How To Enter Sapele And Warri From Benin Now

 By Tony Afejuku

Sapele and Warri are two significantly important Nigerian cities that need no introduction, special or un-special, from the historic, realistic and imaginative imagination of this creative creator whose impression of things is often – if not always – determined by features which fit the descriptions that convey meaningfully what must be conveyed – meaningfully.

Sapele and Warri, as very many people know, are two unique cities, two uniquely nifty cities, from whichever dominant or un-dominant impressions or perspectives open to us to define the cities. Of course, the cities’ dense and denizenly denizens and brought-ups where-ever they are always have something, something beautifully beautiful, to say about them in the same way that those of Benin, the antique city, allow their imaginations and conceptions to beautify it.

East-West Road And Shame Of A Nation

 By Jerome Utomi

The world is aware that the Niger Delta area or the South-South geopolitical zone of Nigeria is prone to many negative influences as a result of successive Federal Governments’ neglect of the region. Some of these challenges are well known and glaring, yet no attention given to addressing them, even though they have a substantial impact on people, corporations and social levels.

A typical example of such monumental neglect is the shoddy state of the East-West Road, a strategic road connecting the country’s busiest and foremost commercial cities in the region. That is why it is baffling that successive administrations in Nigeria had allowed the road to degenerate to such a state of disrepair.

There Was A Man Called John Jerry Rawlings

 By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

Nigeria is more divided than ever, and the politicians of Nigeria have gone completely mad. It is as though everybody is now totally beyond control. Nigerians have replaced the Constitution with just one word: Impunity.

*Rawlings 

Of course in this matter of impunity, there is no difference between the parties and the politicians because crossing party lines rampantly like harlots-on-heat is all the rage. There is no redemption in sight for the odious lot. These wanton Nigerian politicians need to be reminded of what happened in Ghana back in 1979.

Resource Curse And Niger Delta Unending Discourse

 By Jerome-Mario Utomi

Going by information at the public domain, a Warri Delta State-based newspaper, GbaramatuVoice, in furtherance of its Niger Delta Economic Discourse series, will on Tuesday, November 29, 2022 by 10am, at the BON Hotel, Warri, Delta state, hold a focused group discussion that centers on two separate but related typical and topical issues – the recently extended Presidential Amnesty Programme and the Federal Government proposed but abandoned modular refineries in the region.

The dialogue, which has as a theme, ‘Presidential Amnesty Programme and Modular Refineries: Towards sustainable human capital relations,’ will bring together, to deeply appraise the programmes and come up with useful recommendations, critical stakeholders comprising ex-agitators in the Niger Delta, policymakers from both state and federal levels, agencies and commissions, development professionals, media professionals, traditional rulers from the oil producing communities, representatives of different security agencies and apparatus in the country among others.

How Much Crude Oil Is Being Stolen In Nigeria?

 By Nnimmo Bassey 

To say that Nigeria is being stolen is an understatement. It is a sordid situation. Shocking stories from the oil and gas sector continue to hit the news media. Rather than being numbed by the monstrous pillaging of the nation, Nigerians should respond to the wake-up call, especially in an election season. 

By some deft choreography, the blame for the stealing and pollution in the oil field communities of the Niger Delta has been deflected to the poor communities. 

This devious deflection has been so successful that the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), which has the fingerprints of multinational oil companies all over it, criminalizes communities and holds them up as being responsible for interferences that may occur on oil facilities in their territories.

Stealing The Nation!

 By Nnimmo Bassey

To say that Nigeria is being stolen is an understatement. It is a sordid situation. Shocking stories from the oil and gas sector continue to hit the news. Rather than being numbed by the monstrous pillaging of the nation, Nigerians should wake up to the wake-up call, especially in an election season.

By some deft choreography, the blame for the stealing and pollution in the oil field communities of the Niger Delta has been deflected to the poor communities.

This devious deflection has been so successful that the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), which has the fingerprints of multinational oil companies all over it, criminalizes communities and holds them up as being responsible for interferences that may occur on oil facilities in their territories. 

Nigeria: Outsourced Campaign And Presidency

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Even in saner times, the citizens are confronted with an epic struggle in an attempt to trust their politicians. Bogged down by decades of treacheries that have manifested in the repudiation of promises on whose back politicians got to office, the prospect of the citizens trusting them is effortlessly rendered nugatory.

