Oil bearing cluster communities in Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa State have verbally attacked the management of oil multi-national Chevron Nigeria Limited over exclusion from benefits arising from their operation in their domain.
The communities are Lobia and Koluama I and II, which are host to the operation of the oil multinational in the area.
Peeved by Chevron’s management delay in enlisting them as beneficiaries despite all entreaties, indigenes of Lobia communities on the Atlantic shoreline and Koluama, staged a protest on the streets of Yenagoa to press home their demand.
The angry indigenes also visited the office of Keffes Rural Development Foundation to protest their exclusion, while hundreds of youths, women and elders armed themselves with anti-Chevron placards, as they sang war songs.
The Lobia and Koluama youths and women barricaded the entrance of KRDF secretariat in Opolo area of Yenagoa, the state capital.
KRDF is funded by Chevron to implement existing Memorandum of Understanding and development projects in the oil firm’s host communities in the state.
Some inscriptions on the placards brandished by the protesting indigenes, read, ‘Lobia community must not only benefit from negative effects of Chevron’s operations’, ‘The peace-loving people say no to exclusion, enough is enough’, ‘Lobia community is an autonomous community’, among others.
The deputy paramount ruler of Lobia, Chief Kingsley Gongo, who led the protest, said that the community embarked on the peaceful protest to draw the attention of the foundation, government and management of Chevron to the exclusion of the community from development.
Gongo said that it was regrettable that efforts to table the matter had been rebuffed as several letters written to relevant authorities had yet to yield any results.
He said that the community had attained an autonomous community status and recognised as such by Bayelsa State government for over five years.
The monarch regretted that Chevron and the Foundation had yet to recognise the community as one of its hosts, excluding them from development projects.
Addressing the protesters, Head of Administration at KRDF Secretariat, Mr Faowei Biboete, pledged to convey their grievances to the chairman of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
Biboete said that it was the responsibility of the board to set criteria for including communities to benefit from Chevron’s corporate social responsibility projects.
He applauded the people for their peaceful conduct and expressed optimism that the issue would be amicably resolved through dialogue between the foundation and the community leadership.
State leader of Environmental Right Activists, Friend of the Earth (ERA/FoeN), Comrade Morris Alagoa, appealed to Chevron and KRDF to resolve the conflict through dialogue given the peaceful approach of the people.
The ERA State Coordinator decried the adverse effect that the Lobia community and part of Koluama had continued to suffer as a result of affluent, comprising both liquid and solid waste into the river, thereby endangering their source of livelihood as the toxicity had led to the death of fishes, extinct of wildlife, loss of nutrient to economic trees in the coastal communities.
Alagoa alluded that this vex issues were responsible for conflict/crisis within oil bearing communities, when unchecked could also result in physical attack on oil workers and facilities owned by oil multi-nationals.
Alagoa noted that the community provides access to the oilfields located near the Atlantic coastline in Koluama in Southern Ijaw area of the state.