Tag: Yenagoa

IT was pre-dawn, and the impossible metropolis of Lagos was already astir with commerce and commotion. Sex workers and miracle hawkers were returning home. Your sharp nostrils could pick the scent of expired passion and expectant humanity fired by the opium of faith and optimism. Lagos is the Mecca of hope and great expectations. To fail in Lagos is to be felled by adversity. The great outlying suburbia was already emptying its denizens on the commercial and business districts of Ikeja, the administrative capital of Nigeria’s meta-city.
There was something unnerving about the great mass of humanity shuffling to work or worklessness as the case may be. The gainfully unemployed mix with those who are employed without much to gain. Akin Ambode is faring extremely well, but this great conundrum of unplanned and unregulated urbanization requires huge resources and great ingenuity to tackle and deserves to be put in some global context.
A friend who has since become one of the nation’s premier business moguls told the columnist that visiting Beijing for the first time forty years ago, he could sense the great economic ferment unleashed on the nation when he opened the shutter in his room at dawn only to be confronted by an endless mass of humanity slogging their way to work on foot with the ferocious discipline of a column of ant workers. China has since overtaken the US in economic might.
Lest we forget, one was headed for Yenagoa, the capital city of Bayelsa, for the very first time, and what a historic visit it turned out to be. The former fishing hamlet and premier domain of the Ijaw people, Nigeria’s fourth biggest nationality, does not register or resonate as one of Nigeria’s iconic cities. With its remoteness, its sheer inaccessibility, its fetid and festering mangrove swamps, the ungainly one-street capital is not a preferred tourist destination. But it is morning yet on creation day, as they say.
This early dawn, you could already pick the fragrant odour of akara ball as it surged and hissed from huge frying pans. Even this early and despite the dark mist, the newspaper stalls were already hosting the first plenary of the people’s parliament, or tribunal of the tribunes. This raw feral forum comments on everything under the sun and does not take hostages. Occasionally, when passions outpace logic, proceedings end up in a free for all fistic fire-fight.
But this morning, it is Bayelsa for breakfast. One’s only connection with the state is a tenuous and transient one indeed. A decade and three years earlier in 2005 after its incumbent governor, DSP Alamiesegha, was arrested and detained in Europe on the suspicion of money laundering, yours sincerely wrote from exile a piece for an international magazine predicting that by the time the article was published, the former Squadron Leader would have slipped his mooring and arrived in Yenagoa to a heroic and tumultuous welcome.
It was as eerily prophetic as it could get. DSP struck on the dot of the hour to wild jubilation and applause in Yenagoa. He was led to the State House in a carnival-like procession by his people. Looking back, this was the zenith of glory for Alams. Thereafter, it was a swift descent into official disgrace and eventual death.
He was replaced by his deputy, Goodluck Jonathan, who thereafter commenced a steep and starry ascent that carried him to the portals of the Nigerian presidency. But time remains the ultimate healer. Judging from the mood in Yenagoa this morning, Alams remains a celebrated icon of his people.
This morning, one had arrived at the Hangar at the domestic airport with some trepidation. Your companion, a former military supremo, had tried to drive the fear of flying deep into the marrow by hinting that the preferred shuttle mode is “a Bristol helicopter flying fixed wings”. Having been flown in all kinds of air-borne contraptions during the civil war, he could no longer be fazed by any aircraft as long as it takes to the sky.
Mercifully, it turned out that it was a regular plane on a scheduled early morning flight to Port Harcourt. But the old fear of flying returned as you took your turn to board only to catch a glimpse of a female pilot checking the instruments. Why must it be today of all days that a female pilot would be in control? This might well be the preferred exit route, you thought as you crashed on the seat. Aeronautical assassination was probably on the menu.
After a smooth take off, concern for safety evaporated as the plane eased itself through the cloudy sky and turned sharply towards the Atlantic Ocean. A practised aviator was in control. We were informed by the cockpit that excepting unforeseen circumstances, the journey was to last no more than forty five minutes. It was time for a power nap.
In what seemed like an eternity later, you found yourself being driven in a two-car convoy towards Elele, Ahoada, the famous East-West intersection which connects Bayelsa State to Greater Nigeria, and then towards Yenagoa. Although technically in Rivers State, we were informed that that portion of the road had to be constructed by Bayelsans. If they want to be linked with civilization, let them get on with it. Unitary federalism is not a tea party.
