EFFURUN—THE Urhobo Unemployed Youths Movement, a group campaigning for employment opportunities for Urhobo youths has called on President Muhammadu Buhari to reexamine the contracts awarded for the protection of petroleum pipelines and other oil industry facilities in the country.

While addressing newsmen yesterday, in Effurun, Delta State, the group, through its President, Comrade Francis Onokpasa, condemned the present rationale behind the award of such contracts, claiming that the process had been bastardised by ethnicity, nepotism and politics on the part of the previous government as most of the contracts were awarded to the Ijaws with nothing reasonable left for the Urhobos and other ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta.

He said: “Urhobos are oil producing like Ijaws and it is highly erroneous to give the impression that Ijaws own all or even majority of the oil wealth of Niger Delta. Most of the oil pipelines from many other oil producing ethnic nationalities in Delta and even parts of Bayelsa pass through Urhobo land.

“Can you imagine that apart from the Ijaws who have been favoured over us as if there are no oil facilities in Urhobo land, the former government even awarded a mouth-watering contract to the Oodua People’s Congress, OPC, to protect pipelines in Yoruba land simply because OPC campaigned for PDP?”

While calling on President Buhari to immediately look into contracts awarded in the sector, Onokpasa, however, urged Urhobo youths threatening to attack oil facilities “to be patient and give President Buhari’s government a chance to do justice to all ethnic groups in the region in the interest of peace and progress of Niger Delta.”