PH
Yesterday, The South-South Legacy Forum said it is foolhardy for the Ijaw in the Niger Delta to fraternize with “demonic forces, whose sole aim is to provoke hate in order to heighten the miseries precipitated by the forces of corruption in the land.”
The forum, therefore, asked the people of Ijaw extraction to distance themselves from the activities of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its sponsors.
The coordinator of the forum, Comrade Wilfred Frank Ogbotobo, in a statement issued in Abuja, said the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) should avoid, as a matter of policy, statements or actions that would associate the image of the struggle of the Ijaw with the hate campaign of Nnamdi Kanu and his IPOB, as the motives of the two groups clearly did not share the same values.
Frank, who is a chieftain of the APC, said Nigeria had never witnessed “such density of hate in the history of agitations, as Kanu and his IPOB have wrought in the short span of their activities.”
He said: “And the IYC itself knows that the militancy in the Niger Delta did not evince such hate among Nigerians, even at the peak of the criminality it later assumed with the accompanying loss of focus.
“Ijaws no longer have reason to be violent or destructive. The Ijaws have no option but to behave responsibly in the affairs of Nigeria and, to think and act as major stakeholders in the Nigerian project. This, indeed, is the new thinking of President Muhammadu Buhari’s change agenda and we must strive to live up to it,” the statement said.
The forum also advised those with advanced age in the South South to give room for the upcoming generation.
