A Niger Delta activist,  Pat Obiene, has called on opinion leaders, industrialists and top political office holders in the region to exploit the huge deposits of gas resources to generate electricity.
He said that the region needed not to suffer from the continuous power outage presently being experienced as a result of insufficient power supply from the national grid.
Obiene who was speaking on a live interview radio programme in Port Harcourt recently, on the development of the Niger Delta, frowned at the nonchalant attitude of most leaders of the region who play politics with the region’s development.
According to him, there are so much to benefit from power generation in terms of industrialisation and business development, if the huge gas resources available in the region could be exploited to generate electricity.
“We know that electricity is very crucial to industrialization and business, both to the small scale businesses as well as the large scale business.
“We are talking about youths unemployment and restiveness, but I can tell you that if enough resources are genuinely invested in the electricity generation through gas, and if we have stable electricity, many businesses will grow, and many youths will engage themselves in productive ventures.
“Industries and manufacturing will be accelerated, and manufacturers and producers will no longer complain of spending so much on power for their production, which can also add to the cost of production.
“The problem we have here is that our leaders are not thinking in that direction at all, but we are continuously depending on what the national grid will give to us; whereas we have large deposit of gas resources in this region which could be harnessed to better the region”, he stated.
Obiene, however, ap-plauded the efforts made so far in the area of electricity generation through the exploitation of the gas resources, saying that more need to be done to make it more beneficial for real economic development of the region.

By: Corlins Walter