By Reuben Abati

One of the abductors recognised him as the author of The Concubine, but the code of ethics among this class of Niger Delta militants, these bastard children of the revolution, does not recognise status or achievement. The boys knew that Amadi had been visited at home by the Governor of Rivers state and that he is an important man. They wanted him to pay N300 million to secure his release.

They soon realised that they had abducted a man of words and ideas, and little cash, so they decided to let him go. Amadi had to trek five miles in the jungle, (he had to fall back on the emotional memory of his earlier training as a combatant soldier), before he stumbled on the search party that had been organised to locate him. His story, already well-reported in The Guardian and Vanguard newspapers is a sobering comment on the constantly mutating dimensions of the Niger Delta struggle.

THE NIGER DELTA STRUGGLE

As far back as 1951, the people of the Niger Delta had begun to protest against the marginalisation of their region by the country's majority ethnic groups. Minority-majority relations is a key historically determined aspect of Nigerian history and a source of great contention, with the minorities insisting on their rights in the context of justice and equity. Access to power, control of resources and freedom are the constitutive elements of this subject and debate. In the Constitutional conferences leading to independence in 1960, the minorities had succeeded in articulating their concerns.

In 1958, the Willinks Commission was set up to address the minority question. In its report, the Commission observed that "the needs of those who live in creeks and swamps of the Niger Delta are very different from those of the interior", noting that " a feeling of neglect and a lack of understanding was widespread... a case has been made out for the special treatment of this area. This is a matter that requires special effort because the area if poor, backward and neglected". Specifically, the Commission recommended the setting up of a Niger Delta Development Board. The Nigerian Government that succeeded the colonialists later set up River Basin Development Authorities as recommended by the Commission, but there was hardly any political will to take the matter seriously. By 1966, Isaac Adaka Boro and Nottingham Dick, two Ijaw young men, concerned about the rising. perceived domineering tendencies of the Igbos in the East, the Yorubas in the West and the Northerners, had set up the Niger Delta Volunteer Service (NDVS) under which platform they declared an independent Ijaw Republic in February 1966.

Such open rebellion would soon become a pattern in the Niger Delta.. Confronted with the sheer insensitivity of the Nigerian ruling class, an emergent Niger Delta elite tried to form organisations such as the Association of Mineral and Oil Producing Communities, but the more catalytic agency of the coming revolution was the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) which in the late eighties and early nineties, brought the plight of the people of the Niger Delta to international attention and led to the declaration of the Ogoni Bill of Rights. Subsequent developments include the Kaiama declaration of 1998, the isolation of Shell as the face of the injustice in the Niger Delta, open defiance and demonstrations against the Nigerian state by the people of the Niger Delta, and the emergence of militant groups and warlords in the creeks.

By 2007, the situation in the Niger Delta had degenerated into pure anarchy. This is the reality today, with the emergence of a series of youth gangs, fighting for the control of oil resources on behalf of their people. The militants as they are known are armed and defiant. They issue ultimatums to oil companies to stop all oil exploration activities. They attack oil installations, kidnap oil company officials. Seeing that crude oil is stolen openly by state officials, and that a whole ship, bearing oil cargo can disappear from Nigerian shores, and the Navy and everyone else could claim ignorance, the militants have also begun to engage in illegal oil bunkering.

There is so much lawlessness in the Niger Delta. Oil theft is rampant, and the struggle has degenerated into all forms of criminality: the kidnapping of innocent children, the abduction of men, married women and open warfare. Port Harcourt, once regarded as a garden city has become a war zone of sorts. A Lagos-based Ijaw lady, Sarah Joseph, quoted in a report in the Sunday Tribune of January 20, 2008 on terrorism in the Niger Delta describes the situation as follows: "I entered Port Harcourt and I started having headache for no just reason. The moment you step into the city, may be after a long time and you hear of the experience of those living there, you are bound to be sacred. If I have my way, I don't think I want to enter Port Harcourt in a long time, forget the fact that I was born there and my parents live there".

Across the Niger Delta, Nigeria is faced with a crisis of untold proportions, bordering on national instability. Nigeria is unable to meet its OPEC quota due to the suspension of oil exploration activities in many parts of the Delta. National electricity supply is down to about 800 MW because ethnic militants regularly disrupt the supply of gas from the Niger Delta. In the last year, about $20.7 billion was lost as revenue due to the Nigerian government. Nigerian security agencies including the military are overwhelmed as the militants in the Niger Delta appear to be better armed and more determined.

The current situation in the Niger Delta is the total effect of the failure of the Nigerian government to take the people of the Delta seriously, and to implement honestly and truthfully, the recommendations of the Willinks Commission.

