By Dirisu Yakubu, Abuja

Rights advocacy group, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, Tuesday, lamented the level of environmental and human rights degredation in oil producing states, particularly Imo state, in the past few years.

This is even as the rights group decried the non-appointment of an Imo indigene as Managing Director of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, since it was set up a few years ago.

Addressing a press conference yesterday in Abuja, national coordinator of HURIWA, Emmanuel Onwubiko, expressed disappointment at what he called the outright neglect of the South-Eastern state in the scheme of things, despite its contribution to the production of crude in the country.

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He said: “We are concerned about the general state of infrastructural marginalization of the entire crude oil producing areas. The case of the Imo State Crude Oil Producing Areas is particularly humiliating and constitute the gravest violations of environmental and fundamental human rights.

“The state of degradation of the environment caused by the activities of the operators of the crude oil minerals drilling firms and the central government is to put it mildly, utterly despicable and reprehensible.

“To now observe that these specific areas in Imo state that are statistically noted for being the home to some of the largest crude oil minerals deposits in the country and holds the records as being the area in which the largest concentration of gas deposits in Africa are found, but yet this uniquely gifted crude oil minerals producing area in Imo State has consistently got the short end of the stick in virtually all the previous strategic management appointments of the top three officers of the NDDC, is unjust, unconstitutional, unfair and morally disgusting.

“We appeal to Mr. President who is the appointing authority to do the needful by considering nominees from the Imo state crude oil producing areas to hold one of the top three executive positions in the NDDC so the longstanding injustices against these marginalized people from a place that is the hen that lays the golden eggs for Nigeria ‘s sustainability for years, are carried along and adequately given their due rights and privileges.

“We do hope that President Muhammadu Buhari in his comprehensive drive to sanitize the management of the NDDC with the forensic auditing of the financial health of the NDDC, will inevitably see the need for the correction of lopsided appointments in the leadership of the commission.

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“This we think is the basic requirement of the fundamental principles of equity and fairness which the All Progressives Congress campaigned vigorously around that won them the central government in the 2015 general elections”

HURIWA further noted that “the bias appointment of the commission’s Managing Director), which has persisted since the commission came into existence over the years, “has assumed a critical and sensitive dimension of great concern that if left uncorrected is capable of threatening the operations and truncating the activities of the NDDC.”

Although the plum position of MD of NDDC ought to be rotated amongst the Nine states of the Niger Delta, HURIWA noted that same “has been skewed in favour of only four states of Rivers, Akwa-Ibom, Bayelsa and Delta.”

Vanguard News Nigeria