The Pan Niger Delta Forum, PANDEF, has expressed disappointment in the speech presented to Nigerians on Thursday evening by President Muhammadu Buhari saying besides what he had been saying since the #EndSARS protest by Nigerian youths started, there was nothing new.
National Chairman of PANDEF, Air Commodore Idongesit Nkanga, (retd), while reacting to the President’s speech stressed that the forum had expected the president to have commiserated with the youths that were gruesomely murdered at the Lekki toll gate, Lagos State.
” We appreciate the fact that he (Buhari) commiserated with the security services, but the people that lost their lives he didn’t. Maybe I missed it but that seems to be the high point of the whole thing. “And listening to what he said today, I don’t know whether that would be enough to assuage the feeling of the youths, I am not sure.
“What he has basically told us in his speech I don’t think that there are new things in it. And we had issued a press release a day before what happened at the Lekki tollgate that we want peace and we ask for peace.
” We hope that now that government has started talking, that it will expedite action on what the youths are demanding for” He noted that the government should always ensure that the future of the youths is considered important, stressing, “Even in the animal kingdom you don’t kill your young ones, you protect them.
“And anytime I play back what I saw on the television at Lekki, that those young people were sitting down, waving the Nigeria flag, singing the National anthem and they were shot at, it is depressing. And it is a disrespect for this country.
