President Buhari, Dialogue Matters

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

With an air of imperial finality, President Muhammadu Buhari has ruled out the possibility of holding a dialogue on how to resolve the crises in the Niger Delta. From initially pretending to support a dialogue with the leaders of the region, Buhari has moved to declaring that there are no credible leaders to talk with in the region and now finally that a dialogue is not even necessary. He says the problems of the region are already known.

The position of the president which was articulated by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo during his visit to the Niger Delta seems to be only about the oil-rich region. But it actually reflects the stance of Buhari concerning the whole country. Buhari does not want any dialogue; all he wants is for the citizens to be quiet, wait patiently as he hands them a roadmap for the development of the country. But this approach of Buhari is not acceptable to the citizens simply because he cannot be trusted to take the right decisions on their behalf. Any roadmap for development that Buhari contemplates can only be tilted to suit his askew sense of development and equity.

As regards the Niger Delta, Buhari can only end up like his predecessors whose sense of development without the input of the people from the Niger Delta has paved the way for the gleeful allocation of oil blocks to people from other parts of the country while the indigenes of the region are neglected. Past governments were aware of the despoliation that has resulted from oil exploration in the region, yet they failed to take any significant step to address the situation. From Isaac Boro to Ken Saro Wiwa, the agitations by the people of the Niger Delta for development of their oil-ravaged region have often been met with brutal responses.

Or can the people really trust the president when he has failed to begin the process of the development of the Niger Delta almost two years after he came into office? And now it was not even the president, but his deputy, who went to the region after so much prodding. If the president were really sincere, he should have gone to the Niger Delta himself to understand the urgency of looking for solutions to the problems of the region. And he should have done this earlier. Rather, he has been preoccupied with how to crush agitators in the region. There is a good reason to suspect that what Buhari is doing is just verbal pacification to secure a peaceful environment for him to get more oil to run his government. With the history of Buhari’s lackluster responses to injustices in different parts of the country, the people of the Niger Delta have good reasons to be skeptical about his avowed developmental roadmap for the region. These responses have perpetually diminished our humanity, collective and individual, and thus we are obliged to be eternally vigilant in accepting his promises.

Buhari, War And The Niger Delta

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

It is mystifying that President Muhammadu Buhari has chosen to capriciously shatter the prospect of peace in the Niger Delta through his massive deployment of troops and weapons in the region. The deployment came at a time the agitators for socio-economic justice in the oil-producing region, especially the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), have agreed to dialogue with the government.

Buhari and Army Chief, Buratai

The agreement came after much hesitation apparently because the agitators understood the remorseless penchant of successive governments to treat the issue of the ecological disaster and economic deprivation spawned by oil exploration in the region with disdain. Despite their doubts, the agitators have expressed their sincerity by suspending the bombing of oil facilities.

Of course, we should have known that Buhari considered war in the region inevitable. For while apparently leaving the option of dialogue open, Buhari has consistently threatened that he would deal with the Niger Delta agitators the way he crushed Boko Haram insurgents. Buhari may have drawn inspiration from the strident calls from some northern leaders for him to bomb agitators like Boko Haram insurgents. By their position, these northern leaders have lumped up the agitation in the Niger Delta in the same cauldron of misguided religious and blood-thirsty ideology of Boko Haram insurgents.
So what is unfolding in the Niger Delta is only a manifestation of a coveted agenda of Buhari that has escaped the veneer of  pretensions to foster peaceful dialogue to resolve the problems of the region. Buhari only wanted the agitators to lay down their weapons so that he could deploy his own in the region.

The fact that the agitators have declared a ceasefire has rendered the option of war patently chauvinistic. What is needed is for the government to continue with the option of dialogue. Buhari’s acceptance of the option of war amounts to blithely glossing over the fact that there are issues in the Niger Delta that need to be responded to appropriately. These are issues of socio-economic injustice in the region. Here are a people whose oil wealth has been used to develop other parts of the country while they have become impoverished. This has been the situation for over five decades.

The nation and its leaders have not deemed it necessary to engage in a comprehensive agenda to improve the environment, except some sporadic and facetious efforts. Now, the oil funds from the region are now being used to search for oil in the northern part of the country. If oil is found there, would the northerners allow people from the Niger Delta to be the prime beneficiaries? Would they allow them to be those that would lead supervisory agencies and dictate the terms for intervention in those areas where oil is produced in the north?