Former Senator, Joseph Kennedy N Waku and representative of Arewa Consultative Forum has described militants in the Niger Delta region as criminals who should be jailed.
Speaking with Vanguard yesterday, Waku who represented the Benue North West Constituency on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, at the Senate in 1999 ruled out the option of dialogue with the militants.
Waku said, “In the first place, what were the offences committed by these people before they were pardoned? Are they not criminals? If I were the president, I would jail them.
“What kind of dialogue? Let them bring to table what they want. Let them do what they are doing, they will also suffer it. Are they also not suffering when they ruin the economy? Are they not facing the same problem like you and I? They are talking of marginalization today.
“That is criminality. We are also affected but we want to take it in a matured approach. You cannot go and begin to destroy state apparatus in order to achieve your agitation, it is against the law. I am not in a position to talk about which contract was revoked because I am not involved in that.
“If those contracts were illegally awarded without going through the due process and the current administration wants to follow due process, what is bad about that? Go and do your investigation on that contract to see whether the old law that qualifies one for such contracts were made. What do you award contracts to militants for? In the first place, the name ‘militant’ is criminality. It is only this country that somebody will come back and say I am a militant and then ‘you award him contract.”
He maintained that militants who claim to be fighting for the marginalisation of their region should come out and make their demands and not by, “holding the state to ransom.”
He also advocated for compensation of people of the region whose eco-system has been damaged by oil spillage.
“My advice is that you can’t take government for ransom. If their livelihoods have been damaged considerably by the pipelines and they have nowhere to go, let there be adequate compensation to them. It is not to take laws into their hands. And by the way, let me be honest with you, this is natural resources; nobody owns it and nobody farms it but by virtue of the location that you find yourself. If there is ecological diversification and you need to do something for your livelihood, then you table this issue to the federal government so that there would be amicable resolution.
“What do they need? Let them come out and tell government that ‘this has been our farmland, it has been devastated, we have no land to farm anymore’ and then bring a proposal to the federal government. This is how it should be done than issuing threats. If I were the president, I would have ended that thing by now,” he said.
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