Niger Delta: Beyond the Ogoni clean-up

Events of last week in the Rivers State demonstrated how public life in the Niger Delta can simultaneously playout contrasting shades of sadness and joy. For instance, the country was in one vein celebrating the testimonial match of Joseph Yobo, one of its most celebrated international football icons, at the Adokie Amiesimaka Stadium in Port Harcourt, and had the rare treat of witnessing a delightful profusion of superlative footballing skills from an international field of stars, some retired and others still playing. Honouring Yobo with their complimentary appearances in the match were players from different countries and generations such as Nigeria’s Austin Jay Jay Okocha, Samuel Eto of Cameroon, and Ghana’s Sully Muntari. Others included Ben Iroha–Nigeria’s ex international of an older generation. Also on song was David Moyes – Yobo’s former coach at Everton Football Club, England.
Added to that was the scheduled visit of President Muhammadu Buhari to Ogoniland in Rivers State for the kickoff of the Ogoni Clean-up campaign, which was initiated by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP).The Presidential visit was an unprecedented gesture of honour not only to the Ogonis but the entire Rivers State and the Niger Delta region by extension. If only late environmental rights crusader Ken Saro Wiwa whose sterling personal enterprise kick-started the clean-up drama  was alive to see the day!
Whether the state and the region optimally exploited the game changing prospects of the visit by Mr President to their backyard, remains a matter for another day. For in another vein, which serves as a most undeserving flip side to the foregoing, blood was flowing as pain and agony spread at several locations of the same Rivers State and the rest of the Niger Delta region, with gunmen and other assailants invading and killing scores of persons in gory fashion. To accentuate the spate of anomy in the region, the group that goes by the name Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), claimed front burner attention with their attacks on sundry oil locations and deepened the nation’s oil woes. The latest salvo from the Avengers was the threat to bomb sensitive locations in Abuja, and their advisory to persons in such places to avoid them. Locations so listed included the Presidential Villa, Nigeria Police Force Headquarters, NNPC Towers and military installations. Whether Nigerians took the warning seriously or not remained in the realm of individual considerations.
However, in a significant twist, the development was followed by an official reaction which was commendably palliative in essence, as a meeting was held featuring the Vice President Professor Yemi Osinbanjo and the governors of the oil producing Niger Delta states along with service chiefs as well as other stakeholders, and which yielded a change in the government’s attitude and response towards the region. A key outcome of the meeting was the suspension of all military offensives against the restive militants–all be it temporarily. There are even reports that one of the demands of the governors present was that all corruption charges against persons from the region be withdrawn. Hopefully, such a report should not be true as it offers no positive value to the cause of the region.  
Yet against the backdrop of the foregoing and the legion of interventionist measures launched in the Niger Delta recently and in the past 60 years, it requires no clairvoyance to note that the crisis in the region is as fresh as ever. While the core problem of the Niger Delta right from colonial times as was reflected in the Willink Commission Report of 1957, remained the challenge of fostering among the people of the region, a sense of inclusiveness in the Nigerian federation, the recent developments provide conclusive evidence that not much positives have been reaped. Rather new forms of restiveness emerge every day with corresponding military response from the central government. However, the response by the military, may have in recent times elicited yet more problems from the militants who become more resolved to fight, with each fresh salvo assuming a newer level of viciousness than previous ones. The situation is as if to tell the country by adapting the words of Jimmy Cliff the Jamaican Reggae star that “the harder you come the bigger you fall”.
The truth of the matter is that the nation’s oil installations comprising various sophisticated plants and hundreds of kilometers of pipelines, which are the targets of any attack on the nation’s common patrimony are highly vulnerable as they are dispersed over a very wide area. They are, therefore, mere sitting ducks that can be hit at any point. Therefore, as much as the nation’s gallant military is doing the very best in extremely trying circumstances to protect these facilities, they lack the wherewithal to provide a fail-proof shield.
It is in that context that the outcome of the Osinbajo meeting with the region’s governors should serve as a turning point to the Niger Delta conundrum. That meeting itself serves as a follow-up to the circumstances associated with the Ogoni clean-up campaign, at which flag-off Osinbanjo represented President Muhammadu Buhari. Given its long and turbulent history, the clean-up campaign qualifies as a watershed in the Niger Delta struggle for resource control and inclusiveness in the Nigeria project.
In the same vein, the militants would be acting wiser and more productively by reconsidering their present scorched-earth posture from a standpoint of strategy, and give the new initiative by the government a chance. Now that the government is ready for dialogue, they should not blow the chance if indeed they are fighting altruistically for their people who are not spared the collateral damage from restiveness and militancy.
The bigger challenge, however, is to chart a way forward beyond the clean-up of the ravages of oil production in Ogoni land. A valuable insight into the challenge ahead draws from the fact that out of the 189 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in the oil producing states, Ogoni land comprises only four Local Government Areas (LGAs) out of a total of over 120 where oil has been actually produced for the past 60 years, which bear the brunt of the ugly face of the business and are equally needy of clean up.  They have largely been abandoned and discarded like a sucked-out orange, with their plight providing impetus for the serial waves of bloody restiveness that the region and the entire country have been witnessing at great expense.
Hence the clean-up dispensation must as of necessity extend beyond the present area of attention which is Ogoni land. The federal and state governments in the region as well as other stakeholders  should not wait for another tortuously long process of intervention by UNEP or any other agent of sympathy to kick start the clean-up of all the other areas as ravaged as Ogoni land. The present dispensation provides enough metaphor for a wider swath of responses from the various stakeholders in the Niger Delta to wake up to the reality of a new dawn waiting for them to tap from its promise.
As is widely acknowledged, the serial waves of restiveness are driven by the belief which the youths in the region hold that they are fighting for their inalienable rights, and the Ogoni clean-up exercise has provided a globally endorsed template for the justification of their struggle. To ignore the impetus of the exercise for addressing their concern is to ask for more assertiveness from them and that is hardly what Nigeria needs now.
In more specific terms, the complement of responses must go beyond the present dole out of handouts to a few beneficiaries as amnesty payoffs. A more profound response should aim at changing the game in the region through better collaboration between the agents of change. This calls for a realignment of the role of the various relevant agencies, and in particular the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs from its presently non-descript status, to that of a better defined coordinating apex organ, which oversights all other operators working for the good of the region.