Former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s attack on the Ijaw National Congress’s National Secretary, Ebipamowei Wodu, during an event in Abuja on Monday was criticized by the Ijaw National Congress on Friday.
Obasanjo’s claims that oil and gas discoveries in Ijaw land and the Niger Delta region belonged to all Nigerians were also rejected by the INC.
According to INC President Prof. Benjamin Okaba, when presenting the Ijaw stance during an interactive session at the summit organized by the Global Peace Foundation in partnership with Vision Africa, Obasanjo unnecessarily tackled Wodu.
‘Inclusive security dialogue: unbundling barriers, a strategic meeting for key influencers,’ was the focus of the forum.
Okaba, speaking to journalists at the Ijaw House in Yenagoa after the event, claimed the INC national scribe was addressing the Nigerian state’s neglect, suffering, and overall underdevelopment of the oil and gas-rich Niger Delta when “Obasanjo got into a short fit of outburst.”
He, therefore, demanded an apology from the former President as his unwarranted attack on the pan-Ijaw social-cultural organisation’s national secretary amounted to an attack on the Ijaw and Niger Delta people.
Okaba, who read a statement titled, ‘Obasanjo’s flight of fantasy: A joke taken too far’, said, “Obasanjo and his likes, who have over the years denied the Ijaw nation every opportunity to annex, own and control her God-given resources must be told in very clear and unmistakable terms that we cannot be intimidated, hushed and harassed into a moronic silence.”
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