The Ijaw Youth Council Worldwide, an umbrella body of all Ijaw youths in Nigeria and in the Diaspora, on Wednesday, threatened to embark on a mass protest and oil production shutdown over the recent compulsory retirement of some Ijaws in the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, alleging that the exercise was ill-motivated against indigenous people of the Niger Delta region.
While demanding their urgent reinstatement, the group maintained that “anything other than this within a few days from now will lead to a total shutdown of NNPCL activities across the country.”
“This forceful retirement of Ijaws in the NNPCL is something that we will resist with the last drop of our blood,” the IYC said in a statement on Wednesday signed by its spokesman, Binebai Princewill.
It saw it “sees the exercise as an attempt to exclude the Ijaws from the scheme of things and a well-hatched plot to only employ northerners and Yorubas in the NNPCL,” insisting that “the entire Niger Delta community will be left with no other choice but to shut down the NNPCL and other oil activities in the country.”
Also, the group threatened to resist, at all costs, the purported buying of AGIP Oil Company by Oando “without making it public for qualified Ijaws and Niger Deltans to bid for its takeover.”
The IYC called on the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led Federal Government to urgently wade into the matter to avoid the wrath of the Ijaw people.
“While we love Nigeria as a country and will be ready to do all within our powers for a united one Nigeria, we will not accept any attempt to unjustly undo sons and daughters of Ijaws occupying such sensitive offices in the Nigerian state. It is the promise of IYC that we will not allow this injustice to fester,” the Ijaw youths said.
