Itsekiri Youths Storm INEC, Demand Fresh Delineation Of Warri Constituency Wards

Itsekiri youths on Tuesday stormed the headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), demanding another delineation of wards in Warri federal constituency of Delta State.

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The protesters under the aegis of Ugbarajo Itsekiri Youths and Warri Reclamation Thrust (WRT), alleged that there was injustice in the previous exercise as they were not carried along.

The national president of Ugbarajo Itsekiri Youths, Joseph Okotie; convener of WRT, Bright Omaghomi and another co-convener, Tsaye Mene declared that the delineation which had generated widespread concern, dissatisfaction, and tension among affected communities.

They insisted that the exercise was unfair, unconstitutional and not in tune with electoral principles.

Okotie said, “we as a people we don’t have problem with the court judgement, INEC can come and delineated. But let it not take what it belongs to us and give it to another.

With what INEC had done, automatically, we don’t have any political power any more in our region, automatically we are tenants. If we want to go by what they’ve done, we are tenants in our own land, that is not acceptable.

“We are here to register our grievances, we’ve told them, we’ve submitted documents. We’ve submitted another one today and we are calling on the new INEC chairman to go through this document we submitted. Maybe, they didn’t give him the last one or the previous ones we’ve submitted.

“INEC needs to call for another ward delineation where everybody will be carried along and we know how they’ve come about the fictitious ward they’ve been going about town with.

“We are already disenfranchised in our own land and we say no, you cannot take a man that has 10 wards and all of a sudden now six. What happens to the four you removed? Then you give this our land to other people and give it other fictitious names. You import wards from the forest from the river, if our IT personnel plot this graph you will see the total blunder being done by INEC.

“We’ve said this before and we stand by it, we will not trade our land to anybody at all, we say no to this injustice, we will stand and defend what belong to us with the last drop of our blood.”

Also speaking, Omaghomi said the delineation exercise undertaken on April 4 2025 was fraught with a lot of errors.

“We were totally short changed, our land were gifted to our tenants who are residing in our land, our various communities were renamed with the names of these tenants in order to give them more ward and more units against us to take over political power and that is what we have come to protest here.

“INEC’s refusal to respond is why we are here to tell INEC to please respond to all these petitions we have submitted. We have not submitted the petitions for formalities. In fact I don’t have any iota of confidence in what the INEC REC had told us, the same thing he said last year is what he is repeating.

“I requested for a timeline and a timeline might not be specific. If he would have given me range I would have understand but clearly INEC is not showing sincerity on this matter and I am not happy about it and of course we should realise that this is an injustice.

“If somebody brings a petition or allege something to your office that you have done, you are supposed to invite them to understand proper and probably do your own investigation, come up with your own result,” he said.

For her part, Mene called on INEC to do the proper thing to avoid  legalising illegality.

She said: “We want INEC to come and properly delineate, we are the original owners of the land of the Warri Federal Constituency which are the Itsekiris. All the aborigines and settlers know themselves, issues of ownership has been settled, they have the documents before the formation of this country, Nigeria.

“So, what we want to do going forward is to bring the report and those who perpetrated the illegality, staff of INEC should be punished for doing what is wrong. We don’t pamper people that want to cause crisis that could lead to ethnic war, destruction of lives and properties and even the oil installations in our area.

“Therefore, we want these INEC staff beginning from to be arrested, their accounts investigated and also the commission should apologize to the people of Warri Federal Constituency. So, that people should have confidence in INEC and let them do the right thing,” she added.