Time has no wings. Yet, it flies. It flies so high that we often lose track of things past. It flies so high that the labour of our heroes past often ends up in vain.
Today, I remember Kenule Beeson Saro-Wiwa. Today, I remember Niger Delta. Today, I remember Rivers, Saro-Wiwa’s state.
It has been 20 years since Saro-Wiwa was killed. November 10 made it 20 years that the military junta of the late Gen. Sani Abacha chose to go for the messenger rather than the message.
A lot of water has gone under the proverbial bridge since then. Ogoni, the significant part of Rivers State which Saro-Wiwa fought and died for, is still on its throes. Shell’s evil deeds on its land are still telling on the health and wealth of the people. Many other oil-bearing communities in Rivers State are also down on their knees. No thanks to Shylocks masquerading as oil giants.
Things are not looking up for the larger Rivers too. The state is on break. The political impasse over the last violence-ridden general elections has ensured the state remains on vacation. Forget claims that the last general elections were violence-free. The Supreme Court said the state was a ‘theatre of war’. The apex court could not have captured it better because for months, men without spine, men of brawn put Rivers State, the Lagos of the South-south, on the spot. It was either they were shooting guns or they were throwing bombs. And when they did it, they hid their faces. They acted most times under the cover of the dark and daylight.
Aside guns and dynamites, they also used machetes and other dangerous weapons. Heads were broken. Necks were twisted. Arms had hot leads pumped into them. And there was a woman whose back was reshaped with bullets. It was simply a tale of blood.
Of all the killings in Saro-Wiwa’s dear Rivers State, those of the Adubes caught the public’s attention more. Their killers showed no mercy. In one fell swoop, nine persons, including a father, his two sons and daughter were killed. The members of Adube family are still in tears and are seeking justice.
Those killed are: former Caretaker Committee Chairman of Ogba/Egbema/ Ndoni Local Government Area, the late Hon. Christopher Adube, his two sons Lucky and John, his daughter Joy, a family friend Iyk Ogarabe and the family driver, Mr. Samuel Chukwunonye.
The larger Niger Delta too still grapples with a lot of issues. Decades before the birth of the Presidential Amnesty Programme and the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), the Niger Delta, where Nigeria derives the bulk of its revenue, witnessed agitations. The people expressed unhappiness over the way they were neglected. Their farms were polluted by oil spills. Their streams were taken over by crude oil. Their health worsened. And their existence was seriously threatened.
Close to the year of the birth of the Amnesty Programme, the agitation had taken a new twist. Before the deadly twist, Saro-Wiwa had been judicially murdered. Several other people had been killed by security operatives under one guise or the other. With intellectual [and environmental] activists such as Saro-Wiwa out of the way, another generation of activists took over. This set believes if you make peaceful change impossible, you make violent change inevitable. They also believe it is illegal to be lawful in a lawless environment. So, they took to arms in their quest to prove a point.
They damaged oil pipelines at a devastating speed. They bombed military boat houses. They siphoned barrels of oil. No thanks to these dare-devils, oil installations were blown up and oil workers were afraid to go to the rigs and others. The economy bled. The country was losing billions of Naira daily.
NDDC’s mandate was to develop Niger Delta. But, its activities meant nothing to the militants who were set to bring down the country unless the region was given control over its resources. The impact the NDDC could have made was limited by the fact that its dues were not given to it. The statutory payments that should be made to it were withheld by all arms of government. It ran into trillions of Naira and all efforts to get the money released for the betterment of the people did not work.
Things were getting worse by the day. They were still in that terrible state when the administration of the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was inaugurated on May 29, 2007. That the then President was uncomfortable with the state of war in the Niger Delta soon showed. First, he created the Ministry of the Niger Delta. Pronto, the government set up a technical committee to review all existing reports on the region.
The committee, headed by Saro-Wiwa’s right hand man and ex-President of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Ledum Mittee, recommended an increase of the derivation fund from 13 per cent to 25 per cent. It also recommended open trial for one of the faces of the arms struggle, Mr. Henry Okah who was then in detention in Angola. Another of its recommendation, which led to the Amnesty Programme, is that youths in the region must be disarmed through a credible Decommissioning, Disarmament and Rehabilitation (DDR) process.
The late Yar’Adua knew something urgent must be done to rescue the situation. He needed to save the country from international embarrassment that the arms struggle had become. By then, there had been reports of militants partaking in piracy activities on the Gulf of Guinea, a development which had seen the governments of Equatorial Guinea and Angola complaining to Yar’Adua at international meetings. Okah was mentioned by the two governments as being responsible for the piracy activities against their countries.
Okah was a leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which had claimed responsibility for many of the kidnappings and the attacks on oil facilities in the region.
By April 2009, the then President dissolved the board of the NDDC. Timi Alaibe, who was the Managing Director, however, got another job. He was appointed Special Adviser on Niger Delta Affairs. His major job, it turned out, was to midwife the birth of the Presidential Amnesty Programme. Two months after Alaibe’s appointment, Yar’Adua breathed life into me.
The programme did not immediately bring excitement. Okah’s detention was a major factor for the insurgency’s leadership’s apathy to embrace it. Yar’Adua recruited Chief Tony Anenih, Dr Koripamo Agary and Dr Ferdinand Ikwang, among others, to assure the agitators that he was truthful about not victimising them after dropping their guns.
Alaibe traversed the creeks persuading hard-line militant leaders to embrace me. He did not do it alone. He got Kingsley Kuku, the Arogbo-born ex-member of the Ondo State House of Assembly, who had worked with him as Special Assistant at the NDDC, to get Government Ekpemupolo (Tompolo), Mujahhid Dokubo-Asari, General Shoot-at-sight and many other leaders of the arms’ struggle to sign up to Yar’Adua’s offer.
Okah, who had by then been repatriated from Angola and was standing trial for treason at the Federal High Court, Jos, was a major issue in the refusal of many militant leaders to accept the programme. But, because Yar’Adua wanted the programme to succeed, he agreed to drop charges against Okah and on July 13, 2009, Okah became a free man.
Between June 25 and October 4, 2009, 20,192 militants embraced the programme by handing over arms in excess of 20,000. Others who did not hand over their weapons initially because of the fear of the unknown later did before the deadline expired. Even after the deadline’s expiration, 6,166 more people, associated with it. Through the programme, over 30,000 ex-militants have been given a new lease of life.
But despite all the efforts, Niger Delta still remains sick. The people are not reaping much from the huge revenue oozing out of their land. I ask: shall Niger Delta people be free?
My final take: We must find an end to the social and environmental crisis and injustice exposed by Saro-Wiwa in the oil-rich and massively polluted Niger Delta. Oil companies, such as Shell, should stop dodging their responsibilities. They must prevent further spills, clean up, and provide adequate compensation to people affected by oil pollution. Shell should pay the chunk of the cost of the cleaning up of Ogoni land recommended by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP).
Rest well, dear Saro-Wiwa. Better years ahead, dear Niger Delta.
