Okah, Senators beg MEND on ceasefire

By Emma Amaize, George Onah, Emmanuel Aziken, Henry Umoru & Laide Akinboade
WARRI — As the three-month unilateral ceasefire declared by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta (MEND) expires today, its leader, Henry Okah, as well as Senators and other stakeholders have urged the group to extend the ceasefire just as Ijaw leader, Chief E.K. Clarke declared that the amnesty granted the militants by the Federal Government is failing.

The Federal Government, on its part, has denied the plan by the United States Government to assist the country wipe out militants from the Niger Delta in order to protect American investments in the region.

Spokesman of the militant group, Jomo Gbomo in an exclusive online interview with Vanguard, yesterday, confirmed, that “Henry Okah is among those who have asked us to extend the ceasefire and we are considering all the options we have”.

He, however, pointed out, “Nothing is certain until the expiration of the ceasefire. Anything is possible”.
Commenting on the meeting Sunday with leader of Camp 5, Government Ekpemupolo, alias Tompolo, by the Minister of Defence, Major-General Godwin Abbe (rtd), Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan of Delta state, former chairman of the PDP Board of Trustees, Chief Tony Anenih and others, he said, “If the men from Abuja are meeting Tompolo to give a time frame for discussions on the root issues, that is understandable, but if they are there to threaten him to disarm, accept amnesty and be a ‘good boy’ then that is not going to be acceptable to him, I believe”.

 

Nigerian government prepares to attack Niger Delta

President Yar’Adu is reported to be preparing a full major offensive against Niger Delta as soon as the ceasefire declared by militants ends on tomorrow, September 15th.

And this time, Nigerian military forces will be using special warships, helicopter gunships and troop transports, and unmanned drone intelligence planes and ships sold to Nigeria by Israeli, Malaysian, Singaporean, Dutch and Russian companies.

Israeli and Russian instructors have been providing specialised training to Nigerian Navy and Air Force sailors and pilots in how to operate the ships and helicopters over the past few months, and some of these instructors may help operate them during the offensive.

This is despite the  amnesty offered by the Nigerian government which is not due to end until October 4th.  If the offensive takes place it will be the second in 6 months when the Gbaramatu Kingdom in South West Warri was attacked and bombed by the Joint Task Force.     Towns and villages were destroyed in the attacks leaving thousands displaced. The exact number of dead is not yet known.   Thousands of women and children remain in refugee camps as I write, many of whom have been preparing to return to their homes in the next few weeks.  If previous offensives are anything to go by, the attacks will be indiscriminate with thousands of civilians being killed, displaced and their homes and farms destroyed.   Those foreign governments supplying the weapons and training to Nigeria are also culperable in the offensive as they are fully aware of the intended targets.

And this time, Nigerian military forces will be using special warships, helicopter gunships and troop transports, and unmanned drone intelligence planes and ships sold to Nigeria by Israeli, Malaysian, Singaporean, Dutch and Russian companies.

Israeli and Russian instructors have been providing specialised training to Nigerian Navy and Air Force sailors and pilots in how to operate the ships and helicopters over the past few months, and some of these instructors may help operate them during the offensive.

Links:

War for oil

Niger Delta

US military in Nigeria

 

Into the heart of the Niger Delta oil war

By Michael Peel Published: September 12 2009 01:26 | Last updated: September 12 2009 03:42 A woman dries cassava in the heat from Shell waste gas flares As our speedboat casts off from Yenagoa, in the heart of the Niger Delta, I feel as if I am being propelled into a more welcoming world. A bracing wind replaces the humid closeness of the town, a monument to disorder clustered around a single, thunderous main road. The foliage on either side of the water is thick and lush, with oil palms peeping over the top of the tree line. The river traffic – mainly canoes loaded with goods such as fish, wood and plantains – clings to the banks to avoid being capsized by our wake. I am travelling with a few guides and a fellow journalist, Glenn McKenzie, in search of the Niger Delta’s main militant movement: the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or Mend. The organisation had attacked oil installations and kidnapped dozens of oil workers, prompting the big companies to send non-essential staff home and shut down hundreds of thousands of barrels a day of production. Members of Mend. The white flag signifies the Ijaw god, Egbesu Soon we pass a village where a long white flag flutters from a post. It’s a symbol of Egbesu, a water spirit central to the culture of the Ijaw people, the largest ethnic group in the region. Simeon, one of the guides, explains that white flags represent peace; red, fighting spirit. If you are killed in battle, it means not that Egbesu has failed you, but that you have violated its laws. As Simeon puts it bluntly, “You oppress, you steal, you will die.” For the western oil majors, long used to a bit of heat, the security crisis was as bad as they had known. By this summer, estimates of Nigerian ­production ranged from 1.6 million barrels a day to as low as 800,000 barrels a day, all far distant from the 4 million barrels-a-day target for 2010. In July, an increasingly desperate government announced a two-month amnesty in an effort to tempt the militants out of the creeks.

