“I predict that a denouement of the riddle of the Niger delta will soon come. The agenda is being set at this trial. Whether the peaceful ways I have favoured will prevail depends on what the oppressor decides, what signals it sends out to the waiting public.” Ken Saro-Wiwa, November, 1995

Nigeria and her oil alliance dismissed the warning of Saro-Wiwa; they chose not to respond to the questions that he motivated the Ogoni people to ask in their Bill of Rights. The pomposity of the country’s custodians of power is contained in a statement by Philip Asiodu, a former federal minister, who stated that the oil producing areas are too insignificant to threaten the nationhood of Nigeria.
 

Today, Asiodu, himself a Niger Deltan, knows better. He has not found the will-power to rescind the statement he made because of aristocratic background. Asiodu was not the only culprit. In 1993, Alhaji Tanko Yakassa, a former adviser to the Alhaji Shehu Shagari, the second republic president of Nigeria, suggested that the Ogoni people be relocated to the arid deserts of the north so that Ogoniland would serve as Nigerian oil fields. If Asiodu’s statement could be classified as self-defeatism or a speech based on what he was benefiting as a government minister, Yakassa’s was brutish, utterly insensitive and a reflection of the slave status with which his likes held the people of Niger Delta.

Relating such callous statements to historical antecedence, Saro-Wiwa and his Ogoni people cried out that the Nigerian state had an official doctrine to perpetually enslave the Niger Delta. The Ogoni pointed at the Land Use Act of 1978 promulgated by Olusegun Obasanjo as a military head of state from 1976 – 1979. Yet, Obasanjo returned to power in 1999 as a military ordained president with the intent of continues strong hold on the Niger Delta. On his second missionary journey, he flagged off the current battle that has turned the Niger Delta almost into war days-images of Liberia. He massacred the people of Odi within months of assuming power as a message to the Niger Delta.
 
President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua
The killing of yet to be stated number of people in Odi is not isolated from the broad conquistador of Niger Delta through brutal repression by the Nigeria. Obasanjo’s action was an inherited plan that always under pinned governmental policies, under General Ibrahim Babangida; it was in the form of well established network of surveillance force that takes out their targets in covert manner. Babangida reluctantly ‘step-aside” and Earnest Shonekan, a civilian and interim president, held power for 82 days until full fledge military returned.

It was Babangida’s long time right hand man, General Sani Abacha, who took over the realm of power from Shonekan. Abacha was openly brutish in order to instill fear and terror into those that may dare him. He created terroristic figures like Lt. Col. Paul Okotimo, an army officer that openly stated that he has over 204 strategies to kill the Ogoni people. When Abacha passed away the mantle fell on General Abdulsalemi Abubakar, a subtle military politician. This was seen in the way he cleverly converted the troops which Abacha formed to terrorize the Niger Delta into a specialized squad called “Operation Fox”.

Highly equipped and trained, “Operation Fox” operated at low for a considerable part of the regime’s life until Obasanjo took over office. “Operation Fox” changed its name to “Operation Sweep” immediately after Obasanjo became president in 1999. By this time it was clear to the oil producing communities that the “civil administration” was not going to be the answer to their predicaments. This, with other factors influenced the creation of militant gangs by youth groups of the Ijaw ethnic nationality in Bayelsa and Delta states.

Militant forms of protests have been with the Ijaw nation for a long time. Obasanjo who fought in the Nigerian civil war as a commanding officer in the Niger Delta is well aware of the fighting spirit handed down to the Ijaws by their icon – Isaac Adaka Boro. His administration infiltrated groups by pro-government elements that are loyal to local and national politicians that are aligned to the ruling party. A significant faction of the militants became appendages of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and were used by to violently rig elections in 1999 and 2003. Substantial evidences abounds that influential politicians and members of these groups collude to carry out illegal drilling of crude oil – commonly known in Nigeria as oil bunkering. 

As some militant leaders formed close ties with politicians and the introduction of oil bunkering into the system, cash and sophisticated weapons were accessed with ease. Today, has become extremely difficult to establish the difference between the militancy that is agitating for the interest of the oil producing communities and politically midwife criminality. The arms proliferation in the Niger Delta is part of the deliberate strategy to propel a complete anarchy and war to rubbish the agitation of the oil producing communities. It was the invented wisdom of Obasanjo to dislodge credible agitation that opposes oppression of oil communities by the government and their multinationals collaborators. 

