An environmental activist and Chairman of Kokodiagbe, one of the communities under the Gbaramatu Kingdom in Delta State, Mr. Sheriff Mulade, has said that the ordinary people of the Niger Delta region were more pained by the devastation and poverty in the oilrich region than the militants.
Mulade said that with the deplorable situation in the area and the appalling condition of the people who could hardly feed themselves, the indigenes had become angrier than any group of youths, particularly the Niger Delta Avengers currently carrying out violent attacks and bombings on oil facilities in the area.
The activist said this while taking round our correspondent, who was on a visit to Kokodiagbe, one of the largest oil bearing communities in the region.
Mulade said although the people of the area had been pushed to the wall by the Federal Government and oil companies operating in the region, they could not resort to violence or take up arms and embark on the destruction of lives and property as the NDA militants had continued to do because such action would amount to unnecessary destruction of infrastructure and facilities that should be of benefit to the region.
The community leader said, “Right now the people living in Gbaramatu find it difficult to get one meal a day. I am speaking as an indigene and chairman of my community.
“I can feel the pulse of our people. If you visit the community today, you become the Messiah of the people. They will want you to help them in any way that you can. They are looking for just N200 to buy garri to eat, and this is an oil producing community. These are communities that are host to Shell, Chevron and which government relies on to survive.
“You have pushed the people to the wall and this is why I continue to say that we the people of the Niger Delta are angrier than the avengers. It is just that we cannot do what the avengers are doing. The reason why we cannot support what the Avengers are doing is that we cannot destroy what we have to demand for what we do not have.
“We cannot destroy our environment because that is our heritage and the environment depends on us and we depend on our environment. We believe that the oil in the Niger Delta region will dry up one day.”
He, however, accused the Federal Government of employing a deliberate policy to keep the people of the region in poverty, while it uses their God-given natural resources to develop the other parts of the country. “We also believe that the Federal Government is deliberately keeping us in perpetual poverty so that by the time the oil dries up, then they will tell us to go our way. They are only using our resources to carry out seismic activities in other parts of Nigeria.
“Our ecosystem has been destroyed, our environment has been bastardized, our traditional occupation of farming and fishing has been destroyed and in the midst of all these, the Federal Government is still after us and we are running. The Federal Government is after us because we said we need development, we need our environment to be remediated, we need equal political space; we need quality education and all that. But rather than looking into our demands, they begin to use the security to intimidate, oppress, humiliate and harass us and even burn down some of our communities. The oppression is too clear,”Mulade said.
He added that the people of Gbaramatu were going through untold hardship, lamenting that the average lifestyle of a man living in the kingdom was complete poverty.
