The Niger Delta — A Conquered People?

“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind.”
The above words belong to the late leader of the Pan-Africanism movement Marcus Garvey. My father’s love for reggae and Bob Marley over the years helped imbue them into my minds eye, that up until some years back when I finally learned of it’s originator, I would swear it was Bob Marley who first said it. It is a historical statement, and is important to the rest of this article.
60 years this year, that is how long oil exploration has been ongoing in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. During this period, the rules that have governed all inhabitants of the geographical entity Nigeria has changed and evolved to facilitate a socio-political and economic system similar for all intents and purpose to a crude form of feudalism or should-i-say domestic imperialism. This evolution has not been by mistake by any means. It has been strategic enough and has been executed ruthlessly. It is the evolution of a system built for the sole aim of exploiting crude from the Niger Delta at the detriment of its people, while banking on the successful and continuous functioning of the system on the inability of the Niger Delta people to mobilise and put an end to such inhumane exploitation, due to their small population and minority status comparative to that of the perpetuators of the current system. Systems like these ensure to enact edicts and laws to justify, legalise and entrench itself in the public institutions and minds of the people, especially those who wish to pull down such systems. Especially for the Niger Delta people.
“Legality is the construct of the powerful not of justice.” — King Douye Alfred
60 years is a half a century and 10 years. It is a very long time to not have anything to show for all the mineral resources mined from the Niger Delta and what saddens my heart is that we have been so psychologically overpowered by the decades of brutal exploitation, that even those who should be the most vocal and in staunch opposition against it, have gradually accepted a certain fate and now hypnotically espouse the ideals of the said system purposefully created for their exploitation. The Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Pastor Usani Uguru Usani being one of such persons.
On Thursday 6th September, the Minister of the Niger Delta, Pastor Usani Uguru Usani played host to the Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Nigeria Agip Oil Company, Mr Fiorillo Lorenzo in Abuja. Apparently the meeting went so well that the Tribune can be quoted as saying concerning the Minister: “He said that the present administration of President Muhammadu Buhari was not unaware of the urgent need to check the effects of pollution in the Niger Delta region but was constrained by other pressing demands of the country.”
Their conversation appeared to have touched on the cleanup of the Niger Delta which itself is a term formulated by activists from the region and deftly latched upon by government on the heels of the launch of the Ogoni cleanup. It has served more to confuse and paint a picture reminiscent of Soviet disinformation antics during the cold war. There is no cleanup of the Niger Delta ongoing. Communities in Ibeno where Mobil operates are as polluted as they were decades ago. Same with Bayelsa, Delta, Edo and many other oil producing areas in Rivers and Akwa Ibom States. My village Bomu for one is still polluted down to our groundwater. What cleanup can be “said" to be happening in the Niger Delta is in Ogoni, and even that has continued to be a showcasing of pictures, meetings and consultations and very many false starts. Before I go back to Pastor Usani, let me remind you that this government announced that the Ogoni cleanup would begin in earnest in August this year, three years after it was launched. This is September and nothing has been heard.
That Pastor Usani Uguru Usani himself a Niger Deltan, could say confidently that the reason why the government has not attended to the urgency of the Niger Delta environment which has been devastated in great part by the government and her international oil company co-conspirators was because there were more “pressing demands” of the country is a shame. A shame that weighs heavily on me and should weigh heavily on every Niger Deltan. That your natural resource can be exploited without regard for your survival, your natural ecology destroyed as a resultant effect while benefiting every other Nigerian apart from you should be enough reason for you to be sober and angry. Then for someone to add that there are more “pressing” issues to attend to with the funds gotten from the exploitation of your resources and destruction of your environment, you should be more circumspect. “Am I a slave?” will be a good question to ask yourself or you can start from the top and allow the words of Marcus Garvey simmer.
Nobody will fight for you Niger Deltan. You’re just another black man on a black continent, oppressed by fellow black men. What are you going to do about it?
