Group condemns financial reward for violent militants

The United South-South Youth Council (USSYC) has condemned the act of inducing violent militants with huge financial rewards, saying the practice will only escalate militancy, especially in the volatile Niger Delta region.

A statement yesterday by its National President, Chief Egberike Pereotubo, said paying violent militants, who in the first place should called freedom fighter, was wrong.

He said: if they pay the violent ones, what happens to the non-violent ones. Now international organisations believe that all the youths from the South-South are violent. The only way to prove to them that not all our youths are violent is to pay all the non-violent group.”

He lamented a situation where The federal government ceeded Bakkassi land, resources and property to the Camerounians, adding: “We are the ones who are supposed to determine our leaving on our own, because we were sacrificed by the Federal Government to the Camerounians.”

Pereotubo added that every state should henceforth manage it own resources, saying that resource control would ensure that the federating units pay income tax to the centre.

He stated that the South-South was not part of Biafra and as such Biafran agitators should not include the region in their secession bid.

He noted that the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) was not doing enough to help the people, especially the youths.

“There is a cartel in the NDDC that awards all the contracts to themselves. Only the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) members are doing the jobs without empowering the youths.

“The Federal Government should stop approving the budget of NDDC until they account for the past. Even the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is complicit in the underdevelopment of the Niger Delta region,” he added.

The USSYC, therefore, calls on the NDDC to account for all the contractors it had made commitments to that have abandoned their projects.

Pereotubo also condemned the activities of the Delta State Primary School Pupils Feeding Programme, especially as it gives projects it to only PDP members as coordinators’ insisting that the youth council will get round all the states in the South-South to find out if the situation was the same like in Delta.