THE ISSUES AND THE SOURCES OF PROVOCATION

Essentially, what the people of the Niger Delta want in 2009 is not so different from what the people of the area wanted as far back as 1951 or what other Nigerians have always wanted. Areas of correlation can be found in the demands of the Ijaw Youth Congress and demands on the Nigerian state by the Movement for the Survival of Biafra, the Arewa Youth Congress or the Odua Peoples Congress. As citizens, the people of the Delta are asking for equity and justice and due recognition of their rights as citizens. These are contained in the Ogoni Bill of Rights, the Kaiama Declaration and similar declarations by other groups in the Niger Delta.

Simplified, this includes first, the right to control crude oil resources or at best to be accorded 50 per cent derivation. Second, the people are insisting on a cessation of deleterious oil exploration activities which destroy the Niger Delta ecology and human lives. Third, they want the abrogation of all laws which dispossess them of their rights as a federating unit inside Nigeria. Fourth, they want the crisis of poverty in the Niger Delta to be addressed. With the oil boom becoming an oil burst and the failure of Nigeria to diversify its economy, the country's poverty index has risen sharply but there is worse poverty in the Niger Delta. Fifth, they want other Nigerians to listen to their message and treat them with respect as equal stakeholders in the Nigerian partnership arrangement.

The Niger Delta presents a curious paradox. The people live in coastal areas surrounded by water, and yet they cannot get potable water to drink. Their neighbourhoods and creeks are littered with pipelines criss-crossing all the way through, bearing petroleum products to other parts of the country, but in this same Niger Delta fuel is scarce and expensive. The cost of petrol is higher in Yenagoa than in Kano. Revenue from crude oil sale is used to provide infrastructure in other parts of Nigeria: the beautiful roads in Abuja, the skyscrapers in Lagos, the flyovers across the country, but many communities in the Niger Delta are cut off from civilisation because there are no roads or bridges leading to them.

More jobs have been created in Europe and America on account of oil exploration activities in the Niger Delta whereas Niger Delta youths are largely unemployed. The qualified ones among them have to struggle with Yorubas and the Hausa-Fulani to get positions in the oil companies. Conveniently, the oil exploration companies have their head offices in Lagos and Abuja, not in the Niger Delta. Children just grow up and die in the Niger Delta with little hope about tomorrow, whereas children in other parts of Nigeria, attending schools built with oil wealth stand a much better chance. The Niger Delta people feel neglected and provoked. The militants among them have reached a point where the only choice they find attractive is to destroy the goose that lays the golden egg, simply because the goose is more useful to other people rather than its owners.

But perhaps the greater source of provocation has been the arrogant and non-challant attitude of the Nigerian state and its greedy managers. Until the blow-out in the Niger Delta began with the sustained rebellion of MOSOP, the standard response of the Nigerian state has been one of condescension towards the Niger Delta agitation. The people are considered illiterates and minorities who could be manipulated. Successive governments have tried to show an awareness of the emergent problem, but without the political will to make a diffrence.

The Babangida administration set up the Oil Minerals Producing Areas Commission (OMPADEC) in 1992, but it was starved of necessary funds and the little that it got was squandered and stolen by officials who saw OMPADEC as Babangida's way of giving them their own share of the national loot. A Niger Delta Development Commission was set up by the Obasanjo administration in 1999, but like OMPADEC, it has also been grossly under-funded. Worse, development initiatives targeted at the Niger Delta also tend to place greater emphasis in reality on political patronage, opportunities for awarding contracts, rather than development.

The mistreatment of the Niger Delta has since assumed even more frontal forms. For long, every attempt by the people to table their grievances has been met with arrogant rationalisations. At the 2005 National Political Reforms Conference, delegates from the Niger Delta had to stage a protest walk-out when it became clear that certain hegemonic interests were bent on dictating to the Niger Delta team. Besides, the reduction of that conference to a debate about Obasanjo's perceived tenure elongation gambit derailed it. Oil companies treat oil producing communities just as condescendingly too: a few community/youth leaders are given low level contracts by the oil copanies. Divide and rule tactics are employed in dealing with the people.

But the people of the Niger Delta have since noticed the contrast between their lives and the standard of living enjoyed by oil company executives and they are angry. The NNPC and its subsidiaries which are supposed to defend Nigeria's interests are grossly inefficient and incompetent. Certain Northern intellectuals have not helped matters by openly telling the people of the Niger Delta that the crude oil deposits in their land do not belong to them, but that this is actually the property of Northerners which found its way for some geological reason to the Delta. It is a nomadic theory of crude oil formation that is provocative in all respects. The people of the Niger Delta have also watched helplessly how Nigerian governments use crude oil resources to assist other countries while Nigerians wallow in abject poverty at home. In 1997, General Sani Abacha donated crude oil contracts to six ECOWAS member-states!

