A prominent Traditional Prime Minister in the Ukwa West Local Government of Abia State, Chief Ogunka Adiele John, has condemned the deliberate attitude of previous Abia governments of neglecting his people using the propaganda that Ukwa West indigenes have legal rights to sit on both the boards of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, and the Abia State Oil Producing Areas Development Commission, ASOPADEC.
He said the practice of using the two interventionist Agencies to deny Ukwa West people their rights should stop.
Writing in a Community news platform, the Asa Eminent Forum, AEF, Ogunka said while the governments of T. A. Orji and Dr. Okezie Ikpeazu systematically programmed the mindsets of the leaders of Ukwa West to believe that NDDC and ASOPADEC were there to cater to the infrastructural needs of his people, they went behind to hijack the two bodies to construct all-seasons roads in their places, and left his place with gullies and death traps as roads.
Continuing, he said:
“because of these two Agencies, the previous governments abandoned us to our fate to the extent that we could not access our LGA headquarters or visit our brothers in Ndoki. Commuters were wickedly exposed to kidnappers and miscreants among us.
“Men abandoned their cars to hike okada through bush paths littered with criminals and dangerous animals, paying tolls in the middle of the bush to enable them to get to their destinations.”
The Chief, who is a retiree of the Shell Petroleum Development Company, SPDC, called on Ukwa West sons in the government of Dr. Alex Otti to start early to engage their government to change the course of events in Asa,.adding that, “Asa people have suffered enough. We’re entitled to anything accruing to us from NDDC and ASOPADEC because of the minerals from our place, same way we should be entitled to development projects from across the various ministries in Abia State.”
“The LP leaders in conjunction with Asa Development Union and our Traditional Rulers should step out of their comfort zones and engage the Governor directly to discuss the deplorable state of infrastructure in Asa land, lack of jobs for our Youths and pervasive insecurity bedeviling Asaland. The earlier the better”, he said.
