TWENTY-ONE Ambassadors of European Union (EU) member countries in Nigeria met yesterday in Abuja for several hours with the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Edmund Daukoru, the Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Mr Funso Kupolokun and top officials of the corporation over security in the Niger Delta.
Dr Daukoru at the opening session said Nigeria was losing about 800,000 barrels of crude oil per day, with multi-billion dollars destruction done to oil facilities in the region.
He, however, said apart from the use of armed forces, government was handling the problem with some incentives to the youths of the area and their communities in general. He said 20,000 youths from Nigerian coastal states had been employed, even as three of 12 floating mega stations worth N6.24 billion wuold soon be commissioned in the creeks of the Niger Delta among other projects.
He told the worried Ambassadors that government was using a soft-middle approach in tackling the problem. Government is saying, �enough is enough,� he declared, adding: �There is a very robust social programme at the instance of Mr. President.�
He said all the Niger Delta states had been mandated to pick representatives to constitute the Presidential Coastal States Social Economic Council (PCSSEC). He said the group comprised all the state governors of the Niger Delta, oil operating companies and traditional rulers who have been mandated to draw out specific development projects for the area.
According to him, two meetings of the group had been held in public where stakeholders spoke on what they had done for the region. He pinpointed Federal Government intervention in nine areas: Employment, transportation, education, health, telecommunication, environment, agriculture and power and water resources.
�N230 billion for the dualisation of the East-West (Lagos to Calabar) road has been allocated and contracts have been awarded to three companies,� he said.
He said because of the urgency of the situation, an extra-budgetary allocation had to be made for that purpose, adding that the River Niger would be dredged and 12 floating mega stations built for the reverine communities was real.
He said three of the floating stations had already been completed and ready for commissioning. �Each of the floating stations has a capacity of 300,000 littres of fuel. This the equivalent of 10 trucks load of fuel,� he said.
He said but for the uncertainty in security, the three mega stations would have been towed to their bases in Delta, Bayelsa and Rivers states. �For the first time, fuel is brought to the Niger Delta region from whose underneath crude oil emanates, but never had direct access to products, instead paying several times the pump price,� he said.
He also announced that 396 communities were now under the Rural Electrification Scheme, saying: �Federal Polytechnic in Bayelsa State will take off in September.