The quick response to every agitation in the Niger Delta has been the deployment of military force. There is a long list of instances of human rights violations by state security agencies and the oil multinationals in the Niger Delta including rape and massacre in Umuechem and Odi and the intimidation of Niger Delta activists. A secret memo on governments' consideration of solutions to the crisis revealed official preference for a military solution to be adopted by the Joint Task Force which was deployed by the Nigerian authorities to keep the peace in the Niger Delta.

The resort to self-help and the proliferation of arms and ammunition in the Niger Delta is directly linked to all of these. It is a protest against the failure of the Nigerian state to ensure justice and a collective sense of belonging. It is the people's way of reminding other Nigerians that they are not stupid. In the process, they have discovered the power that they wield over Nigeria and the world. Every crisis in the Niger Delta has an immediate effect on government revenue and the profits made by oil companies. It also has a direct effect on world oil prices which have been most volatile. Nigeria is today at the mercy of the Niger Delta militant in the creeks. A negligent nation creates the most unlikely kind of folk heroes. And innocent ones like Captain Elechi Amadi are made to suffer an undeserved collateral damage.

Robot  # 1 | 11.01.2009 04:36

Elechi Amadi, 74, one of the elders of the Nigerian literary community was abducted by a group of young men on January 5. His story, already well-reported in The Guardian and Vanguard newspapers is a sobering comment on the constantly mutating dimensions of the Niger Delta struggle....Read the full article.

konkomitant  # 2 | 11.01.2009 10:11

Our government is just buying time whilst the situation in the delta deteriorate into full scale anarchy. JTF is ill-equipped, NDDC we don't know what, Niger Delta Ministry jamboree. We're managing the crisis. Yar'Adua is a cunning actor!

Kay Soyemi (Esq.)  # 3 | 11.01.2009 13:11

Dear RA, UMYA maintained a very loud silence when the matter of his health and the reasons he travelled to Saudi in 2008 became a matter of public speculation. To date, he stubbornly, like a fly following the corpse to the grave, refused to explain himself. I am not sure what you thought of his obdurate stance on that matter, but... Could you be following the 'NIGERIAN LEADER' by doing same on the matter raised raised by SR? Methink not, and am still holding my breath! Don't want to pass out before I get a response.:pray:

akuluouno  # 4 | 12.01.2009 02:28

In spite of the recent past acrimonies and misunderstandings, the Igbos have since voted in total support of 100 per cent derivation to the Niger Delta:D:D I challenge other major groups in the NVS to support the Igbo resolution:clap: Regards to all:kiss:

EezeeBee  # 5 | 12.01.2009 03:00

=akuluouno;311707>In spite of the recent past acrimonies and misunderstandings, the Igbos have since voted in total support of 100 per cent derivation to the Niger Delta:D:D I challenge other major groups in the NVS to support the Igbo resolution:clap: Regards to all:kiss: Dem fit? Can they overcome their fear of no 'freebies'? Even at the great and painstakingly documented cost of destroyed lives in the Niger delta today and dangerously distorted futures tomorrow? They (All Nigerian groups) are so amazing but they lack the courage to step into their magnificence. Instead they squabble at the teat, tremble at the trough and kill the golden goose. I ask again; Dem fit?

Mikky jaga  # 6 | 13.01.2009 03:40

If the Niger deltans have been protesting injustice since 1951 and close to 60 years after, with all efforts made to redress the issue, no solution seems to be in sight, it is either the method of protest needs be changed or the protesters need to go beyond protest to other means of redressing the injustice. One very effective means of addressing the issue is to look at their political alliances since 1951. If their allies all these years cannot redress their problems, common sense dictates they find other alliances elsewhere. In life there are no permanent friends but permanent interests. They have tried taking up arms, it has not worked, kidnapping and abductions have not worked either. Let the ND check their politics, therein may lie the answer to their questions,

konkomitant  # 7 | 13.01.2009 08:08

=EezeeBee;311713>Dem fit? They (All Nigerian groups) are so amazing but they lack the courage to step into their magnificence. Instead they squabble at the teat, tremble at the trough and kill the golden goose. I ask again; Dem fit? Who fit, and who get the courage? Please don't tickle me by mentioning those vandals and kidnappers (aka militants) that destroy pipeline and then run back into the bush. That to me is not courage!

akuluouno  # 8 | 13.01.2009 10:08

The Hon Konko, I do not think that you caught Ez Bee's drift.:D