Just as well the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) first spurned dialogue, and resumed bombing critical economic infrastructure.
That is lesson number one: never strike a deal with outlawry. If you did, you would lose your essence as a state.
Despite all the fire and fury, firestorm and thunder, bombing and shelling, the NDA is nothing but outlawry agenda sworn to criminal enterprises; to benefit a few but ruin the majority.
Ultimately, that majority would not be the Arewa talakawa (poverty after all, has no tribal mark) or the urban “sophisticats” in the South West; or even NDA’s kindred spirits, Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
Both NDA and IPOB seem acting out a twin but ultra-dangerous conspiracy.
It would be the Niger Delta poor. Their lands and swamps have, for decades, been ravaged by an insensitive, oil-guzzling Nigerian state.
Now, with the so-called Avengers, the latest mutation of militants, they are being raped by home-grown robber barons, who kill, rob and plunder — but blame outsiders for their crime.
Now, by NDA’s latest gambit — an ecological equivalent of cutting your nose to spite your face — they are preparing the Niger Delta (whether in or outside Nigeria) for a future of sustained underdevelopment.
When that period comes, the Niger Delta would wake up with a start — that their most implacable enemies are bivouacked indoors. Blasted is that community where criminal elements rule the roost!
Indications that NDA is nothing but grotesque ode to outlawry? Follow this simple narrative.
A certain Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, was to be docked for alleged mega sleaze. Instead of having his day in court to clear his name, as any lawful person would, he vanished.
Not even a bench warrant could produce him. The closest to his “appearance” was some lawyers arguing his case in absentia. With all due respect, despite the legalistic bluff by his lawyers, that is brash outlawry.
Shortly after, bombs started booming — the Avengers were in business. Sure, Tompolo has issued strident dissociations from the Avengers, pleading with NDA to stop the bombing, but speaking from both sides of the mouth.
Besides, a man speaking behind a curtain, when he could communicate face-to-face, always lugs a huge credibility problem!
By its latest sound bites, a so-called Joint Revolutionary Council of the Niger Delta Liberation Force (JNDLF) has been busy shooting from the hips, exultant and quite triumphant.
But alas! It makes quaint demands for negotiations sans negotiations: halt corruption trials against suspected PDP and Niger Delta looters. Halt the Goodluck Jonathan probe. Unfreeze Tompolo’s account. Release Nnamdi Kanu. Release Sambo Dasuki.
And if Ripples may add: bring back the corruption gravy! The Avengers, by their demands, are pressing, at gunpoint, their divine right, and that of their pan-Nigeria confederates, to loot the public till!
Why is no one surprised? NDA is nothing but avengers for corruption. Any country that humours such decadence, tolerating a group that brashly dons the badge of rot, courts wilful death.
In that triumph of the moment, JNDLF brags about how USA and “other nations” pleaded with it to shelf its threat of taking down six different targets, via a missile attack. It also blabbed about how its “international partners”-in-crime (apparently mercenaries) had withdrawn their “chartered” submarines for the Avenger menace, pending the fire next time.
That could be excitable bluff by a braggart assembly, over-reaching itself. Before the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), Emeka Ojukwu bragged no power in Africa could vanquish Biafra. His Biafra wannabe, IPOB’s Kanu, also once swore: in Ireland alone, he had enough IPOB scientists to blast Nigeria to its knees.
Both, however, turned a damp squib — Ojukwu’s bluff, after consuming no less than two million lives; and Kanu, straining to escape trial, with the Avengers’ threat his most pathetically potent fall back!
But if this threat is real, how did these Niger Delta folks stockpile such awesome arsenal, with the security agencies snoozing?
That beams the focus on another face of the Jonathan Presidency.
From the facts in the public space, Jonathan’s presidency was an epitome of rot. But it would appear that rot was only a stinking outer layer, cloaking a more sinister core. There appears a direct correlation between the mega loot of the public till and arms stockpile — at least from the Niger Delta front.
Throw in Tompolo and his alleged racket at the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), for which he has refused to appear in court, his scuttling into a hole and the belching of bombs from virtual nowhere, it takes no especial acuity to put the pieces together.
The clincher, of course, would be the vandals’ campaign for the release of Dasuki, alleged chief operator of the illicit spigot, that splashed public money into private pockets. But, of course! Who will flies embrace, as the Yoruba say, but the man with the very bad sore!
So, the effete Goodluck Jonathan may have run the country aground in just six years. But his security agents may also have looked elsewhere, while the vandals of the swamps loaded themselves with scary arms.
That would be gargantuan betrayal — if established: both to his presidential oath and to a country of 170 million people that gave him, a minority of minorities, a rare opportunity. It also explains the militants’ pre-election boast to cripple Nigeria, should Jonathan lose.
But by far the most ominous, for Nigeria’s democracy, is that you can lose democratic elections but take up arms to sabotage the winners. That is the pure treason behind this current madness.
But no less ominous, for the economy, is the tragic conceit that you could, at gun point, spring those accused of humongous sleaze from justice.
That is an outlaw agenda — and that appears the sum total of Avengers’ grand demands. Any self-respecting government would balk at such inanity.
“It is the fashion these days to be a desk general” was Wole Soyinka’s witty conclusion to the play, Jero’s Metamorphosis, written in the early 1960s.
Between the 1960s and now, there seems a metamorphosis, of sorts, from desk generals to swamp generals! Those swamp generals, whose heroism exclusively issues from bombing oil installations, are entitled to their delusions, like some Don Quixote tilting at windmills.
Still, there is a difference between stealing in to rupture pipelines, and launching missiles against civilian targets elsewhere. That would be worse than war crimes. Fortunately, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has enough gaol rooms for war criminals. Maybe, it is high time Nigeria contributed its quota to these vilest of criminals!
Negotiation over the Niger Delta is no crime, though it is strange how little of that went on when “son the soil” Jonathan was president.
What Jonathan did was not restructure, to correct the age-long problem, but tilt the till for his thieving countrymen, young and old.
So, the issue is not, not negotiating per se. It is not negotiating at gun point, with a group with questionable motives, fired by hideous political conspiracies.
Any state that cuts a deal with such an outlaw ensemble only nails its own coffin.
