A Niger Delta monarch, leaders, and stakeholders have asked the nation’s security agencies to carry out internal cleansing, and fish out officers and men involved in crude oil banditry, rather than challenging a citizen that spoke the bitter truth to name the complicit security officials.
They asked President Bola Tinubu, who, recently, sacked all the service chiefs, and appointed new ones to give the fresh helmsmen clear-cut directives to expose and punish all military personnel engaged in crude oil theft.
Responding to the Nigerian Navy’s demand through its Spokesperson, Commodore Adedotun Ayo-Vauguhan, that the leader of the Niger-Delta Peoples Volunteer Force, NDPVF, Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, should name the military officers involved in oil bunkering, the stakeholders advised the security agencies not take the patience of Niger Delta people for granted
Dokubo-Asari, during a visit to President Tinubu at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, last week, disclosed that military officers were involved in crude oil bunkering in the oil region.
Akin to his Navy counterpart, the Nigerian Army Spokesperson, Brigadier General Onyema Nwachukwu, also debunked the claim of military participation in oil bunkering, saying the army had intensified its battle against the oil thieves.
However, stakeholders, who spoke to Saturday Vanguard, during the week, insisted Dokubo-Asari should not mention any name publicly, and that security officials’ participation in oil bunkering was common knowledge in the creeks.
They said that he (Dokubo-Asari) was not the first to speak out, as an ex-militant leader, Government Ekpemupolo, alias Tompolo, whose Tantita Security Services Nigeria Limited, TSSNL, is one of the private surveillance contractors currently monitoring the nation’s oil pipelines, and others, made a similar disclosure in the past.