The present administration was anointed by Olusegun Obasanjo in 2007; the presidential campaign train of Umaru Yar’Adua successfully co-opted several leaders of militant groups through their political god-fathers, hook-winked by the perfunctory nomination of Goodluck Jonathan as a vice presidential candidate of Obasanjo’s ruling PDP.  Jonathan, an Ijaw, a former deputy governor, who later became the governor of Bayelsa state on the misfortune of his boss, Diepreye Alamesaiya, who was arrested in UK for money laundering.

The choice of an Ijaw to the second highest position in the land was strategic, and it worked, as a tsunamic-euphoria engulfed every Ijaw community in different states. But what the militants and the Ijaw masses did not consider is that both Jonathan and Yar’Adua were picked by Obasanjo, first for his own selfish interest in the broader national polity. More relevant to the Niger Delta, the decision to make Jonathan the number two man was aimed at the destabilization of the Jonathan’s former boss, who had wider political influence amongst the Ijaws and commanded a lot of respect from the militants too.

Musa Yar’Adua gained power and of course; the support of local politicians from the Niger Delta, but like every past head of Nigeria, the issue of the people of the Niger Delta was immediately relegated to the background. Few months into the life of the administration, the same group of politicians of the region that supported it, started crying foul over the near powerless nature of the vice president’s office. The president response to the virulent threat was to demonstrate that he cut the short in Nigerian affairs. Yar’Adua reinvigorated Operation Sweep changing it to Joint Task Force (JTF), empowered to police and militarized the entire Niger Delta and to track down those behind “bossnapping” (not kidnapping) of oil workers. The Yar’Adua government made matters worse when in its supplementary budget, it went ahead to allocate 460 million naira or $3.8 million for weapons for the JTF.  This exacerbated the region further.
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Politicians from the Ijaw ethnic nation in particular threatened to withdraw there support, coupled with the unanimous rejection of Ibrahim Gambari’s choice to head a proposed Niger Delta submit, because of his prominent role in the campaign against Saro-Wiwa during Abacha’s regime. It was only then that Yar’Adua deems it necessary to instituted Technical Committee on the Niger Delta (TCND) to “look” into the problems of the Niger Delta. The TCND which was headed by Barrister Ledum Mitee, an Ogoni who is the only accused that survived the tribunal that sentenced Saro-Wiwa and eight others, and whose leadership of the Ogoni movement had been trialed with a lot of controversies. The government also reluctantly established a special ministry that would focus on the needs of the peoples of the Niger Delta; headed by Chief, Dr. Ufot Ekaete, a former secretary to the government under Obasanjo. The Nigerian public has been made to belief that the report of Mitee’s committee, which has been endlessly criticized, is supposed to largely form the operational wheel of the ministry.

Even by a casual analysis, Yar’Adua has demonstrated both consistent inconsistency and conflicting approaches in dealing with the problem of the Niger Delta. Wole Soyinka, the noble laureate captures this recently, when wrote that “President Yar’Adua’s lackadaisical approach towards these contentious issues has become increasingly clarified as not one of governance indifference or lack of understanding, but of complicity through inaction. It is studied and purposed, the complement of the frenetic inaction of his predecessor. The only difference is that the Otta farmer fabricated a lot of deceitful motions – what I have termed frenetic inaction - to provide a cover for ensuring the status quo, while his successor cannot be bothered with such pointless exertion. His preference is the posture of a somnolent spider that has learnt to outwait and outwit noisome flies.”

No serious minded person thought Yar’Adua to be any better than Obasanjo, but it is worth mentioning that the PDP campaign, it was promised that the present administration would continue with the process of implementing the Niger Delta Development Plan (NDDP), a plan which took seven years to put together by his predecessor. It goes without saying that if the government meant well, the natural place to start would have been the implementation of the NDDP. Considerable achievement would have been made since 2007, if the energy which the government spent in setting up the TCND and a ministry was directed at the implementation of the NDDP.  That this did not happen, confirms what we reported in our August – September edition that the plan was part of a last minute magic to garner support for the PDP’s presidential candidate.

