Leader of the Pan Niger Delta Forum and Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Ijaw National Congress, Chief Edwin Clark, on Wednesday slammed former President Olusegun Obasanjo over what he called a disappointing display of hatred against the people of the oil-producing states in Nigeria.
Leader of the Pan Niger Delta Forum and Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Ijaw National Congress, Chief Edwin Clark, on Wednesday slammed former President Olusegun Obasanjo over what he called a disappointing display of hatred against the people of the oil-producing states in Nigeria.
The elder statesman was reacting to a recent outburst by the former President in Abuja, where he attacked the National Secretary of the INC, Ebipamowei Wodu, at a peace and security parley convened by the Global Peace Foundation and Vision Africa.
From the forum themed ‘Inclusive security dialogue: Unbundling barriers, a strategic meeting for key influencers’, emerged a viral video in which Obasanjo was tackling Wodu for saying the Ijaw were being treated like second class citizens in Nigeria despite producing the oil and gas resources that had sustained the country.
In an open letter to Obasanjo on Wednesday titled, ‘My disappointment over your unprovoked outburst against the people of the Niger Delta region’, Clark accused the former President of double standards over resource control in the country.
He said while Obasanjo talks tough and insists that resources found in any state belong to the entire country, he had kept mum over the gold reserve in Zamfara State.
Clark also noted that it was the practice of the principle of derivation in the 1960 Constitution, which allowed states ample opportunity to benefit from their local natural resources, that enabled the old Western Region under Chief Obafemi Awolowo to make the money that enabled it to “develop far ahead of the then Eastern Region.”
