•Tasked Buhari to develop region
A Niger Delta Activist, Comrade Sheriff Mulade has appealed to the Niger Delta Avengers and other militant groups in the region to give peace a chance so as to give the Federal Government the needed opportunity to take holistic approach towards the development of the area.
Niger Delta Avengers, the militant group that had claimed responsibility for many sabotage attacks in Niger Delta last year, recently said that it has asked its fighters to prepare to fight the “enemy” as it claimed Nigerian authorities were not ready for dialogue.
The Avengers declared a ceasefire last year after staging major attacks on oil facilities crippling Nigeria’s oil output.
The attacks cut Nigeria’s oil production, which stood at 2.1 million barrels per day (bpd) at the start of 2016, by more than a third in June 2016, although the oil minister said in December pipeline repairs lifted output to nearly 1.8 million bpd.
“It has been evidently clear that the Nigerian state is not ready for any form of dialogue and negotiation,” the Niger Delta Avengers had said in a statement posted on their website.
“All fighters and commands are hereby placed on high readiness in your webs of operations to hit and knock the enemy very hard,” the group had said.
Another former militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which had agreed to lay down arms in 2009, had said a week ago it had lost trust in the government to bring peace to the region.
Those behind the pipeline attacks, which began in early 2016, say they want a greater share of Nigeria’s energy wealth to go to the southern region.
But the Activist begged the Niger Delta Avengers and other militant groups to allow the prevailing peace in the region to be sustained, saying that peaceful negotiation was the only way to go.
Violence, according to the Activist who spoke in Warri, Delta state, at the weekend would do nobody any good and appealed to the Niger Delta Avengers and other militant groups to follow the path of peace.
” I want to state it here that we cannot allow Niger Delta environment to be a theatre of war. All militant groups in the region should give peace a chance”, he said.
While stressing the need for the prevailing peace to be sustained, he strongly advised President Muhammadu Buhari to be proactive and show sense of commitment towards ending lingering agitation for the development of the oil rich region.
He said that;”The people of the region are tired of begging the Federal Government to develop the region producing the wealth of the nation. The needful should be done by this administration for the suffering people of the region. Government must do everything humanly possible to avert unnecessary crisis that will further ruin our economy”
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