Cross River Tops In Communal Crises Among 9 Niger Delta States –Group

A group, Partnership for Peace in the Niger Delta whose primary purpose is to promote peace in the Niger Delta, says Cross River tops the nine Niger Delta states in terms of communal conflicts.

The resource person, Efio Nyok, disclosed this at a media workshop on ‘Conflicts and Conflict Reporting’ organised by the group in Calabar on Tuesday.

He said, “sixteen out of the 18 local government areas of the state had been enmeshed in one form of conflict or the other either internally or with other neighbouring states.”

He dissected the various kinds of conflicts, their root causes, one of which is the scramble for land, the communities where there are conflicts, and how the conflicts could be reported.

The Cross River State Coordinator of the group, Dr Moses Abang, said “The workshop was organised to look at various communities here in Cross River where communal clashes have either not been reported or under-reported. One of the communities is Mbiabo in Cross River State which has a boundary with Itu, which is the Oku Iboku community in Akwa Ibom. There have been intra-conflicts between these people and the main one is the conflict between the two states which we have been given a document from 1913 to 2005 which is the Supreme Court judgment with several interventions which we started in 2018.

“We partnered with the Boundary Commission and they promised us that in December 2019 they were going to demarcate this place so that the conflict can be resolved. All to no avail. None of them has been carried out. This is a very big concern to us because people are dying by the day in these communities. It is either the Oku Iboku people are launching attack on Mbiabo people or the Mbiabo people are crossing over to launch attack on Oku Iboku people.

“And we have people representing us. The people in the House of Representatives and the Senate, people like Eta Mbora and Senator Gershom Bassey and the Senator himself and Governor, Prof Ben Ayade. They are supposed to look at these people and say there is something going on there. But no one is reporting it. That is why we have come to fill in the gap for the media so that these cases can be looked into.”

He also said, “The people in the communities say they need government presence to end the conflict. The place should be properly demarcated. The police station is quite far away. When they finish killing and they go to call the police, before the police respond, it is either a day or two or three days after. If we have military presence, it will reduce conflict to the barest minimum.”