With just one year in office, President Muhammadu Buhari’s draconian
style of governance is unloading in many dimensions with the killing of
an undisclosed number of people in the Niger Delta Region of the country
by soldiers searching for militants bombing pipelines and fighting for
resource control.
In the same vein, 15 members of the Indigenous People of Biafra group were
killed by the police during a peaceful rally in Onitsha to commemorate
heroes of the 1967-1970 civil war to create a separatist state of Biafra
in South-east Nigeria.
Associated Press (AP) said Deputy Superintendent Alphonsus Okechukwu
denied the killing but eye-witness accounts confirmed the killings in
Onitsha.
In the southern Niger Delta, soldiers encountered three speedboats
believed to be carrying militants on a mission to attack an oil
installation on Sunday and “opened fire on them, killing most of them and
injuring others,” said a statement from army spokesman Col. Sani
Kukasheka Usman.
Earlier Sunday, militants in two other speedboats opened fire on soldiers
from an artillery regiment who responded with “overwhelming superior
firepower” that injured an unknown number, he said.
In another attack, on Saturday night, soldiers fired on a speedboat trying
to reach Oporoza to evacuate civilians wounded in the military’s siege of
that town, according to the Ijaw Youth Council, a community group.
The military’s offensive comes after the Niger Delta Avengers, a new
group, mounted three attacks in three days last week and warned of
“something big” to come.
Community chieftain Elekute Macaulay said troops arrived at Oporoza before
dawn Saturday and were reinforced early Monday to widen a siege of the
area reachable only by water or air. He said half the 40,000 inhabitants
have fled to the bush and creeks, and the others are afraid to come out of
their homes.
The Ijaw council said it “strongly condemns this … brutalization of
innocent residents.”
Soldiers are demanding that villagers hand over fighters of the Avengers,
and its alleged leader Government “Tompolo” Ekpemupolo, said Chief
Macaulay. Tompolo has denied involvement with the Avengers but the attacks
began shortly after an arrest warrant was issued for his alleged theft and
subversion of money from government contracts to guard oil installations.
Oil militants are angry that the government is winding down a 2009 amnesty
program that paid 30,000 militants to guard the installations they once
attacked. They are demanding a bigger share of Nigeria’s oil wealth for
residents of the Niger Delta, where hundreds of thousands of livelihoods
have been destroyed by decades of oil pollution.