Tackling The Plight Of Niger Delta Region

By Grace Omowumi Semudara

Niger Delta, as a geographical entity, her folks and the enormous gift of nature (crude oil) have been the cynosure of all eyes as their struggles dominate national discourse. It can be said with all sense of humility that the region and her people, by their endowment with abundant natural resources, should not have anything to do with stifling poverty, as postulated by many.

But that is not the case, the tale of the Niger Delta is that of misery, despair, penury and haplessness in the face of immeasurable wealth, that would have accrued them, if the proceeds of their crude oil resources are judiciously used to develop their polluted lands. The region is only a microcosm of the dense citizenry of our African Giant Nigeria.

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.