Ceasefire: Your communiqué raises more questions, Warri group berates Clark’s stakeholders

A Niger Delta based monitoring group, The Warri Study Group, WSG, has berated Ijaw National Leader, Chief Edwin Kiagbodo Clark and his Niger Delta Coastal States’ Stakeholders, saying the communiqué issued at the end of the one-day meeting held at PTI Conference Centre, Effurun, Delta State Friday August 19 raises more questions than answers.

According to Warri Study Group, the communiqué which was signed by Chief E.K. Clark and Prof. G.G Darah on behalf of Delta State did not condemn “the criminal activities of the Niger Delta Avengers and other militant groups in the region”.

The group in a statement signed by its Chairman, Edward O. Ekpoko, Esq. and Secretary, Tony Ede, opined that “those invited in the stakeholders’ meeting were dominated by over 80% of one ethnic Nationality out of the six coastal states of the Niger Delta, adding that the communiqué issued at the end of the one-day talk shop “was neither read nor generally agreed on at the meeting”.

The statement which was made available to Fresh Angle International Monday August 29 via electronic mail after the group’s meeting held Saturday August 27 in Warri, described the “emergence of some traditional rulers, elders and politicians in the region now coalescing into different groups” to mediate in the Niger Delta crisis as pretenders.

While stating that they “have also observed with chagrin the visit of some Niger Delta Monarchs to the Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr. Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu was an all-Ijaw affair”, the Itsekiri group posited that “some of these elders and traditional rulers are acting the script of the militants and have only recruited and/or assembled some few innocent ones and /or those willing to be bought outside their ethnic Nationalities to give it a semblance of a Niger Delta struggle”.

They admonished the federal government “to be wary about dialogue with emerging traditional rulers, leaders of thought, elders or stakeholders as peace builders”, insisting that the Buhari administration “must separate acts of criminality in genuine efforts to develop the Niger Delta” whose problem “is more of management of the resources allocated than anything else”.

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