President Bola Tinubu has been urged to ignore what a non-governmental organisation described as a coordinated campaign of blackmail, including staged protests and public calls for the removal of the Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, Bayo Ojulari.
Speaking at a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday, Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Forum for Integrity, Nelson Idoko, dismissed the protest staged at NNPC Towers by a group calling itself Niger Delta Youths as “laughable and stage-managed.”
The demonstrators had demanded Ojulari’s resignation over alleged corruption and mismanagement, insisting that someone from the Niger Delta should lead the company.
NFI, however, said the protesters were neither genuine Niger Delta youths nor authentic stakeholders.
“They were youths hired from Abuja suburbs who could not even show their faces on camera,” Idoko alleged.
He added that Nigeria, as a federation, does not allow any region to dictate presidential appointments.
“Is it not the same Niger Delta that now has the Minister of the FCT for the first time in history? These cheap agitations hold no water,” he said.
Idoko also questioned the timing of the protest, noting it came just a day after NNPCL announced it was close to meeting 100 per cent of its OPEC quota for the first time in decades.
“Clearly, the timing was meant to drown the loud ovation this achievement attracted,” he said.
“It is also curious that the protest was staged while President Tinubu is in Brazil wooing investors. Even his statement that Nigeria is no longer a corrupt country and a fertile land for investment was criticised,” he added.
The NFI urged the President to take action against those sponsoring “the orchestrated antagonism against his well-thought-out reforms.”
“We have the names of the sponsors of these protests and media attacks and will submit them to the relevant agencies for investigation and prosecution,” the group said.
It further called on Tinubu to “fish out enemies within” who, according to NFI, are feeding from the government while secretly aiding opposition elements to undermine his administration.