 

OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT UMARU MUSA YAR’ADUA ON THE NIGER DELTA by Tompolo

HIGH CHIEF GOVERNMENT EKEPEMUPOLO

IBE EBIDOUWEI OF IJAWLAND

2, Palace Road Oporoza Town Gbaranmatu Kingdom, Delta State.

24^th August 2009

OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT UMARU MUSA YAR’ADUA ON THE NIGER DELTA.

MR. PRESIDENT

I am Chief Government Ekepemupolo, referred to in good and odd times as Tompolo. I have played my insignificant roles religiously in the determined struggle of the Ijaw, nay Niger Delta, nationalities since 1993 against insensitive multinational corporations and the state. In 2003, I left the average God given comfort of my life without prompting and moved into our beautiful creeks of the Delta of the Niger (reversal mine) among others, to advance our divine and just cause. Till date, I do not plan nor envisage a return to the artificial cities of Warri, Port Harcourt, Lagos and Abuja with your response trend to our struggle.

The intellectual and political agitation of our people predates Nigeria’s independence hurried as it seems today; and the same fundamental and core issues remain unsuppressed and ever daring despite conscious attempts by successive regimes to simplify them through unending conference talks and committees without attending to the recommendations there from..

Reform proposals, from the Willinks Commission of 1958 through Gen. Ogomudia’s special Security Report to the Mitee Technical Committee, abound. Candidly, your committee on amnesty and its arm dealing with disarmament in content and operations are the same to the purified ramifications of our structured struggle. Who is deceiving who?

 

War on Gas Flaring

©Photo by Sokari Ekine 2000

In May this year, the Nigerian government once again extended the deadline to end gas flaring…Gas flaring is the burning of the natural gas that is produced on the surface during the production process. The flares are either blown off in the sky or in giant sized low level pits on the ground and are in the midst of villages and farmland. They burn gas that produces huge flames and toxic gases. This latest postponement is one in a series  dating back to a December 2007  deadline which which was preceeded by  the original flare-out date of 1984. For a full report on the impact of toxic flares see ERA.

Niger Delta communities have since organised themselves under the umbrella of “Host Communities of Nigeria Producers of Oil and Gas (HOSTCOM)” and will be taking direct action to once and for all force the government into ending this practice.

“You cannot shift the date (for stopping gas flaring) any longer. As from October (next month) the HOSTCOM will take the bull by the horns, gas flaring will be stopped by force whether the Federal Government and the oil companies like it or not,” the group’s coordinator, Mike Emu, said in Benin.

“It is going to be a battle to be fought by the youth, the so called militants, the women and HOSTCOM. It would be a battle royale. But all that government and the oil companies need to do to avert the ‘war’ is to stop gas flaring between now and October and pay up all the outstanding gas flaring penalty levies. From October anything can happen in the region.”

 

South-South governors rise in one strong voice against injustice on their land, people

Friday, July 31, 2009

Some policy shift of the Federal Government has triggered credibility problem, threatening the fragile amnesty deal expected to calm frayed nerves in the Niger Delta. Kelvin Ebiri (Port Harcourt), Hendrix Oliomogbe (Asaba), Alemma-Ozioruva Aliu (Benin), Inem Akpan Nsoh (Uyo), Anietie Akpan (Calabar), Joe Adiorho (Lagos) and Willie Etim (Yenagoa) report on the unfolding drama.

“OUR concerns are the amnesty programme, relocation of the University of Petroleum Technology Bill.

“We believe that every effort must not only be made towards lasting peace in the South-South region but also national peace to avoid an exercise in futility.”

With these words, Governor of Cross River State, Senator Liyel Imoke, also Chairman of the South-South Governors’ Forum, earlier this week in Lagos summed the South-South governors’ protest against the Federal Government’s handling of the Amnesty declared on June 25 by President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

“We want a sustainable programme not lip-service and it is so important that the programme could only work by carrying along all stakeholders. ..” he continued summing up the case of the region against recent actions of the Federal Government that have seemingly negated the very essence of the declared Amnesty.

Since 2005 when militancy assumed new dimensions in the country, threatening the very existence of the federation and almost crippling the revenue base of the government, the Federal Government has been in a quandary on how to respond.

