08/22/09 Bloomberg Reports-

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, the main armed group in Nigeria’s oil region, said it suspended peace talks with the government and may resume attacks on oil infrastructure.

The group, also known as MEND, is opting out of an amnesty program because the government “expects disarmament without the real issues being addressed,” spokesman Jomo Gbomo said in an e-mailed statement today. “MEND will be compelled to resume with ferocious attacks on the oil industry at the end of our cease-fire on Sept. 15.”

Under a 60-day government amnesty program that began on Aug. 6, fighters in the region that produces almost all of Nigeria’s oil were to turn in their weapons and renounce violence in order to avoid prosecution.

Attacks by armed groups in Niger River delta have cut Nigeria’s oil exports by more than 20 percent since 2006 and forced operators such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp., Total SA, Chevron Corp. and Eni SpA to scale back investments.

MEND declared a unilateral cease-fire on July 13 after its leader, Henry Okah, who was facing capital charges related to treason and gun-running, was freed by President Umaru Yar’Adua’s government. The group wants more local control for oil revenues now mostly going to the central government.

AFP News Excerpt 08/18/09

LAGOS — Nigeria’s main armed group in the Niger Delta Tuesday warned that the alleged extrajudicial execution of a civilian by the military was putting an ongoing ceasefire in jeopardy.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) said in a statement that the special military unit, the Joint Task Force (JTF) in Sama, in southern Rivers State, on Monday “executed an unarmed man and dumped his body into the river.”

“Such irresponsible action by the military, even if it is targeted at civilians, is not acceptable and can jeopardise the current ceasefire if repeated,” the statement warned.

Following the civilian’s execution, youths in the area carried out a reprisal attack on the JTF unit, killed a soldier and went away with his rifle, it said in the statement titled “threat to ceasefire.”

The MEND expressed its support for the action of the youths.

“The MEND stands behind communities who take actions to defend themselves and retaliate extrajudicial killings by the military,” the text said.

The MEND, which engaged the military in a bloody confrontation in Delta State in June when dozens of soldiers, militants and civilians were killed, last July 15 declared a 60-day ceasefire.

The truce was in response to President Umaru Yar’Adua’s declaration, last June 25, of an unconditional amnesty for all militants in the volatile region who lay down their arms.

The amnesty runs from August 6 to October 4.

JTF spokesman Colonel Rabe Abubakar denied the killing of the civilian.

“There was no such incident to the best of my knowledge. The JTF cannot go contrary to the amnesty programme,” he told AFP.

Attacks by armed groups on oil facilities in the Niger Delta cost hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude a day. Hundreds of oil workers have been kidnapped, and monthly oil revenue this year dropped to around one billion dollars from an average of 2.2 billion dollars in 2008.

Oil is Nigeria’s foremost foreign exchange earner.

08/14/09 Next Article excerpt:

The Movement for the Emancipation for the Niger Delta (MEND) on Friday said that the Nigerian Government has asked it to confess to being in possession of weapons belonging to the Nigerian Army.

The move according to the group is to give Nigerians the impression that the amnesty programme is working.
In a statement signed by MEND spokesperson, Jomo Gbomo, the group said that the move by the government ‘has the input and connivance of the Amnesty Commitee, Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, Ministry of Defense as well as the Joint Task Force’.

The statement reads:
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has been approached by the Nigerian government to own up to thousands of weapons belonging to the Nigerian Army which would be delivered secretly at night to an arms collection centre if we agree to the plan.

This desperate measure which aims to give the amnesty program some semblance of progress has the input and connivance of the Amnesty Commitee, Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, Ministry of Defense as well as the Joint Task Force. We know that some unscrupulous individuals will participate in this scam because of the money involved and as such we are using this opportunity to raise the alarm before Nigerians and the international community is hoodwinked.

For a government that has perfected the art of rigging elections, this latest fraudulent attempt does not come to us as a surprise.

MEND believes in a holistic process where the root issues that prompted the unrest are addressed and weapons are freely given up in exchange for justice.

We are happy to note that the military has vacated the Gbaramatu communities to allow the displaced people return home and hope that the government will go a step further by rebuilding the damaged homes or compensating those whose property were wantonly destroyed.

Jomo Gbomo

Original link:
http://nigerdeltavine.com/2009/08/13/nigeria-dokuboasari-accuses-onovo-of-plans-to-undermine-amnesty
08/13/09 Daily Independent (Lagos)

Warri – Niger Delta People Volunteer Force (NDPVF) headed by Muhajeed Dokubo-Asari has accused the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Ogbonnaya Onovo of trying to undermine the amnesty offer by the Federal Government, calling for his immediate resignation.
-

This comes as the group said over 20 of its members have accepted the government olive branch, but implored the government to rein in the leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), who it accused of working with the police to nail Dokubo-Asari over alleged plans to destabilise the government through force of arms.

