NIGERIA: Niger Delta groups allege new attempt to cheat region

U N I T E D N A T I O N S
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NIGERIA: Niger Delta groups allege new attempt to cheat region

LAGOS, 19 June (IRIN) - Two leading activist groups in Nigeria's volatile Niger Delta oil region have accused President Olusegun Obasanjo's government of aggressively developing offshore oilfields in order to abdicate its responsibilities to the region's impoverished people.

The Ijaw National Congress (INC) and the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) represent, respectively, the biggest and the smallest of the ethnic minority groups that inhabit the region.

In a joint statement on Wednesday, the two groups accused the government of conniving with major oil producers to source most of Nigeria's oil from offshore fields and abandon onshore fields where restive locals often disrupt operations to protest government neglect.

"The INC and MOSOP view the proposal to rely on offshore oil as ill-conceived, unjust and at odds with the interest of the Nigerian nation," said the statement signed by Kimse Okoko for INC and Ledum Mitee for MOSOP.

"Apart from being an ignoble retreat from its responsibilities to the people of the Niger Delta, we see this as a proposal for the economic strangulation of the Niger Delta until we are ready to submit to the government and oil companies on their own terms," it added.

In April the federal government had won a suit it filed at the Supreme Court against states in the oil region, which gave it exclusive control over revenue from offshore oil resources.

This has aggravated tension in the troubled oil region, where impoverished inhabitants accuse the government of cheating them out of the wealth pumped from their land while leaving them to live with the environmental degradation brought by oil activities.

On taking office in 1999, Obasanjo had authorised a new round of oil exploration licences, most of which covered offshore and shallow water oil leases. All the major oil multinationals in Nigeria have in recent years announced sizable finds, indicating that in a couple of years much or even all of the country's export quota would be met by offshore production.

INC and MOSOP allege that a presidential committee on security in the oil region, comprising top military and security chiefs and representatives of oil companies, had advised that concentrating on offshore oil production would be an effective way of containing the frequent cases of disruption, violent protests and hostage-taking that have characterised onshore production in the last decade.

"We contend that the security solutions to the situation in the Niger Delta lie in dealing fairly with the development and environmental problems of communities with a fraction of the cost of maintaining a militarised presence in the region," the groups said.

[ENDS]

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