| The meeting between Nigeria’s Acting President Goodluck Jonathan and some of the militants who have embraced the government’s amnesty programme did not hold as planned in the capital city of Abuja Friday, and no reason was given for that.
The meeting had been scheduled for the Banquet Hall of the ‘Aso Rock’ presidential villa, but State House correspondents who converged there later dispersed when it did not hold. The meeting was planned to help give a boost to the amnesty programme, whose implementation has been hampered by the lingering illness of President Umaru Yar’Adua. Thousands of oil militants in Nigeria’s restive Niger Delta oil region embraced the amnesty, under which many of them gave up their arms and renounced violence. But the next stage of the programme, which includes reintegration and rehabilitation of the repentant militants, has not taken off, triggering public protests by the militants and resort to renewed attacks by the main militant group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). Former Defence Minister Godwin Abbey, a retired army General who oversaw the amnesty programme, has been dropped from the new cabinet announced by the Acting President. Indications are that some of the militant leaders are not happy with Abbey’s implementation of the post-amnesty programme. “After the militants surrendered their weapons, Abbey was behaving like a conqueror, especially with his insensitive utterances,” a source close to the militants said. A presidency source said the implementation of the programme had now been put under the office of the National Security Adviser, retired Gen. Aliyu Gusau. On Friday, Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka met with Jonathan to discuss, among others, the amnesty programme. Soyinka, one of those nominated by MEND to represent it in talks with the federal government, later said while the amnesty programme was a ”brilliant idea”, it remained ”an unfinished business and ill-executed’. |
Mar282010