Gbo Kaabari Ogoni, a body made up of Ogoni elders have petitioned President Muhammadu Buhari urging him to halt the planned resumption of oil and gas exploration in the area in order to avert bloodbath.
Chairman and secretary of the group, Senator Bennett Birabi and Dr Desmond Nbete, warned that the ongoing activities of the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC) – including procurement preliminaries and timelines for the Ogoni retry project – were a recipe for a fresh crisis which will culminate in mindless bloodbath.
According to them: “The activities deliberately fail to recognise that oil production in Ogoni and OML 11 has a unique history that cannot be wished away by an executive fiat for a restart of exploration and exploitation without duly engaging the people in a proper and painstaking conversation.”