As the Niger Delta people cried out to the government to adopt pragmatic method approach capable of addressing their needs, Yar’Adua’s JTF launched an operation "Cordon and Search" on the Niger-Delta and from then men of the JTF and militant groups fought full fleshed war-like-battles on several occasions. The militants’ attack on some personnel of the troop on May 15 2009 is one of several attacks that followed the JTF’s invasion, rape and massacre in Gbaramatu kingdom two days earlier. Recalling the issue in an open letter to the president Chief Government Ekepemupolo wrote thus: “on assumption of office on 29th May, 2007, MEND and the peoples of the Niger Delta greeted you with a unilateral ceasefire and opened a wide window for a peaceful resolution of the regional crisis. On 29th June 2007, your Vice President Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan visited regional agitators in Camp 5 with a message of peace and process was agreed. There from, I have spoken with lowly and highly placed in your government including yourself emphasizing on the cardinal demands of our people. No armed confrontation of skirmishes had occurred between agitators and the Joint Task Force until 13 May 2009 amidst the traditional festival of the people of Gbaranmatu.”

The JTF breached the peace process which resulted in the May 15 retaliation by militant forces which was presented as the reason for excessive and widespread retaliation that has seen the Niger Delta being brought to the brink of civil war. Both the JTF and militants took the liberty to attack and/or counter attack each others’ camps, and in many cases, the JTF would vent their anger on innocent communities in the guise of searching for militants. Needless to say that there had been huge losses to the Nigeria, the task force itself, the militants, oil companies, and oil producing states, especially Bayelsa, Rivers and Delta states. A Nigerian newspaper says: “at the last count oil production had dropped to 1.38 million barrels per day (bpd) against the 2.2 million bpd that the 2009 budget had predicated, meaning that about 24 million barrels or more may have been lost since the crisis started which amounts to a substantial loss to the country.”

Yet, with the pace of events in the Delta, the nation will suffer more losses as the Warri-Escravos crude oil pipeline – which took the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) years to construct was bombed, and it is not the first time this important pipeline had been touched by militants. While NNPC, the Nigerian government enterprise that run all its oil interests was still mourning over the costly destruction, the Nigeria Gas Company (NGC) pipeline at Abiteye in Delta State was also touched. And as petroleum experts were still busy calculating the damages, five major trunk lines belonging to Chevron Nigeria Limited (CNL) were blown up by militants.

Despite the loss of lives, weapons by both militants and the JTF, the heaviest loss were suffered by innocent men, women and children of Okerenkoko, Oporoza, Kurutie, Kunukunuma and other Gbaramatu communities. Innocent villagers were killed and their houses were burnt, by the JTF which carried out aerial raids on their communities. No fewer than 3,000 persons were displaced from their homes at the various Ijaw communities eventually find their way to the Displaced Persons Camp at Ogbe-Ijoh, while another up to 20, 000 persons correspondently got trapped in the mangrove jungles. At the refugee camp, mothers and their children starved, as the food brought by under-funded government relief agencies and some donor agencies were not enough to feed the thousands. The appalling conditions and treatment at the place caused most of them to opt to go back and die by the bullet of soldiers that had invaded their communities.

On realization that it could neither overpower the militia groups operating outside its own racket nor able to tame PDP-thugs turned militants, the Yar’Adua government decided to establish a Presidential Panel on Amnesty and Disarmament of Militants in the country’s Niger Delta. The Government’s unveiled the amnesty programme on June 25, 2009, and it ran from August 6th and terminates on October 4th 2009. According to government statements, the amnesty or blanket pardon by the president aims to disarm, educate and rehabilitate militants and others described as “criminals” in the Niger Delta area. But as at the last deadline of the amnesty only three of the tens of dozens of militant groups had handed weapons that could not be ascertained if those were all.

The Panel charged with the responsibility to usher the amnesty programme met in Port Harcourt, the capital city of Rivers State. In attendance were those it deemed as stakeholders – an ostensible and wide reference, which means traditional rulers and local politicians that could speak to the militants. But the government amnesty programme was trailed by litany of arguments in its favour and some against it, in Bayelsa State, one of the major operation enclaves of militants, many respondents hailed the initiative just as others criticized it, while the Rivers State chapter of the Action Congress (AC), one Nigeria’s main opposition party, says the issue of amnesty should not have arisen in the first place since the country is not at war.

