Date Published: 10/16/09

Group to Yar'Adua: Niger Delta is stateless

A RADICAL citizens group in Nigeria's troubled oil and gas region, Niger Delta Patriotic Front (NDPF) says over 10million citizens in the region, and other resource-endowed regions of Africa are stateless.

Central Co-ordinator of the group, Dan Anderson, claimed in an interview with our correspondent on Friday that President Umaru Yar'Adua and the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are yet to come to terms with the fact that most of the violent agitation in the area ''is largely due to the failure of our public functionaries''.

''Besides the failure of our leaders, the Federal Government policies have been very repressive because the peoples of the Niger Delta belong to what the ruling oligarchy considers as wrong ethnic groups'', the NDPF said.

According to the group, ''civil conflicts in Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo and numerous other countries have been fuelled if not created by pernicious citizenship policies that sever the link between certain parts of the population and the State. The politics of statelessness and citizenship discrimination in Africa are complex and potentially explosive''

Continuing, they added, ''we were hoping that the Electoral Reform Bill would have been passed with  speed with a view to restoring confidence to the oppressed and exploited minority ethnic groups in Nigeria''..

NDPF argued that of the eight oil-producing countries in the sub-Saharan region (Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria; and, in the Gulf of Guinea, Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon) only Equatorial Guinea and Gabon have a contingency fund that provides for shortfalls in oil revenues (Chad had one but it was discontinued in 2006).

Experts however, say that if economic growth slows further, recent gains in poverty reduction might be wiped out and this will ultimately lead to an increase in spending pressures – African timetables however, work within their own time frames.