“The Inspector General of Police, Onovo, has often vowed to deal with and kill Dokubo-Asari and he is helping his bosom friend, Henry Okah to see this to this over God knows why. They will surely fail,” the group said.

Besides, it also accused the police of sponsoring the alarm raised by the self-acclaimed Dokubo-Asari’s second in command, Wisdom Amachree, in some national dailies that he is stock-pilling arms to cause felony in the nation.

“We wish to ask the police what point they were trying to prove by raiding a so called amoury of a people willing and ready to accept amnesty on the day amnesty was declared open if something is not fundamentally wrong,” the group stated.

The police, the group alleged also plan to eliminate “their own informant, the very second in command, Amachree” and “put it squarely against Dokubo-Asari and the People Salvation Front and Niger Delta People Volunteer Force (PSF/NDPVF) so as to charge him with murder on his return from medical treatment abroad.”

Asari’s spokesman, Rex Anighoro, who restated his stance not to accept the amnesty offer, said the proposal “is not and will never be the solution to the Niger Delta

‘question,’” adding that “we demand for the convocation of a Sovereign National Conference where all ethnic nationalities will sit to decide the collective terms of their existence.”

He said those who broke the rank to accept the offer did that out of their own freewill and questions why the police should arrest and incarcerate them, a development which he noted negates the very essence of the amnesty programme.

Original story here:
http://nigerdeltavine.com/2009/08/07/nigeria-police-raid-asari-dokubos-arms-depot

08/07/09
LEADER of the People Salvation Front/Niger-Delta People Volunteer Force (NDPVF), Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, has debunked reports of raid on his purported arms depot last Thursday by the Police in Rivers State, saying he had no plans to secede from the country.

He said Prince Wisdom Amachree, a.k.a General Adekunle, who made the allegation and claimed to be his second-in-command has a psychiatric problem.

Nigeria: Anybody’s War

“If Northern soldiers set one foot in side Biafran soil, not a single inch of Nigerian territory will be safe from our attack.” That was the vow of Biafra Secessionist Leader Odumegwu Ojukwu just before Nigeria’s federal troops, led by Major General Yakubu Gowon, invaded Ojukwu’s Eastern Region six weeks ago. Ojukwu was slow to make good his threat. But last week, having fought his attackers to a standstill, he was ready to take the offensive. In a swift twelve-hour drive, he captured the federal government’s oil-rich Midwestern State (pop: 2,500,000) with impressive ease.

The operation began in the predawn hours when more than 100 trucks carrying hundreds of Biafran troops rolled across the Niger River Bridge that connects the Biafran town of Onitsha with the Midwestern town of Asaba. There, the troops split into two columns—one heading south toward the seacoast, the other sweeping west to the state capital of Benin. With nice timing, Biafra sympathizers in Benin were already staging a military coup against the Midwestern governor, and the city fell with hardly a shot. Other towns soon followed, including the bustling southern port of Warri. That night, a Biafran B-26 bombed three heavily populated suburbs in the federal capital of Lagos; next morning, the plane hit the Nigerian air force base at the Northern administrative capital of Kaduna. In between times, it dropped thousands of leaflets on federal territory, warning of “the terrible consequences of continued collaboration” with Gowon. “Now that we are on the offensive,” Ojukwu announced over Radio Biafra, “we shall not relent until every single enemy soldier on Biafran soil is destroyed, more territories of Nigeria liberated, and the enemy vanquished.”

In Lagos, Gowon promised to escalate his response. “From now on,” he said, “the forces of the federal military government will reply with heavier blows to every act committed by the rebels and will pursue them in an all-out drive until the rebellion is completely stamped out.” So far, Gowon’s 15,000 troops—double those of Ojukwu—have barely won a foothold in Biafra. But Ojukwu’s forces are spread thin, and the more territory they invade the more vulnerable their lives will become. It is still anybody’s war.

RECOMMENDED READING

Somebody posted this comment on a popular news site regarding the islamic militant crisis in Northern Nigeria. Do you think he correct? What are the repercussion as regards the Niger Delta militants?

I think we can officially add being an Islamic Militant to the list of bad career moves in Nigeria.

Perhaps a brigade of Nigerian soldiers can take care of the Islamic militant problem in Somalia and Afghanistan. The US government should think about subcontracting to them.

The military boys really do a very good job of sanitizing/taking care the problem. The Nigeria military is very efficient in wiping out whole city blocks, villages and tribes in some instances (shall we say Biafra). We are just glad they are good at something. Sad but true.

