Chief Edwin Clark, has tagged former President Muhammadu Buhari has a tribal bigot who neglected the Niger Delta region.
In what he titled ‘a farewell address to President Buhari’, Clark lambast the former president for setting back the entire nation, the worst being the Niger Delta region. The elder statesman said Buhari was a failure who treated the Niger Delta without respect.
He accused Buhari of bequeathing a bouquet of unfulfilled promises, a divided nation, and left myriads of critical federal infrastructural projects in shameful conditions, especially, roads in the Niger Delta.
He blamed the former president for the insecurity across the country, perpetrated by killer herders, Boko Haram, Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), bandits, kidnappers and increase in criminality everywhere.
The Ijaw Chief said the situation has deteriorated to the extent that vast majority of citizens, particularly youths, are gripped by fear and desperation, resulting in the ‘Japa syndrome’, which has seen a lot of people leaving Nigeria in droves.
He also pointed out how the Buhari government humiliated him. He recalled: “Sometime ago, at midnight, three busloads of security officers came to accuse me of stockpiling ammunition, and they searched my house. It took them two hours to search. At the end, they found nothing.”
He said the South-South geopolitical zone has been treated very unfairly by the outgoing administration, despite the region’s contributions to the national economy.
He said: “For reasons unknown to me, there have also been series of unwarranted and unjust actions against people of South-South extraction, even with regards to top appointments in the federal public service, in the last seven years.
“That brings to mind, the way and manner the former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen, was harassed and humiliated out of office, to the extent that the office of Chief Justice of Nigeria was denigrated.
“The situation in the Petroleum industry is even more appalling, where the discrimination and seeming snobbery have been elevated to unreasonable heights.
“It appears all strategic positions in the NNPC and its subsidiaries are reserved for people from the Northern zones of the country, while the peripheral positions are for people from the South-South.
“The situation, whereby the Niger Delta Region continues to suffer marginalisation and isolation in critical sectors of the country, especially in the oil and gas sector, should be unacceptable to all fair-minded humanity.
“While our resources are being managed mainly by people from other parts of the country, the people of the oil-producing communities of the Niger Delta, who bear the brunt of the degradation arising from the oil and gas exploratory activities, receive mere soupçons and are rendered spectators of the oil business.”
