A senior British official said on Saturday that President Muhammadu Buhari needs to address grievances in the Delta region where militants have been blowing up oil pipelines and other facilities that have reduced Nigeria’s output by 300,000 barrels a day, closed a major export port and two refineries, Reuters reports.
Nigeria has moved in army reinforcements to hunt down the militants calling themselves the “Niger Delta Avengers” but British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond who told reporters on the sidelines of a regional security conference in Abuja that the situation was “obviously a major concern”, also said Buhari needed to the deal with the root causes because a military confrontation could end in “disaster”. Crude sales from the Delta account for 70 percent of national income in Africa’s biggest economy but residents, some of whom sympathize with the militants, have long complained of poverty.
“The idea that your answer is by moving big chunks of the Nigerian army to the Delta simply doesn’t work,” he said, adding that the army did not have the capacity while fighting Boko Haram jihadists in the north. “It won’t deal with the underlying issues.” “Buhari has got to show as a president from the north that he is not ignoring the Delta, that he is engaging with the challenges in the Delta,” Hammond said.
(Source: ENERGY MIX REPORT)