Muideen Olaniyi
23 June 2008
The Action Congress says the Niger Delta crisis has spurned out of control with the unexpected attack on Shell's deep offshore Bonga oil field last Thursday.
A statement issued in Abuja yesterday by its National Publi-city Secretary, Alhaji Lai Moham-med said "This hitherto unima-ginable attack has finally turned the Niger Delta violence to a crisis of immense proportion that can only spell doom for the Nige-rian state,".
It called for a probe into the circumstances leading to the attack on such a deep offshore facility by a supposedly rag-tag band of militants.
"Since the militants' favoured means of mobility - speedboats - will find it difficult to travel that far offshore, such a probe must find out how the militants were able to reach Bonga. Could they have been assisted by a mother vessel? If so, who owns such vessel?
"As we have said many times through this medium, the real solution to what is fast becoming a declaration of war in the Niger Delta is for the federal government to talk to the REAL stakeholders, not the so-called elders whose stock in trade is to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds to maximise their gains.
"We also make bold to say that past, made-for-television summits on the Niger Delta have yielded no positive results. Brin-ging in even the secretariat of the UN will not make a success of another summit for as long as the real stakeholders - the people in the oil communities themselves - are not involved in such an effort," AC said.
The party said the attack on Bonga, which is located hund-reds of kilometres offshore, has shown that the militants in the Niger Delta could attack, without qualms, any facility that catches their fancy in the Niger Delta.
The attack, it said, has also shown that the military option cannot and will not work in resolving the crisis that has been the biggest threat yet to Nigeria's economic well being. Afterall, thousands of soldiers have been deployed to the region to help protect the same facilities that are being attacked at will by these militants.
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