Violence Doesn’t Pay, Ex Niger Delta Militant, General Kuna Tells Avengers

Ex-Niger Delta militant and former member of the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND), General Tamunotonye Kuna (alias Obese), has reminded those who are now blowing up oil installations in the region that violence would not solve anybody’s problems.
Kuna, who spoke to news men in Abuja on Saturday, condemned the activities of the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), even as he said that he had no reason to go back to the creeks.
He noted that what the Niger Delta Avengers are doing now is in keeping to their promise to make the region ungovernable for President Muhammadu Buhari if he wins the 2015 last general election.
Warning that renewed violence in the Niger Delta region would further impoverish the people of the area, Kuna advised
members of the NDA to embrace dialogue which the Federal Government has been proposing to restore peace to the region.
“I was working with ‘General’ Farah Dagogo, a senior warlord in MEND. I have vowed never to return to the creeks because we have tried violence and it doesn’t work. That is why we have resorted to peace. Ironically, the same groups of Avengers were the same people who benefitted from the government’s amnesty programme.
“The amnesty office is where they were eating and they have lost everything during our struggle. I told them that this government will listen, although no good comes easy.
“I don’t know what is their plan but for me I feel they are fulfilling what they told President Buhari that if he wins the last year’s election, they were going to do this or that. The amnesty office is where they have been packing billions of Naira without giving the people, the masses.
“As (I) am talking to you, we have close to a thousand people who don’t even have house. They lost everything during this struggle. But today, as I speak, they are still suffering. What they (Avengers) are doing is wrong. It is very wrong. I am not in support.”
Kuna said that some people had pocketed the money from the amnesty funds released by the government to rehabilitate the ex-militants in the region, while ignoring some of the ex-militants.
He called for the inclusion of ex-militants who had not benefitted from the amnesty programme.
“We that have not benefitted from this amnesty programme should to be included because the programme is still running. Those who are eating the amnesty money are there fomenting trouble.”