Rotimi Fasan
21 August 2007
column
Lagos — For several decades after the discovery of crude oil in the Niger-Delta the area was rightly seen as the underdog region of the Nigerian state.
No thanks to its vast oil resources whose benefits were nowhere reflected in the everyday existence of the people that inhabit the area nor in the environment.
This was one of several acts of injustice that would see to the rise of agitations among the minority regions of the country. It would, in the case of the Niger-Delta, soon take the form of armed insurrection when Isaac Adaka Boro and his band of insurgents decided to go into the trenches to give bite to their bark for self-determination.
With the ascendant rise in ethnic-identity politics following series of non-performing bandit military and civil regimes, the struggles of the Niger-Delta people would peak and gained international attention in the 1990s under the leadership of Ken Saro-wiwa, the martyred Ogoni leader.
Saro-wiwa's non-violent posture would be repudiated following his judicial murder by the Sanni Abacha government.
This would leave the door open for groups whose grievances would be personified by and find expression in the violent rhetoric of Asari Dokubo. But prior to the dominance of Dokubo there were the scatter-brained cult groups believed to have the backing of politicians in the region.
Those groups are back in business again. (For the purposes of clarification it is important to state that the part of the Niger-Delta being referred to here consists in the areas of the south-south of Nigeria. Otherwise it is a fact that there are other states of the Niger-Delta belonging in areas outside the South-South despite the exclusivist appropriation of that term by certain communities as the Newswatch-organised colloquium on the region seems to have shown.)
Since politicians in the Niger-Delta decided to take a hand in the affairs of the region, sponsoring armed factions in supremacy battles, it was clear that the principles undergirding the region's struggle for self-determination and a greater share in the wealth accruing from crude oil had been diluted. The fault lines had always been there. They have only become more glaring in recent times.
Those series of scattered skirmishes with high death tolls after the 1999 election and in the run-up to the 2003 polls foreshadowed the violence that has now turned that zone into Nigeria's frontier state, a no-man's land of Mafiosi ethic. The selfish battles for lucre and control which saw common bandits controlling the bunkering trade in the Niger-Delta and owning refineries that a so-called Federal Government with the full control of all security agencies could not discover were bound to come to a head at some point. That time seems now upon us.
What aspect of the Kaiama Declaration, it may be asked, sanctions the intra-ethnic killings and kidnappings, totally mindless and without direction- pray, what aspect of the Declaration many of the so-called militant groups glibly mouth authorises the taking of children as hostages in return for huge ransoms, bombing and burning of fuel stations and government houses and the chasing of governors from their lodges? In what area of the struggles for self-determination and resource control do all these fit in?
Even while the very possibility of going home with the prized elephant stares them in the face, the spoilt brigands of the Niger-Delta have decided to search in the ground for common ants.
The greater task of assuming some control and benefiting handsomely from the resources of the region for the benefit of their long-suffering communities has been abandoned by gunrunners and over-indulged militias who have gorged themselves on unearned wealth and are no better than those they seek to displace.
It was until lately fashionable, that is before the release of Asari Dokubo, for these criminal elements to project him as their sole spokesman and leader and claim they were fighting to secure his release. But now he is back home they are short of excuses to give. Their desire, it's now clear, is to share in what they perceive as the attention Dokubo and others in his league have enjoyed. It was not difficult to see that most of the groups have cloudy views of their own struggles.
While they continue to berate the Nigerian state for the criminal neglect of the Niger-Delta, they see nothing wrong in the continuing denudation of the region, despite improved revenues from oil, by state governors that are among the richest people in the world. Some of the groups argued these 'sons of the soil' were free to use wealth from the region for purely private gains so long they were from the Niger-Delta.
The message is now clear: mainstream groups like Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger-Delta (MEND) may continue to speak in the name of the people of the Niger-Delta. But it is evident that theirs is just one of several voices which may neither carry far nor possess more weight than the others. MEND has in a sense become a pro-establishment group, at least in the perception of the new groups now squaring for a piece of the action.
It is only appropriate for people like Asari Dokubo who can now visit Aso Rock to parley with the President to call for order but that would be seen now by the armed outlaws of the region as an act of preservation. The point to note is that there have been too many threats and actual use of undirected violence among groups in the Niger-Delta. The way some of the leaders of the self-determination groups in the region talk about violence has increased its attraction among the various groups.
For there to be any meaning again to the Babel-like noises from the region, the true champions of the peoples cause must step down the rhetoric of war for that of reasoned dialogue like Saro-wiwa did even though Abacha failed to hear him. Otherwise the principled call for justice in the allocation of the oil revenue from that part of Nigeria would be drowned by the violent response of a Nigerian state that has to keep the peace and must be seen to be in control.
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