Yar’Adua’s first year, a disaster - UNDEDSS

30.05.2008

The United Niger Delta Energy Development Security Strategy (UNDEDSS), the coalition of Niger Delta ethnic nationalities and civil societies, has described the first year of President Umaru Yar’Adua as “a total failure” with regard to the President’s fulfillment of his promises to the Niger Delta.

Speaking with newsmen in Lagos on Thursday on the first year of President Yar’Adua’s administration, UNDEDSS’ President, Professor Pat Utomi, questioned Yar’Adua’s sincerity in claiming that the Niger Delta was a pivot of his administration’s seven-point agenda.

Utomi asserted that Yar’Adua had paid a lip service to the development of the region. “The 2008 budget is evidence of the President’s insensitivity to the fundamental issues of the crisis-beleaguered oil-rich region as the budget lacks a viable infrastructure or human developmental component for the region but it is, instead, unfairly anti-populist in its undue emphasis on further militarising the already over-militarised region,” he said.

Professor Utomi also condemned the President’s “very elastic interpretation of the concept of the ‘rule-of-law’ to allow for starving the Niger Delta of much-needed funds, by classifying over N365 billion statutorily owed the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) as ‘expired’….and by assenting to the extra-judicial secret trial of a citizen, Henry Okah, who the Federal Government has conceded as being key to peace within the region!”