The militants are equally divided over accurate meaning and implementation of Yar’Adua’s amnesty, for instance, Alhaji Mujaheed Asari Dokubo, leader of the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPV), says the amnesty by President Yar'Adua to militants is an offer that should be given to convicted criminals. Dokubo, who made this assertion at the premises of the Federal High Court in Abuja, where he went for filing court processes to expunge his name from the alleged list of militants, offered an unconditional amnesty.  In seminar vein, Ebikabowei Victor Ben, better known as General Boyloaf, a prominent militant based in Bayelsa State, has expressed doubts about the seriousness of the Federal Government in carrying through the implementation of the amnesty.

The amnesty plan is a departure from the advice of the report in December 2008 by the TCND. On this matter, the TCND recommendations were of the view that amnesty was just one item in a much larger Disarmament, Decommissioning and Reintegration (DDR) process that begins with confidence building measures on all sides including a ceasefire and the removal of forces; an open trial and bail of Mr. Henry Okah; the leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), Okah was arrested in Angola allegedly for arms procurement and shipment into Nigeria to beef up the weaponry and arsenal of his group. The TCND also recommended the setting up of a DDR Commission; and a negotiated undertaking with militant groups to stop hostage taking and attacks on oil installations. Another striking opinion of the TCND which was not taken into account is “the elimination of all forms of abuse by security forces and the institution of proper programmes of reorientation, demilitarization, retraining and accountability.”

In the absence of such precursor mechanisms, several militant groups including General Boyloaf that initially accepted the presidential pardon later rescind their decisions. Boyloaf and his men re-considered their stand stating that an amnesty is for criminals and they do not consider themselves criminals. According to Boyloaf, “militants are fighting for a fairer share of the country’s oil wealth that comes from the Niger Delta area”, saying that while the region has one of the world's largest and most productive oil wells, most the area’s inhabitants remain mired in poverty despite five decades of oil extraction by foreign energy firms. Despite the disenchantment by people like Boyloaf and Dokubo, another Stakeholders' Meeting on the Presidential Committee on Implementation for Amnesty and Re-integration, was held in Benin, the Edo State capital. The forum without any wide consultation with the people they are supposedly representing welcomed the presidential amnesty/pardon.

Ledum Mitee of TCND and controversial leader of MOSOP, argues along the same line in a recent statement to Vanguard (one of Nigerian leading newspaper), while he commended the amnesty as a bold step by the government; he was quick to suggest that the amnesty should not be offered as a stand alone step.  He went on to explain that it was obvious that militancy feeds on the sentiments of injustice and under-development of the region and that an offer of amnesty that fails to accompany some attempt to address the issues could be counter- productive. Mitee’s position may be tandem to speculation that some N50 billion would be spent on skills acquisition and empowerment of those that repent from militancy. “I am not sure that absence of skills is the main problem” said Mitee: “I have seen doctors, lawyers and engineers looking for jobs. These are not people without skills. What most young people need here is placements, jobs! That is why TCND recommended a direct youth labour scheme that will employ at least 2,000 youths in community work in each Local government in the region.”

Wole Soyinka in an article entitled ‘Between Amnesty and Amnesia’ wrote: “Let me begin by conveying my full endorsement of the position of these two. The offer of amnesty is worthless if it is not all-inclusive, and embraces those who are currently in state custody and/or on trial.  The attempt in some quarters to confuse issues by refusing to separate the principled militants, such as members of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and its affiliates, from the opportunistic mercenaries and criminals, has always struck me as dishonest and diversionary. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a simple enough process, one that can be undertaken by a miniaturized Truth and Reconciliation version of the South African original, adapted to our own unique set of circumstances – and preferably with a change of emphasis that substitutes ‘Restitution’ for ‘Reconciliation’, keeping the latter on the agenda however as the implicit, ultimate destination.”

Mitee also cautioned that the impression should not be created that it is only those who carry arms who qualify for jobs, skills acquisition or empowerment because that would be rewarding the perpetrators of violence which could lead to a situation where unemployed youths would create camps or become militant in order to get these benefits. Painfully, this has been the situation in the past. During the Obasanjo’s regime, Peter Odili, the former Governor of Rivers State paid militant triple the cost of each weapon returned. In the Yar’Adua’s amnesty, the thousands of villagers, the ecological issues, and the resource control agitation by oil communities and a definite strategy to redress the perennial injustice in missing out of the equation again.