The Niger Delta Avengers this week ballooned global oil price to a seven month high of $50 a barrel while plummeting Nigeria’s domestic crude production level to 1.4 million bpd.
The Avengers yesterday struck a Chevron oil facility, hot on the heels of the bombing of Escravos, Forcados and Eni oil installations.
Nigeria’s economy is on its knees no thanks to the Avengers, but youths under the aegis of the Ijaw Youth Congress (IYC), say the Avengers will only go away if certain conditions are met by the Nigerian state.
“People have started discussing. There was a meeting in Abuja yesterday (Wednesday) but I told them that such a meeting would not work”, sneered IYC president Udengs Eradiri, at the Wellington Hotel Effurrun, Delta State, where his group had converged for the 2016 annual Major Isaac Boro anniversary celebration with the theme, “The ideals of Adaka Boro and the renewed militancy in the Niger Delta: The way forward.”
“If they want us to talk, they must first open the Maritime University (in Okerenkoko, Delta State) and start admitting students, then we would now sit and talk. The same issues for which Adaka Boro and Ken Saro-Wiwa were killed are the same issues the Avengers are raising.
“There are no Avengers anywhere. Settle these issues and the avengers would fizzle away.”
The Ijaw youths also warned president Muhammadu Buhari not to make the mistake of arresting former president Goodluck Jonathan–an Ijaw man–on anti-corruption charges. The youths wondered why the scope of the administration’s corruption probe has been limited to the reign of the immediate past president.
The IYC urged the APC-led Federal Government to probe the Halliburton bribery case which was perpetrated under ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, if it wanted Nigerians to take its anti-corruption campaign seriously.
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