road was left undone; so what justification do they have to protest
now?
“Those breaking pipelines do not have a moral right to
agitate under the government of President Buhari. If they wanted to agitate for
an independent republic, they should have done it under Jonathan. Nobody in the
Niger Delta has a point to agitate just a year into another administration. If
they wanted a separate republic, they had all the time to achieve it under one
of their own, so coming now to ask for a separate Niger Delta state beggars the
question.
“What the security agencies should do is more of
intelligence gathering to get to the people behind the Avengers which I think
is a fluke. It is a ghost name people are hiding under to pursue personal
interests and ambitions. They should avoid arrest of innocent villagers and
treating the region like an occupied territory.”
Akinaka carpeted political appointees from the region,
especially the Director General of Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety
Agency (NIMASA), Mr. Dakuku Peterside, for their failure to help the government
arrest the situation, pointing out that if they were grassroots people, they
should have come up to do something to assist the regime they serve to solve
the problem in their region. He however noted that the coordinator of the
amnesty programme, Brigadier-General Paul Boro (rtd), had been running from
state to state over the issue.
He blamed poor funding for the stretched amnesty programme,
pointing out that voting adequate funds to conclude the programme might help
remove the mind of those hoping to be brought into the scheme from it and
quieten the region.
He blamed ignorance for the agitation for a separate region
based on having fossil deposits, and submitted that even if such a republic was
reaslised, it would lead to further fragmentation because those with oil in
their domain would lay claim to it to the exclusion of others which he insisted
was the case in similar circumstances globally.
He said the panacea was enthronement of fiscal federalism
whereby states or regions were allowed to source and exploit natural resources
in their domain and pay a percentage to the federal government.
He said attacks on facilities in Bayelsa were not by
militants but by those flexing muscles over Agip pipeline protection, pointing
out that the person who was given the contract was an APC member while the government
in the state was PDP and those who were organising the attacks wanted to take
over the contracts.
Akinaka called on Government Ekpumopolo aka Tompolo to make
good his promise to Buhari as severally published to ensure that peace reigned
by doing all within his powers to stop the Avengers as the environment and the
people were at the receiving end of the attacks. He also charged the Minister
of State for Petroleum, Mr. Ibe Kachikwu to streamline his intervention to
enable him achieve results as the stakeholders meeting he held in Abuja was too
bogus for anyone to volunteer information without the proper screening.
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