The Ijaw Patriotic League (IPL) has pointed accusing fingers at those they describe as “massively wealthy criminals” running multi-billion naira illegal refineries as faceless persons using proxies in their desperate attempt to force the federal government to revoke the oil pipelines protection contract awarded to a company in which High Chief Ekpemupolo Tompolo has interest.
Declaring support for the federal government not to revoke the contract, the group’s national coordinator, Jasper Eritei, described the decision of the federal government to engage the former leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) to assist in securing the nation’s outrageously violated pipelines as well thought out and in the public good.
The league noted that it was the responsibility of government to make critical decisions to ensure that the overall interest of the society is protected.
The national coordinator said in a statement yesterday that the condemnation and protests that followed the award of the contract to the particular company should alert the federal government and indeed the NNPC that the right decision had been made to prevent oil theft in the Niger Delta.
The theft of the nation’s oil resources, according to Eritei, has assumed a startling dimension at a time government is borrowing to run the country and should be rightly tackled just as the government is doing.
He stressed that the “massively wealthy criminals” would go through proxies to prevent any serious solution.
He stated further that the attacks on the contract should not surprise the government as oil thieves who have deployed billions of oil naira on tankers and personnel to criminally plunder the country’s oil resources will not back off without a fight.
He noted that the orchestrated blackmail is just the first show of desperation by the deadly oil cabal, stressing that with Tompolo’s track record in NIMASS where a company in which he has interest secured the water ways, the people behind the massive sabotage of the Nigerian economy will not be comfortable.
The group wondered why out of five firms that were engaged, only the one by this particular firm is generating condemnation.