*President Buhari

All the citizens could see is a land strewn with broken promises and the politicians as a venality-plagued species of humanity who veil their self-serving ambitions as the inevitable means of the people attaining development.  Yet, because politicians are indispensable components of the democratic experience, the citizens have to learn to tolerate their peccadilloes, vanities and cupidity. The duplicities of politicians often gain heightened expression in the times of campaigns for offices. Our country is in such times now.

Niger Delta: The Big Issue

By Chris O.O. Biose

The basic issue in the Niger Delta is that since the promulgation of Petroleum Decree No. 51, 1969, the Off Shore Oil Revenue Decree (No. 9), 1971 and other obnoxious military decrees by which military dictators dispossessed the Niger Delta of the benefits of its oil and gas resources, successive Federal administrations have been extracting the oil and gas in the Niger Delta and using the proceeds to develop other Regions in the country to the exclusion of the Niger Delta.

The activities of the oil companies were reflected in permanent gas flares, massive coastal marine pollution and unprecedented levels of environmental degradation without parallel anywhere in the world. They promoted intra and inter-community strife by means of selective favours. Regrettably, some youth resorted to militancy although the vast majority remained law-abiding. All these engendered tendency towards breakdown in traditional values and confusion among the oppressed people of the Niger Delta.

Governor Okowa, Fix Warri Roads

By Lexzy Ochibejivwie

Warri, a one-time beautiful and bustling city, has become a laughing stock. The city has been severely scoffed at several fora as a place where people appreciate talk more than physical development. Some social media freaks have recently used its state of roads as raw probative data for articulating what is not right about Delta State. The city has so much promise.

*Gov Okowa

It has all the potentials to be Africa’s Dubai. Many of its indigenes are very talented. Warri, it was, groomed and ignited the first spark of inspiration to famous professional stand-up comics like AY, I Go Dye, Gordons, and many others, who brought thrill to stage comedy and modern live theatre in Nigeria.

What Does Atiku Abubakar Want?

By Hope Eghagha   

Early in 2018 when Mallam Atiku Abubakar began to reference restructuring the nation’s polity as one of his cardinal goals, I thought I should take him seriously. As a man from the Niger Delta whose region has been fundamentally shortchanged by the current quasi-federal arrangement I naturally took interest in this core northern leader who had decided to make restructuring a campaign issue. 

*Atiku Abubakar 

Middle of last year I tried through some of his aides to reach him. No luck. He was either too busy or the aides I reached did not have the clout to arrange a meeting. So I let it rest. Once Atiku Abubakar secured the PDP’s nomination as presidential candidate I thought I should use this medium to broach some of the issues I would have presented to him.

On Biafra And Democracy

By Obi Nwakanma

These are busy times for Nigeria. May is the month of blooms. But in the last couple of weeks, two parallel celebrations came to underscore the fragility of the Nigerian state, and the hollow rituals of its self-annunciation.  First, on May 29, the president like the other presidents before him since the year 2000 when it was initiated by Olusegun Obasanjo, celebrated what it now calls “Democracy Day.”

*Odumegwu-Ojukwu 

I personally think this a truly annoying misnomer because May 29 carries with it, the germ of a profound national tragedy. It was on May 29, 1966 that the Pogrom of Easteners commenced in earnest in Nigeria. On May 29, 1967, General Ojukwu declared the birth of the Sovereign state of Biafra, and announced the excision of the East from the old Federation of Nigeria.

Nigeria: Their Tomorrow Will Surely Come!

By Dan Amor

Are Nigerians hopeful of the day after? The collective answer to this rhetorical question is a resounding NO. If Nigerians are no longer hopeful of tomorrow, they deserve pardon. For, never in the history of mankind have a people been so brutalized by the very group of people who are supposed to protect and take care of them. They ought to be pardoned knowing full well that their manifest state of hopelessness has extended beyond disillusionment to a desperate and consuming nihilism. Which is why the only news one hears from Nigeria is soured news: violence, arson, killing, maiming, kidnapping, robbery, corruption, rape.

*Buhari, Obasanjo and Abdusalami

It is sad to note that Nigeria is gradually and steadily degenerating into the abyss. Even in a supposedly democratic dispensation, a sense of freedom, a feeling of an unconditional escape, a readiness for real and absolute change, is still the daydream of the whole citizenry. Everything is in readiness for the unexpected, and the unexpected is not in sight. You cannot possibly conceive what a rabble we look. We straggle along with far less cohesion than a flock of sheep. We are, in fact, even forced to believe that tomorrow will no longer come. Quite a handful of us are simply robots without souls, as we are hopeless because we are conditioned to a state of collective hopelessness.