I bet if the militants believed in reading and knowledge (like the delta militants) they could have been more aware of the consequences of their action.

PRESS STATEMENT

Ethnic Nationalities Movement (ENM) facilitated meeting in Lagos.

Issues
Time running out for resolution of conflict by government through Restructuring of the country by ensuring Fiscal Federalism, Devolution of power to be evolved through Sovereign National Conference of Ethnic Nationalities being the constituent stakeholders of Nigeria.

Atlas Cove – not an attack against any Ethnic Nationality especially the Yoruba and therefore unpatriotic elements wanting to take advantage of the unfortunate incidence should realize that Nigerians understand and appreciate the circumstances that led to the extra legal measures deployed to carry out the attack. To commend Soyinka, Odumakin, Falana etc for their statements that doused tension.

The fraud of the 1999 Constitution now being challenged in court by well meaning patriotic citizens of Nigeria deserves the support of all of us and therefore Ethnic Nationalities across Nigeria and other civil society organizations to support the initiative and do so openly.

The manipulation of our people by a particular group who employ various means and with state funds to set Ethnic Nationalities against each other must end. Those who fall for the ploys at different times must begin to watch closely so that the evil design that has succeeded in keeping our Nationalities apart and in turn set them against one another can be confronted and eliminated. It is therefore judge patently wrong for any Nationality to rejoice at the maltreatment of its neighbour by the same overbearing internal oppressor.

All progressive patriotic movements and true lovers of Nigeria and freedom fighters to come together and harmonize views that are already quite similar for a quick realization of the objective of saving our country from sliding into a failed state. Some of the groups include Conference of Ethnic Nationalities of the Niger Delta (CENND), Ohaneze, Afenifere, Yourba Council of Elders etc. In the same vein patriotic organizations like Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Odua People’s Congress (OPC) Arewa Youth Forum (AYF) etc should come together to prosecute the same agenda.

The Federal Government should be told in plain language that it cannot order any state government as in the case of Lagos to tow any particular line no matter how much it thinks it is in the right. It is only the courts that can adjudicate and settle any case that may arise between governments including the Federal Government.

The case of citizens who are rioting in some states of the North is indicative of the faulty nature of governance that has been foisted on us. The group that says that it abhors western education are perfectly entitled to their opinion and rather than subjecting them to mass murder, government should listen to and respect their views. The breakdown in communication is responsible for the avoidable huge loss of lives in the states where the agitation are going on. In a Federal System of government, all segments should have the freedom to choose what they want.

ETHNIC NATIONALITIES MOVEMENT [ENM]
#9, Twins Obasa Close, Opposite Deeper Life Bible Church, Ifako Gbagada, Lagos.
E-mail: forum@yahoo.com”>ethnicnationalitiesforum@yahoo.com
Tel: 08056037816

PRESS STATEMENT

The Ethnic Nationalities Movement (ENM) is alarmed at the extremely precarious state of the country and taking this into consideration, it summoned an enlarged special meeting of the Movement in Lagos to which some other well placed and well meaning Nigerians were invited on Monday, July 27, 2009.

Some of the extremely worrisome developments that necessitated this action include amongst others:
The heightened state of restiveness across Nigeria and in particular the Niger Delta, the Atlas Cove attack by militants, the riots in several parts of Northern Nigeria, the spate of industrial actions and strikes by university teachers and non academic staff and other workers that have lasted for weeks, the rather odd order issued by President Yar’Adua to Governor Fashola to disband local governments in Lagos, the actions and reckless utterances of the Petroleum Minister Rilwann Lukman and diversion of the developmental project of PTI to Kaduna etc.

The spate of unchecked corruption in the running of government activities such as the Halliburton scandal, the unreasonable self allocation of atrocious and indefensible salaries and allowances by Senators and House of Representatives members etc.

The overall state of siege that Nigerians have been placed by such criminalities as kidnappings and armed robberies about which the government and the police and security agencies are clearly unable to check or abate.

In assessing these and other issues of concern in the country, the meeting deliberated extensively and arrived at the following conclusions:
That it is now clear that time is running out for government to resolve the many conflicts holding down development in Nigeria. The solutions to the conflicts should have been achieved through the restructuring of the country which would have ensured Fiscal Federalism to usher in proper devolution of power to constituent units of governance. It further agreed that Ethnic Nationalities of Nigeria who are the true owners of the country should long have been invited to participate in an all embracing National Conference to redefine the terms of association of the constituent units of the country and place her on the road to development and progress.

