What Do Niger Deltans Want?

By Hope Eghagha 

In the wake of the Acting President’s recent media-advertised visits to the Niger Delta, a highly-placed Nigerian posed a question to me as a suffering indigene of the exploited and oppressed zone of the Nigerian State: What do Niger Deltans want? Put differently, the question could be: What should the Nigerian State do for the Niger Delta? The question popped up in exasperation, I suppose. To ask this question some 60 odd years after the Oloibiri discovery shows we haven’t come to terms with the tragic circumstances of the Niger Delta.

If we want to play on words, these questions could be posed in different ways. The first proposition is that what the people want is different from what they have been given. Another flip is that they have been given enough and should just shut up and get on with life. It could also mean that citizens from other parts of the country genuinely want to know what people of the region want. Whatever meaning we give to the question, the plight of the Niger Delta is a sore point in the history of our country.

The question got me thinking though. Is it true that the corridors of power do not know what is good for the region? Have Deltans articulated their wants in the Nigerian polity? What about the tonnes of literature that led to the creation of the NDDC, and the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs dating from the 1950s? If the Niger Delta had a son of theirs for five full years in charge of the Nigerian Presidency, do we still as Niger Deltans have the right to complain? In other words, if in five years a Nigerian President of Niger Delta extraction could not chart the course to national transformation, who else can? If past governors of the states in the region did not use funds allocated to them judiciously, how are we sure that resource control would yield anything different? 

I will summarise my submission with an anecdote: Communities which live in abject poverty in spite of billions of dollars that have been sucked from their soil and which still hold billions of dollars in gas reserves are in dire straits. Simply put, the Niger Delta needs a transformation of the environment and infrastructure of the land that has given so much wealth to the Nigerian federation. Either by design or default, we have not been able to achieve this. This is sad, tragic and alarming.

Niger Delta’s Achilles Heel

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

 Beyond the declaration of a ceasefire, militants under the aegis of the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) should prepare to win their war at the negotiating table. Notwithstanding the threats to crush the militants, the government has left open the option of ending the militancy in the region through dialogue. By making an allowance for dialogue, the government has obviously spurned those hankering for the bombing of the militants to submission.

It is now that the militants still have the sympathy of a large proportion of the citizens that they should make themselves available for talks if their agitation is really driven by the need to redeem the despoiled Niger Delta. The agitation is already on the cusp of being hijacked by some people who do not belong to the NDA. So, if the NDA members do not make themselves available, and the government succeeds in destabilising them by conquest or infiltration, it is these fringe militants who do not share the vision of NDA that would be the beneficiaries of any peace deal that may be reached.

From what can be seen in the rabid jostle for the representation of the militants, it is not even these counterfeit militants who pose the greatest danger to the negotiation with the Federal Government. It is rather traditional rulers and other so-called leaders from the region who pretend to speak for the militants and the entire people of the area. While their so-called intervention lasts, we must remind them and their fellow travellers that they are not by any means needed on the journey to bring peace to the Niger Delta through dialogue between the government and the militants.

After risking their lives in the creeks fighting, the militants should not allow people who do not share in their sacrifices to represent them. The dialogue would fail and the sacrifices of the militants would be in vain if they allow these people to represent them. In fact, the traditional rulers and other so-called leaders of the Niger Delta should not be allowed to go near the venue of the discussion because they have contributed to the problems of the region. These are people who have been close to successive governments in the country. If they knew how to solve the problems of the Niger Delta why have they not done this since? These people were close to the immediate past government of President Goodluck Jonathan. If they could not persuade a president whom they considered their son to develop the region, is it Buhari they would be able to convince to do this? By now, the people of the region and other citizens have known that these people who parade themselves as the leaders of the region only want to negotiate for their own pockets.

Buhari And The Niger Delta

By Ken Agala

On Thursday morning news broke that President Buhari had cancelled his trip to Ogoni due to threat to his life from the Niger Delta Avengers. This is a very wrong move as the President must have handed over the required impetus to the militants and thereby emboldened them.

*Buhari

Even Jonathan’s ‘chickening out’ of going to Chibok at the peak of the Boko Haram insurgency, is less of a ‘Chickening out’ than this. But I know a President can’t move against his security report and I wrote about this when Jonathan was called names for cancelling his Chibok trip.

While Nigerians were shocked to read a report that our oil production has gone down from the agonizing 1.4 million barrels to 1.1, a few days ago the Avengers bombed three more crude oil wells even when the military carried out an invasion of Gbaramatu kingdom and other Niger Delta communities.

With the Presidents action, the Niger Delta Avengers have received credible endorsement as a group to be respected and I believe many conscripts will begin looking for how to join them .

Frankly speaking it is despicable to be talking about cleaning up some Niger Delta communities while more environmental degradation is strategically perpetrated by Niger Deltans.

But there is a law called The Law of cause and effect. Every effect is the result of a cause and every cause must have an effect

When President Buhari in his brutally frank manner told his US audience last year that he can’t in all honesty treat regions that gave him 95% votes equally to those who gave him 5%, I expected that his party men from these 5% regions would have openly protested and forced him to withdraw the statement. That statement was very wrong from a President who has a mandate to treat everyone equally.

I expected Mr. Presidents media team to tactically twist that statement in way that it’d give some form of confidence to people from the 5% region but they rather coined the name ‘wailers’ for these 5 percenters .