No Cure For Yakubu Gowon Fever

By Tony Iwuoma

Former head of state, Yakubu Gowon, was gifted with opportunity for atonement when he recently appeared on AIT’s People, Politics and Power programme. Unfortunately, the man, who wanted to ‘go on with one Nigeria’ (Gowon), flunked the grace of history.

*Gowon

Perhaps, the greatest take-away was Gowon’s inadvertent exoneration of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. He had actually set out to vilify the venerable Biafra leader by heaping inordinate falsehood on the dead, who can no longer defend himself. Gowon claimed he went to Ghana for the famed Aburi Accord unprepared. That, according to him, accounted for why highly cerebral Ojukwu bamboozled all of them and wringed the concessions he got. He added that secession was not on the card in Ghana and, of course, it couldn’t have been. It was not on Ojukwu’s agenda either. However, secession crept into the matter when the pogrom against the Igbo in the North continued unabated and Gowon, admittedly, could not halt it. According to Gowon and rightly so, the Igbo saw Biafra as the only hope for safety and freedom.

Nigeria’s Minorities: Pawn On The Political Chessboard

By Rasheed Kola Ojikutu

In Nigeria, the word “ marginalisation’’ is on the lips of everyone who could utter it, most of who place little emphasis on the context of its usage and the meaning. Although, a social word, it has found profound use in the lexicon of politicians to the extent of its being a major veil for covering political mischief, agitation and sometimes violence. What is marginalisation? What does it mean for a group or an individual to be marginalised?

The Oxford dictionaries define marginalisation as the treatment of a person, group, or concept as insignificant or peripheral. The Business Dictionary.com explained it as the process whereby something or someone is pushed to the edge of a group and accorded lesser importance while the Psychology Dictionary sees it as the process through which the marginal groups and their members are identified as not being apart of the main group. 

No To 'Operation Crocodile Smile' In The Niger Delta

By Dan Amor

To all intents and purposes, the reported mobilisation of soldiers to Cross River State and other states in the South South geopolitical zone in a military jamboree code named "Operation Crocodile Smile", is needless and avoidable. Unfortunately, Niger Delta youths who call themselves militants have once again played their much-abused region which, ironically, produces the wealth of the nation, into the willing hands of the establishment under the watch of a central government with an unstated or hidden agenda to totally exterminate the goose that lays the golden egg from the face of the earth.

 Even while the region was yet relatively peaceful, when the reawakened restiveness had not reached fever-pitch, President Muhammadu Buhari, even in his inaugural speech alluded to how he would combat and defeat Boko Haram and Niger Delta militants. One can then safely assume that the current war is directly or indirectly orchestrated by the powers that be just to create room for them to execute their plan against the region.

Nigeria: That October 1 Hate Speech

By Steve Nwosu

If I say President Muhammadu Buhari’s October 1 speech was pre-recorded, that could amount to “hate speech’. Especially, as I have no documentary evidence. So, I’ll not say what I think.

*President Buhari

Similarly, if I say the Independence Day broadcast is the second hate speech I’ve heard from the president in a space of 40 days, I would also be incorrect. Especially as the details of what constitutes a ‘hate speech’ is increasingly looking like the proverbial Malawian constitution of Kamuzu Banda’s. It is whatever they tell us is the law that we accept as the law.

So, I’ll only recall that, after being away for 103 days, President Buhari returned to deliver one angry-speech (where he berated us for behaving badly, especially on the social media, while he was away), and that about 40 days later, he delivered yet another one (where he took Igbo leaders and elders to the cleaners, over the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB)).

President Buhari’s Illusion Versus Reality

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It should be clear by now to the citizens who are genuinely concerned about saving the country from careering into mortal catastrophes that their first task is to rescue their president. It is not a redemption from his hobbling medical condition. London doctors are equal to this task. This they have uncannily demonstrated by giving President Muhammadu Buhari a new lease of life. Now, apparently far from an afflicted president who was in dire need of the citizens’ empathy and prayer for his good health, Buhari has resumed office with so much vigour that he easily underscores his toughness by casting his expectations from the citizens in fire and brimstone.

