17th April, 2018
By Kazeem Ugbodaga
Former Governor of Delta State, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan on Monday said he wants to represent Delta South Senatorial District at the Senate in 2019 because of his desire to pursue quality legislation that will lead to an end of the crisis in Niger Delta.
Uduaghan, at an interactive session with newsmen in Ikeja, Lagos, Southwest Nigeria said he would soon declare officially his intention to contest the Senatorial seat of Delta South at the National Assembly.
According to him, without being boastful and in terms of capacity, he had the capacity to do the work of a senator in Delta South Senatorial District, saying that the experience he garnered over the years as commissioner, Secretary to the State Government, governor, among others, had prepared him to serve at the national level.
“I was commissioner for four years under James Ibori and I was closed to him. I knew what he was doing in terms of peace issues. I was the first state government official to enter into creeks to meet Tompolo in the heart of the Niger Delta as SSG to start negotiating peace with him. I still did it severally when I was still a governor. At even one of the outings, it was even the soldiers that pointed AK-47 at me when I was coming back.
“Sometimes, I come back at night from negotiating peace, so I know the place in and out. I have been there in the day and at night, in fact, at one of them, I was sitting on a chair with about 20 of the boys with their guns, they were drinking, and we were there for three hours negotiating peace. I know the challenges, let me just say this, what we did and what the government has been doing is having what I called two boxes in managing the problems,” he explained.
The former governor said the first was that of engagement, as he used his influence then to mobilize religious leaders, traditional rulers and the youths to engage the boys in the creek in dialogue.
“We had the other box of enforcement, that is using the military the army, the police, navy etc. One will think that with the two boxes, that will be enough to deal with the problems, but they are still there and re-occurring in different form, some criminality and some genuine agitation; we still have the Niger Delta Avengers bursting pipelines; sometimes, we have those hijacking boats and sometimes ethnic quarrels,” he said.
According to Uduaghan, from his experience, the military, as an enforcement body was not a permanent solution to the problems in the Niger Delta, saying that they were not very familiar with the terrain, adding that “so, when the thing is really happening, it requires mobilizing the young people to show them the terrain or to prevent the crisis.
“For us to move forward, we must have an enforcement body that includes the community; especially the youths in the community, since they know the terrain. It is easier for people in that area to try and carry out enforcement or execute security challenges; it is easier for people in that area to know those who are involved in illegal bunkering. There are two parts to it, there is the part of genuine agitatation, which has now been mixed with criminality and the criminality seems to have overshadowed the genuine agitation.
“To deal with it, we need the local people to be involved in the security arrangement and that will require legislation. The Waterway Security Committee I put up for instance, there is no law backing it up, so we need to put up laws that will help us in moving forward in solving the Niger Delta crisis.”
He added that there were lots of projects abandoned in the Niger Delta, saying that specific laws were needed to revamp these projects, adding that if there were previous laws, there was the need to bring them out and tailor them to meet what is happening in the Niger Delta.
“All these engagement we are doing, we need to promulgate laws backing the engagements, there are lots of environmental damage going on. There are laws backing the environment, but we need to tidy them up. What I have done is to get a team of lawyers, they have looked at the laws and brought them out as it affect issues in the Niger Delta,” he said.
He lamented that since the crises in the Niger Delta, nobody had been prosecuted or brought to book.
“Nobody has been prosecuted so far, first of all, you cannot catch them and the people that are supposed to catch them don’t know how to catch them. I am going there to put up an enforcement body of people who know them and can get them and take them to court. If we are not serious of law and order in the Niger Delta, we will continue to have crisis.
“Right now, there is no law and order in the Niger Delta and we need to come out with and remind ourselves of the existing laws and tailor them towards the issues in the Niger Delta so that we can have permanent peace. A lawmaker is to make law and that will be my cardinal point. Also, there is the issue of attracting things to your area. There are very few people in the National Assembly that I don’t know. I have the capacity to attract things to my area more than anybody on the field today,” he stated.