The General Officer Commanding (GOC) 6 Division, Nigerian Army, Major General Jamal Abdussalam, has said troops conducting operations, following the gruesome murder of 17 personnel at Okuama community in Ughelli South Local Council, would be firm, decisive, and professional.
The GOC disclosed this when the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), Samuel Ogbuku, paid him a condolence visit at the division’s headquarters in Port Harcourt, yesterday.
Abdussalam, while appreciating Ogboku for the visit, said the mission handed to troops by Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Taoreed Lagbaja, was basically to recover weapons carted away by the killers and ensure they are arrested.
He said troops will remain in the creeks until these objectives are achieved.
The GOC, in a statement by Acting Deputy Director 6 Division Army Public Relations, Lieutenant Colonel Danjuma Jonah, said no amount of propaganda, arm-twisting, blackmail, intimidation, or false narrative would distract troops from staying on course to achieve their objectives.
He assured that the operations would be conducted professionally, in line with the global best practice of adherence to rules of engagement and respect for fundamental human rights of the citizenry.
He called on people of the Niger Delta region to go about their normal activities and appealed to communities to assist troops by disclosing the location of the perpetrators and stolen weapons.
“The Armed Forces of Nigeria, he averred, is the symbol of our sovereignty, stressing that the Commander-in-Chief, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, captured it succinctly when he said an attack on our Armed Forces is an attack on our nation. Therefore, if we allow criminals to continue to attack our security forces, there will be anarchy,” the statement reads in part.
Abdussalam affirmed that troops will not rest until the perpetrators are tracked down and made to account for their deeds. He said the operation was being conducted in a way that, going forward, nobody would contemplate attacking men in uniform.
Ogbuku, while commiserating with the GOC, said without peace in the region, there would not be development.
He expressed optimism that the Army would conduct the operations professionally by ensuring innocent people are not forced to suffer for the deeds of criminals.
Meanwhile, governors of the 36 states of the federation, yesterday, sought accelerated consideration of the state police option to correct flaws in the country’s national security architecture.
The governors also condemned the killing of the 17 military personnel in Delta State.
In a communiqué issued after a meeting of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), the governors also reviewed progress of the National Minimum Wage Committee (NMWC) and ongoing multi-stakeholder engagements towards agreeing on a fair minimum wage.
According to the communiqué, the governors “urged the NMWC to consider current realities, individual state peculiarities, and consequential impact on the capacity of the government as well as private sector employers to pay”.