*President Buhari in Zamfra (March 2017)

What Buhari is in urgent need of rescue from is his illusions about his fellow citizens, his country and the world. It does not matter that he claimed to be abreast of developments at home and the other parts of the world while he was away. In less than a week since his return, Buhari has shown that he is fixated on his misbegotten notions of governance that he had before his medical sojourn abroad. A graver danger is that these notions have degenerated as they have assumed a misanthropic character. Those who thought that his ill health would have sobered him up and purged him of his self-created distance from the citizens have been sorely disappointed. He has come back home to reprimand them with a sledgehammer for intolerably going errant ways while he was away. After all, in his reckoning, most of those who want a redefinition of the terms for the co-existence of the people have not been confronted with the prospect of their shedding their blood for the survival and unity of the nation.

Nigeria: Our Intractable Northern Burdens

By Ochereome Nnanna

 What happened at the Senate on Wednesday, 26th July 2017 infuriated those who have been clamouring for restructuring and true federalism.  But, it elated two other segments of the Nigerian society which, funny enough, see each other as sworn enemies:

(a) those who want to maintain the status quo,

(b) the separatists.

Those who want to maintain the status quo got what they wanted when the Senate voted 48 to 46 to throw out the proposal for the devolution of powers to the states. It required 72 votes to alter the constitution, subject to the verdict of Members of the House of Representatives. The separatists also rejoiced because, having lost faith in the possibility of restructuring and devolution of powers, they want complete separation from Nigeria to establish their own sovereign republic where they can swim or sink based on their abilities.

The separatists know that the failure of the vote for restructuring and devolution of powers will vindicate their position. It will win them more converts in the East and nudge more groups outside the East to also seek self determination. I would have been surprised if the vote had turned out differently. Just before that day when the Senate had to vote electronically to avoid controversy as to where majority of their members stood, Arewa Youth Forum, AYF) responded to the move towards restructuring by issuing death threats. 

Nigeria: Living With Two Presidents

By Ochereome Nnanna

Section 145 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, (As Amended) has this to say about the power of the Vice President in the absence of the President:

“Whenever the President transmits to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives a written declaration that he is proceeding on vacation or that he is otherwise unable to discharge the functions of his office, until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary such functions shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President”. 

*President Buhari and VP Osinbajo

Because of the cynical nature of Nigerian politics which is sadly rooted in religion, ethnicity, sectionalism and familial interests (factors that corrupt and debilitate our constitutional democracy), a constitutional enactment as precise and self-explanatory as the Section 145 is still made to seem hard to grapple with.

President Muhammadu Buhari, who has done very well in respecting the Constitution by transmitting such letters to the leaders of the National Assembly on each of the two occasions he went abroad to tend to his health problems, however, introduced confusion into the issue when he said Vice President Osinbajo would “coordinate” the activities of government in his absence. The President was heavily criticised for this strange definition of the status of the Acting President, though it hardly matters since it is the Constitution, not the President that defines roles played by everyone in our democracy.

This is the second regime in which our President had to be taken out of the country for an extended stay out of power. When the case of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua took place late in November 2009 he did not transmit any letter as Buhari does. By February 2010, murmurs over a power vacuum became cacophonous and Yar’ Adua’s handlers caused the British Broadcasting Corporation to air an “interview” he granted to show he was not incapacitated.

Osinbajo And The Troublemakers

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is a predictable path that Acting President Yemi Osinbajo has taken in his response to threats that are nibbling away at the nation’s unity. Unfortunately, this path has consistently failed to engender national healing and boost the prospect of fidelity to the vision of a united people. For, what our leaders like Osinbajo are unable to successfully disguise is their insincerity in responding to the overarching challenges of our contemporary society.

*Yemi Osinbajo

His was a response cast in the mould of a warning to those who are fomenting trouble that poses an egregious threat to the peace of the nation. At a meeting with northern leaders over some northern youths who have given an ultimatum to the Igbo in their region to relocate, he vowed to crush troublemakers. Since Osinbajo did not say that the warning was specifically directed at the northern youths, we must not limit it to them in order to appreciate its futility. We must appropriate troublemakers as all those who have grievances against the state since the northern youths only responded to the position of some aggrieved youths in the south-east.

The current threat to the nation’s unity is not what could be wished away by threatening fire and brimstone. It requires a more rigorous examination before proposing a solution. As Osinbajo himself rightly observed, disagreements are bound to exist in any union. But what he did not acknowledge is that the Nigerian nation has failed to adopt an enduring mechanism for resolving these conflicts. Again, why should disagreements whose source can easily be located and resolved permanently be allowed to fester as the Nigerian nation is doing ? In this case, what plague the Nigerian nation are not just conflicts that are inevitable in a union. They are rather crises the country and its leaders have refused to resolve because they benefit from them.