The Supreme Niger Delta Youth Council Worldwide has called on the President Muhammadu Buhari led Federal government to treat members of the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) and MENDS as criminals.
National President of the Niger Delta council, Prince Michael Newgent said those parading themselves as Niger Delta Avengers are nothing but criminals being used by corrupt politicians to cause disaffection among Nigerians.
Niger Delta council who met with leaders of the Arewa Consultative Forum,(ACF) in Kaduna, dissociated themselves from the Niger Delta Avengers, whom they claimed are “armed robbers, criminal” and carrying out the biddings of corrupt and failed politicians from the region(Niger Delta).
Newgent said, “We are the real youth of the Niger Delta. Those (Avengers and other militants) bombing oil and gas installations are armed robbers. They are carrying out the biddings of failed and corrupt politicians. We behind our father , Dr. Joseph Wayas who had no records of corrupt charges before.
“We have told the failed politicians that if they buy gun for us, we shall use it on their children first,” he said.
Second Republic Senate President, Dr. Joseph Wayas, who led the group on a courtesy visit to the ACF secretariat in Kaduna, said despite the current challenges bedeviling the country, Nigeria and Nigerians would remain one.
Wayas recalled one born in Lafiya, the present day Nassarawa State, he and other leaders from the Niger Delta had come to realized that the North remain a ‘home’ to them.
The former Senate President dismissed any plot from any quarter for the disintegration of the Nigeria, noting that the country would remain one and continue to wax stronger and stronger.
He described the meeting as a “meeting of brothers”, noting that there was a time in his life that he has “no state to go to than the North.”
According to him, despite the challenges Nigeria is currently grappling with, the country will grow from strength to strength.
He said:”I am generally emotional when talking on issues that affects the Arewa (north)to the extent that some people don’t believe that I am from somewhere else, especially when it involved people from Lafiya because I was born there in Lafiya. My father was a railway worker and that was the beginning with mixing with the people of Arewa.
“So what is happening here is nothing no new. It has been happening before and will be so until Nigeria becomes one.”
While responding, the Deputy Chairman of the ACF, Alhaji Liman Kwande, who stood in for the Forum’s Chairman and former Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Coomasie, said the north was committed to the cordial relationship that long existed between the region and the good people of the Niger Delta.
Kwande noted that the ACF as an umbrella body of the North believed in Nigeria as one and indivisible entity and pledged the support of the forum to any move that would entrenched peace and unity to Nigerians.
He then pledged that the north would fully participate proposed Niger Delta Peace Conference slated for Benin, Edo state later in the month.
Those that attended the meeting are a former Nigerian Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Ibrahim Salihu (retd), former Chairman of the ACF, Alhaji Aliko Mohammed, former Military Administrator of Kebbi State and ACF Secretary, Col. John Ubah (retd) among others.