As we trawled through the sprawling metropolis formerly known as the Garden City, nostalgia began to get in the way of excitement. This was the city of mamba and mesmerizing music. The strong early morning winds brought back the odour of the great Igbo forest and vegetation just to the north. Aba, the great commercial hub, was a mere forty miles away. Owerri, the former municipal village, was sixty miles away through an old route that passed through a place called Mgbirichi.
As a Youth corper, one was a restless denizen of these magical Mesopotamia of post-colonial Nigeria. Like a phoenix, they rose from the ashes of a destructive civil war. But forty two years have elapsed since you last set eyes on these places. You feel like a returning apparition. Forty two years is a long span in the life of an individual. To get a proper perspective, in forty two years, General Yakubu would have been born, he would have joined the army, would have ruled Nigeria for nine years and would have been ousted by his colleagues and still with two years to spare.
By now, we were approaching Yenagoa, still very much a one-street capital but with a flurry of constructions going on at a furious, frenetic pace. Yenagoa is a city in a harried and harassed hurry. The sandy, inhospitable terrain is the ultimate nightmare of the cavalier civil engineer ; not amenable to instant edifices or casual road construction. In the absence of visionary political engineering and an overarching vision of the multi-ethnic nation, perhaps something can be said for proliferating state creation.
Your companion had all along maintained a calm meditative pose. You decided to rouse him with a historic bait. Forty two years earlier, Murtala Mohammed had created six additional states with a famous broadcast in which he said no jubilation or protest would be tolerated. It was the high noon of military messianism. A week later, this same week forty two years earlier, Mohammed was killed in a failed putsch. Where was our man that fateful morning?
“I was at a pre-briefing in Alabi’s (Isama) office before a proper Supreme Military Council meeting when we started hearing what sounded like martial music. Dimka was his subordinate officer known for his drinking feats. Alabi could not contain his scorn and anger. I barged into a nearby office looking for a proper radio. All the officers in the room including Wyas stood up to attention. We later on discovered that half of them were implicated in the coup.” My companion calmly intoned.
It was a very dangerous thing to do. The old Nigerian military was a scary proposition. But this is a story for another day. By now, the convoy had been swept into the iconic Bayelsa State House. It was a reception fit for notables . The atmosphere was electrifying. To receive us at the entrance was the governor of Bayelsa State, his wife and entire kitchen cabinet. A tall impressively built man with an oak-like presence, Henry Seriake Dickson was as warm, polite, courteous and effusive as they come.
From the wild cheers that punctuated his remarks, the quality crowd that fawned on him and the militant-looking denizens that formed an informal guard of honour all the way to the DSP Alamiesegha Hall where the lecture was taking place, it was clear that Ijaw nationalism of a strategic and intellectual hue had relocated to Bayelsa State. Something is astir in this remote and forgotten corner of Nigeria which may put paid to internal colonialism.
Ijaw nationalism seems to be picking some painful lessons in power projects from the Jonathan tragedy. As a minimum condition for constructing hegemony in a multi-ethnic and bitterly polarized nation, a group, more so a group originating from minorities, must seek to build bridges and keep old friendships in a state of constant repairs.
The Jonathan project was hobbled by juvenile triumphalism, alienating arrogance and a bizarre bravura made all the more bizarre because it was public knowledge that Jonathan owed his ascendancy to an opportunistic brainwave on the part of a deluded leader rather than the balance of political forces on ground. Like a disappointed lover, the same prefect has vowed that the Ijaw people will not taste power in a long time.
Perhaps that would afford them the opportunity to rebuild a natural paradise devastated by man’s inhumanity to man. Henry Seriake Dickson is already showing himself as an exemplar in that direction. As he reeled off facts and figures over hurried breakfast last Monday morning, you got the impression of a man on top of his brief. Having long dismissed him from a distance, one was pleasantly surprised to discover that he trained as a lawyer and had a stint in the police force.
Far more intriguing last Monday was what can only be described as a play of political signifiers across rigid binary divisions. You were supposed to be in enemy territory judging by antecedents, a state run by the accursed PDP.
But if the progressive views of inclusive governance and the inevitability of the radical restructuring of the nation coming from the man in Yenagoa are anything to go by, one can sense a looming restructuring and realignment of political forces which will convulse the nation to its foundation and lead to a smashing of old hegemonic blocs and the emergence of new political groups.
It has been quite a day in Yenagoa.