As hunger, poverty and hardship apparently ravage several families across the country coupled with pockets of protests going on in several parts of the country against the scourge, an elder statesman in Rivers State and minority rights activist in the Niger Delta region, Rev Sokari Soberekon, has advised the people of the Niger Delta to resist the temptation of joining the protests but should rather focus on the issues of marginalisation and oppression meted out on them by the majority ethnic groups in the country.
Soberekon, who gave the charge in an interview with newsmen in Port Harcourt, said there was no need for the people of the Niger Delta to join the protests, as they have over the years been victims of marginalisation and oppression meted out on them by people he described as belonging to the majority ethnic groups in the country.
He said the three major tribes of Yoruba, Hausa/ Fulani and Igbo have continued to hold the people of the Niger Delta hostage, with government policies and programmes that tend to further enslave and impoverish them, adding that the people of the Niger Delta have not benefitted maximally from their God-given oil and gas resources.
Soberekon, therefore, urged Nigerians and other people of goodwill to rather face the realities of the embattled economically, politically and deprived people of the Niger Delta instead of cajoling them to protest against the current hardship in the country.
“We should not allow our contemporary WAZOBIA ethnic groups to cajole us to lose focus on the topical and salient issue bothering the Niger Deltans,” he pleaded.
According to him, “the majority tribes have demonstrated arrant complacency and swishy tendencies and insensitivity over the plight of the Niger Delta without demonstration of solidarity.”
He, however, enjoined the people of the Niger Delta region to support the good intentions of the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and its Renewed Hope agenda, in its bid to get the country out of the woods.