When the May 2009 military option failed in flushing out “brigands” and cowing “criminals” in the South-South, the Federal Government came out with the face-saving option of an amnesty for all militants who surrendered their weapons and renounced armed struggle. The six South-South governors and some of their people accepted it; they were even helping to persuade their “sons” in the creeks to accept the offer for peace to reign.

Thus, the governors would probably not have stirred the hornet’s nest if Petroleum Minister, Lukman, had not unfolded the Petroleum Institute’s new siting policy after last week Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council meeting in Abuja.

 

Fury in Niger Delta – Better felt than imagined

http://www.vanguard ngr.com/2009/ 07/30/fury- in-niger- delta-better- felt-than- imagined/

By Emma Amaize, Regional Editor, S/South and George Onah
At a Stakeholders’ Forum, July 20, organized by the Delta State Government in Asaba to sensitize the people on the National Gas Master Plan, the participants and representatives of host communities were agitated by the issue of ownership and what the host communities and indigenes stand to gain by allowing the Federal Government and multinational companies to exploit gas in the state.

They complained indignantly about oil: What the Federal Government did and is still doing with it after it was found at Oloibiri in Bayelsa State, and vowed that they would not allow gas exploration in their areas if the issue of ownership, local content and privileges of the host communities were not satisfactorily resolved.

Delta State governor, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan pointed out without waiting for the people to carry placards first that the state government had already insisted on 10 per cent ownership, five per cent for it and the other five per cent for the host communities through a special purpose vehicle.

It was obvious from his explanation that the South-South governors understand the pains of their people and the complicated adversity is not unheard of to the oil companies, which erected separate living structures for their workers in some creek communities with water and electric facilities that the villagers are deprived of.

 

Civil society group sue Nigerian government & 6 oil companies

Image by eustatic via Flickr

A civil society organisation, Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP),  at the weekend, dragged the Federal Government and six major oil companies operating in Nigeria before the ECOWAS Court in Abuja, seeking  to compel the defendants to individually or collectively pay monetary compensation of  $1billion and other forms of reparation to the people of the Niger Delta for the pollution and associated human rights violations in the region.

Related Articles:

Shell should end Nigeria abuse

 

Amnesty: Nigeria Sleepwalking into Doom

Amnesty: Nigeria Sleepwalking into Doom

Press Release by IPA & BSU in the UK

14/07/09

Why is the Nigerian government bringing so much pain on the Niger Delta and the ordinary people of Nigeria? Why is the government subjecting Nigeria through this pain, when it is clear how the Niger Delta crisis can be resolved quickly and permanently? Where are the political historians who could have advised the president that the current crisis was inevitable? Where are the democrats and moralists who should be shouting out to the government to do the right thing so as to resolve the crisis quickly, instead of been miserably quiet? Where is the Nigerian National Assembly that should be the defender of human rights and justice that have paled into uselessness and have become a department of the presidency? Where is the British government to mediate in order to end the crisis, rather than advising the Nigerian government on a military solution that has brought so much misery to the Nigerian people? Where is the European Union that talks so much about justice, freedom and fair-play, but has been hopelessly quite? Where is the United States, the preacher of freedom, justice and human rights, yet could not caution Nigeria when Nigeria consistently perpetrates injustice in the Niger Delta? Where is the African Union to help resolve this problem in the spirit of Pan-Africanism? For how long will Nigeria refuse to abide by due process that it preaches, in resolving the crisis instead of embarking on a short cut quick-fix approach in dealing with the crisis?

Nigeria is in a serious trouble, with the potential of collapsing, yet the government and its advisers do not seem to see the danger of Nigeria becoming a failed state, but still do business as usual. The Niger Delta crisis is the single most important issue to be resolved, if Nigeria wants to continue as a state with sustainable social cohesion and economic progress. Why is Nigeria so used to not doing things correctly?

 

Governors, JTF may scuttle amnesty

From MURPHY GANAGANA, Abuja Sunday, July 19, 2009 http://www.sunnewso nline.com/ webpages/ news/national/ 2009/july/ 19/national- 19-07-2009- 03.htm •Photo: The Sun Publishing More Stories on This Section The ongoing peace process initiated by the Federal Government to restore normalcy in the troubled oil rich Niger Delta region may run into a hitch after all, going by fresh signals emerging from political and security circles, as well as the expectations of some militant leaders. Ironically, the most latent threat to the present reconciliatory effort is a clash of political ambition and economic interests between some governors of the core Niger Delta states and their perceived political opponents, especially within the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) against the backdrop of the 2011 polls.