N’Delta Struggle Legitimate – Elechi Amadi

The Chairman, Rivers State Scholarship Board, Captain Elechi Amadi (rtd) has described agitation for resource control by the people of the Niger Delta as legitimate. The chairman, who said this at The Tide Roundtable a weekly personality interview programme of the Rivers State Newspaper Corporation (RSNC) last Monday said that the agitation could be defended morally. He said that what the land owners of the host communities need is physical cash and not any sort of projects that never benefited anybody. The former Commissioner for Education and later Lands in the old Rivers State, who sounded very pathetic on the situation in the region decried the situation where multinational oil companies operating in the region acquire land without adequate compensation to land owners. Speaking on the state of education in the country, the chairman said that various governments are not doing enough to develop the sector, pointing out that though education was part of President Yar’Adua’s seven point agenda, government pays mere lip service to it as nothing concrete was done to better it. He particularly decried the deplorable condition of the nation’s universities arguing that the situation portends great danger for the future development of the country. The chairman stressed the need for the provision of infrastructures in schools, while teachers should be well remunerated to enable them give their best to students. On the proliferation of private schools, he said that the situation is in order, but called for standards to be set by the government within which private schools should operate.