President of the United Niger Delta Energy Development Security Strategy, UNDEDSS, the coalition of all ethnic nationalities and civil societies of the Niger Delta, Prof. Pat Utomi has urged the Federal Government to urgently prove to the world that it is genuinely concerned with the welfare and security of Nigerians and foreigners within our boundaries, by speedily bringing to book all those who were responsible for the massacres that followed the recent elections in some parts of the north

According to Utomi, “there must be no witch-hunting. Every Nigerian must be seen to be subject to the Constitution and extant laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”

Utomi was speaking at a press conference culminating the 20th extraordinary emergency enlarged national executive meeting of UNDEDSS in Lagos which was attended by notable clerics, traditional leaders and youth leaders of the Niger Delta.

The organisation’s Public Relations Officer, Ms. Annkio Briggs, in her remarks said: “Enough is enough, the recent killings of our southerner children, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers and other butchered Christians of both northern and southern extraction must not be allowed to be just another swept-under-the-carpet symptom of this country’s horrifying culture of impunity that we rose up, nationwide, against in January last year.

“We expect President Goodluck Jonathan, who was prime beneficiary of that January 2011 Peoples’ Revolution, to boldly ensure that all proven perpetrators (including those that incited the mobs through unguarded and un-statesmanlike utterances) be brought to book and subjected to the laws and statutes of this land.”

Ms. Briggs said the Federal Government must be seen to be alive to its responsibilities by speedily resettling the over seventy thousand internally displaced persons who fled their homes; by assisting the over five hundred razed churches to be replanted in Daura, Kano, Bauchi etc; and by compensating those over three thousands of bereaved and aggrieved families that lost dear souls to this latest politico-sectarian orgy of murderousness.”

According to her, “Since 1982, when wanton massacres of Nigerians, then termed the Maitatsine Riots, started in Nigeria, through the recent sporadic and inhuman butchery of Jos habitants and the senseless Sharia-fuelled Boko Haram assassinations of government officials and security agencies, to this totally uncalled for madness, a common thread of our northern brethren being quick to take the lives of innocent southerners and Christians in the name of Allah has been evident. This has been mainly because southerners and Christians tend to “turn the other cheek” out of longsuffering love for all humanity.

UNDEDSS Secretary-General, Tony I. Uranta. in his own remarks said, “We beleaguered Nigerians declare that enough is enough. Never again, shall we lie back to be killed by barbaric putative brethren. We are hereby calling on President Jonathanto ensure that justice is done; comprehensively, transparently, and speedily, if we are to avoid the alternatives of, at best, either

citizens unilaterally undertaking their self-protection [which would be tantamount to a breakdown of law and order nationwide] or the beginning of a fast-tracked failure of the entire statehood of Nigeria long predicted by the Americans.

The UNDEDSS scribe also warned all commentators, whether clerics, state officials, or politicians that they should “desist, henceforth, from making insensitive statements with regard to the over three thousand dead Christians, southerners and Youth Corpers who were martyred solely because of the inciting injunctions under the guise of campaigning; and with regard to the capacity and political will of the present administration of President Goodluck Jonathan to entrench justice, equity and rule-of-law in this nation from now on; for nobody is greater than the rule of law, justice and equity. Nigerians voted President Jonathan into power, and we shallprotect our mandate, as vested in him, against any adventurers no matter who they are.”