The meeting agreed that the manipulation of our people by a group of Nigerians mainly of an Ethnic Nationality stock is responsible for the absence of development in our country. It called on those who in the past have fallen for, and continues to fall for the divide and rule tactics of this particular Ethnic Nationality to have a rethink and refuse to be used to compromise the destiny of our country that God has willed to be prosperous by providing her with copious human and natural resources. Furthermore, the devious ability of the same Ethnic Nationality to set the others against one another will be limited or abated if the rest of us realize that our Nigeria can only develop if we all pull together in the direction of positive change and progress.

The meeting agreed that the attack on Atlas Cove by militants cannot be regarded as an attack either on Lagos where all Nationalities of Nigerians are represented or the Yoruba Ethnic Nationality who without doubt is one of the most progressive in the country. It therefore cautioned that the incidence should not be converted by anybody particularly the Dominant Group that runs the affairs of the country to a propaganda weapon to be used to set the Yorubas against Ijaws. The two Ethnic Nationalities suffer the same deprivation and have common aspirations especially with regards to freeing the country from the stranglehold of the oppressive Dominant Group. Prof. Wole Soyinka, Yinka Odumakin and Femi Falana were specially commended for helping to stem reprisal attacks by people who misunderstood the action and felt that they were the intended targets.

The meeting took particular note of the riots in several states in the North of Nigeria and ascribed the unfortunate development to the faulty nature of governance that has been foisted on Ethnic Nationalities of Nigeria. It agreed that groups and individuals should be free in their country to express and achieve their desires as in the case of the present rioters who abhor western education and demanded that government should listen to and allow them fulfill their desires. It was also agreed that Boko Haram and Talibans rejection of Western Education will sail through easily at a National Conference in line with the principle of self-determination in a truly Federal Republic because we as Federalists would be inconsistent if we say MEND has a legitimate demand and Lagos has the right to create its LGs but Boko Haram and Talibans cannot have their own civilization for as long as they do not force it on the unwilling.

The fraud that is considered the 1999 Constitution now being challenged as such in the courts was also extensively discussed. It was agreed that the actions instituted in the courts particularly that espoused by Chief Bankole Oki SAN should be openly supported by all Ethnic Nationalities in Nigeria. The reason is that the so-called constitution is a “military document” crafted in cohort with the same Dominant Group that seeks to manipulate and dominate other Ethnic Nationalities of Nigeria. Ethnic Nationalities are urged to support the action by turning up in large number on days of hearing to openly demonstrate their support for the action.

In the case of the Local Governments of Lagos State, the Ethnic Nationalities condemned the posturing of Alhaji Yar’Adua on the matter of the creation of Local Governments in the state. It agreed that Alhaji Yar’Adua and his government should be told in plain language that Lagos state is in no way subordinate to his government in matters where the latter has legal powers as in the case of local government creation. Alhaji Yar’Adua was reminded that he has other pressing national issues leading the country rapidly towards the status of a failed state which need his urgent attention. However if he considers the creation of additional local governments in Lagos more important than his other numerous problems, Alhaji Yar’Adua should seek redress in the law courts and avoid the further heating up of the polity by issuing threats like a military ruler to a government that is not under his command.

The role of foreign collaborators of the Nigerian ruling cabal represented by Britain is again being signposted by a recent development. In this regard, our attention has been drawn to a highly suspect warning by the Foreign and Commonwealth office of the British Government to its nationals part of which reads “Credible information suggests that Niger Delta Militants will also now be seeking to hijack aircraft where they believe there is a significant target”. The veracity of this claim is definitely questionable because given the dubious roles the British Government has played in the history of Nigeria since the colonial era, we see this effort as attempting to brand freedom fighters in Nigeria as terrorists in order to mobilise international angst against them to aid the hegemony they foisted on Nigeria when they departed in 1960. We are well aware that we do not have credible elections in Nigeria today, no accurate census and lack equity in power relations because the British manipulated all these to aid the oligarchy they foisted on Nigeria. We warn the British Government to be very careful in its interventions in the Nigerian crisis henceforth. In the words of Tunde Bakare, “God forbid that a nation be led by a pack of greedy dogs who never say enough”

Finally, the meeting advised all progressive patriotic movements and true lovers of Nigeria and freedom fighters to come together and harmonize views that are noticeably already quite similar, for a quick realization of the objective of saving our country from sliding into a failed state. Some of the groups include Ethnic Nationalities Movement (ENM), Conference of Ethnic Nationalities of the Niger Delta (CENND), Ohaneze, Afenifere, Yoruba Council of Elders (Y.C.E.) etc. In the same vein patriotic organizations like Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), Odua People’s Congress (OPC), Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Arewa Youth Forum (AYF) etc should also come together to prosecute the same agenda.

Mr. Michael Orobator
Secretary General
Ethnic Nationalities Movement (ENM)