IT was indeed a sad day for women from Gbaramatu and adjoining communities in the Niger Delta when they came to the National Assembly to express their complaints over the way and manner that the Joint Military Task Force operating in the region was decimating their land and people.
They came, they got to the first gate of the Assembly, but they could not even see at least one of their representatives either in the House of Representatives or the Senate. The frantic phone calls they made from the gate to their representatives were not honoured. They left the National Assembly a troop of sad women.
http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/policy_politics/article01/indexn2_html?pdate=180609&ptitle=Niger%20Delta,%20constitution%20review%20remain%20core%20issues%20at%20National%20Assembly
One often wonders whether there ever was a nation as ours at any other time in history. Legislators ought to be ordinarily accessible by members of their constituency; with the pummeling of Nigerian youths in the Niger-Delta, one would expect that grieving mothers and wives get the audience they seek to air their grievances for irreparable loss of loved ones.
Ironically, the federal government plans to recieve militants as part of the amnesty proposal. I guarantee that government will give it full state attantion and attempt to score cheap political point from the amnesty; ostensibly to decieve the world that it has restored peace to the region. But discerning minds know that the affected people will fight again, and perhaps this time there will be more blood and fury than now.
The Niger-Delta problem isn't as difficult as it has been portrayed. Dear government! get to work, massive infrastructural developments and there will be peace.
To the legislature, it's shame! huge, huge shame not to recieve the grieving women of Gbaramatu so you won't be seen as identifying with militants. But, there is a great difference between the militants and the innocent members of their families and comunities whom the army ravaged and pillaged.
On the whole, we have no representatives, and about legislation ... sans legislature!
Ugochukwu Ebu
Thursday, June 18, 2009
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