Okowa: How to ensure militancy doesn’t return in Niger Delta

Ifeanyi Okowa, the vice-presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), says militancy won’t return in the Niger Delta if the residents are well cared for.

He said this on Sunday while speaking at a town hall meeting organised by Channels Television.

The Delta governor said if elected in the 2023 presidential election, the PDP will comprehensively develop the Niger Delta.

“Once you provide the needed governance, it’s unlikely that militancy will return again. You first ask yourself what led to that. People felt ignored, people felt excluded from governance, they were not seeing the infrastructure, their children didn’t find the space to get properly educated to get access to jobs, these were quite obvious,” Okowa said.

“So, in that frustration, you saw a lot of youths take to arms. But when Atiku Abubakar comes back, we are going to provide services that will reach out to all.

“We are going to ensure that people are carried along in the provision of education, in the provision of start-up jobs, in the provision of entrepreneurial skills, in ensuring that our people actually go to school and then they have the opportunity to educate themselves and get gainfully employed because we are going to get the economy working all over again.

“And with all this in place, the full implementation of the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), which is very important, where the communities are going to have a feeling of being included in governance because in that act, it provides for a host community fund and that is enough to help them develop themselves, to develop their children to develop facilities beyond the facilities that government would provide.

“Beyond that, we are also going to ensure that we have an efficient NDDC that works for the good of the people, carrying the people along, providing infrastructure, providing them with educational facilities and other opportunities.

“That is not what you have at the moment. So, when you get all these things, when you make them functional and the people can see the development, you are not going to see militants coming back again.

“In Delta state, by the time we came in 2015, it was really very tough for us… but by the time we started providing infrastructure in the various communities in the creeks which they thought that they could never really get, by the time we started making those provisions and we started engaging them, they realised that the best was to embrace the government and to work together with the government for further development.”