SUNDAY, 24th October, 2021: The Governor of Delta State, Ifeanyi Okowa, the former governor, Emmanuel Uduaghan, and the Deputy Senate President, Ovie Omo-Agege have condemned the lack of attention given to the Niger Delta region, despite it being the mainstay of nation's economy.
The stakeholders spoke at the 2021 Annual Lecture of the Delta Online Publishers Forum, themed ‘Niger Delta Economy: Building A New Face for The Region’.
They lamented about the denial of water space in the region as well as free access to the oil business in the country. They went further to advocate for a new form and ways to develop the area.
Speaking at the event in Delta State on Friday, the guest speaker, Uduaghan, condemned the idea of the continuous tagging of the region as a “Red Zone” by the international community.
He said, “The Niger Delta region has been so hostile to investors and we cannot have the region industrialised until we change our attitude. We must go back to our communities to plead with them to be friendly to investors. Though the activities in the area were mainly fueled by the actions of the oil companies for not considering the plights and needs of the people, especially in the diversification of the economy of the area, the region can be moved from its present under-developed phase to a better one, where human capital development is highly carried along with other indices of human development.
“We must encourage people to have production facilities. It may not be very large but let us encourage small industries. We must also encourage big industries to also come by creating an enabling environment”
On his part, Governor Ifeanyi Okowa called for the continuous development of the youths in the region through skilled acquisition, stating that the states in the region had agreed to work more closely to have a homogenous drive to improve the lives of the people and grow the economy.
Also, Omo-Agege stated that one of the areas for a new economy to be built in the region was to develop sources and represent the diversity of facts of the people they serve, “particularly there is a lot of diversity in the form of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious character of the region”