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Written by: It is an incontestable fact that the history of the Niger Delta struggle is a history of executive negligence by successive Nigerian governments and failure of multinational oil companies to fulfill their social and corporate responsibility to the region coupled with a vicious corporate connivance of these two giant institutions against the people of the region. A Features Report by Thisday newspaper of Monday, June 15, 2009 on Oloibiri in Bayelsa State, where oil was first struck in the country in 1956 presented a story of negligence, deprivation, failed promises and hopelessness. One of the indigenes, Chief Napoleon Ofuruma, captured the situation thus: “There is no water, light and a lot of things. Ordinarily the place where oil was struck suppose to be glittering …OMPADEC promised, we have not seen anything. NDDC came and promised and there is nothing too. Otuabagi don’t suppose to suffer like this judging by what we have given to this country. We should have not been impoverished to this level.” A recent report by Amnesty International titled “Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty in the Niger Delta” described the Niger Delta situation as “human rights tragedy.” The report, which stirred the anger of the Nigerian government and the oil companies, elaborated the condition further: “The people living in the Niger Delta have to drink, cook with and wash in polluted water. They eat fish contaminated with oil and other toxins – if they are lucky enough to be able to still find fish. The land they farm on is being destroyed. After oil spills, the air they breathe smells of oil, gas and other pollutants. People complain of breathing problems and skin lesions – and yet neither the government nor the oil companies monitor the human impacts of oil pollution.” The above reports present the true story of the Niger Delta region. It’s a story of conscious negligence, calculated marginalization, corporate connivance and willful deprivation. The one theory, among many others that best analyses the Niger Delta imbroglio is Gurr’s Theory of Relative Deprivation. T. R. Gurr, in his book, Why Men Rebel (1970) stated that “the more people are deprived of what they consider their due, against what their compatriots are getting, the more they are likely to rebel.” Gurr’s ‘relative deprivation’ is “a perceived discrepancy between man’s value expectation and his value capabilities.” By ‘value expectation’ Gurr means “the goods and conditions of life to which people believe they are rightly entitled.” In Gurr’s words, ‘value capabilities’ refer to “the goods and conditions of life they think they are capable of attaining or maintaining given the social means available to them.” The import of Gurr’s theory of relative deprivation here is that when the Niger Delta people compare the goods and conditions of life to which they are rightly entitled to the other ethnic groups in Nigeria they see factual indicators of deprivation, which causes a lot of angst among them. For example, when they compare the available infrastructure in the region to those in other parts of the country, especially in the north, they have reasons to be furious. When they compare the number of their people employed in the oil companies, they have reasons to cry “Injustice!” And when they also compare the number of contracts awarded to non-indigenes, they marginalized. Josef Omorotionmwam in a feature article in Thisday newspaper (February 19, 2009) presented these revealing and provoking facts: “It is now 23 years since Rilwanu Lukman was this nation’s Minister of Petroleum Resources … today he is back to the same seat. A new Group Managing Director has just been appointed. As usual, he is from the North. The NNPC has seven Executive Directors. In the life of the organisation, no indigene of the South-South has ever been appointed as an executive Director. The Executive Director, Corporate Services is considered the very nerve centre of the NNPC as he occupies the gateway to the organisation, in-charge of employment, promotion and postings. In four quick successions, the occupants of this position have been invariably from the North. As for the LNG in Bonny, the executive Managing Director has always been an expatriate while the Deputy Managing Directors have been from the North. As for the king of them all, the Petroleum Development Trust Fund (PTDF), the Executive Secretary is always from the North, perhaps as an inalienable right.” The above reports present the gruesome scenario in the Niger Delta, the region that lays the golden egg of Nigerian economy. The current outburst of high rate of criminality in various forms like oil bunkering, destruction of oil facilities and installations, kidnapping, armed robbery, extortion, sexual abuses, molestation and the likes are products of these years of official pretence and deceit. It certainly had not always been so. If the federal Government of Nigeria had attended to the needs of Isaac Adaka Boro, when he rose in 1960s with a violent call for the development of the Delta region; if the government had considered the recommendations of the Willink commission on the minority areas; if the Abacha junta had paired a caring ear to the demands of MOSSOP led by Ken Saro-Wiwa; if the Obasanjo government had listened to the wisdom of the content of the resource control agitations led by Obong Victor Attah; if the systems that set up OMPADEC and NDDC had been committed to the objectives of these bodies; if the recommendations of the numerous committees and commissions that have been set up by successive governments had been given any measurable consideration; and if so many ‘ifs’ had been considered, we would not be talking about the Niger Delta region as a volatile geographical space today. Nigerian government has not impoverished by lack of knowledge of what ought to have been done to salvage the Niger Delta situation over the years. A cursory look at the number of commissions/committees set up between 1958 and 2009 for this purpose buttresses the point. Each of these committees/commissions made recommendations that would have changed the course of events in the region had successive Nigerian government given them the deserved consideration and implementation. Certainly the attitude of pretence and negligence with which the Federal Government had been handling the Niger Delta peoples’ agitations over the years are the sole reasons for the escalation of the conflicts in the region to this hydra-headed level. As The Guardian editorial (Wednesday, July 8, 2009) puts it: “The militants rode on the crest of what began as peaceful agitation for resource control. When the federal authorities turned a deaf ear, militancy became the inevitable option.” At this time in the history of this crisis, the militancy has been commercialized and highly politicized, which make the whole business of resolution a very difficult one to handle. Instead of all the hullabaloo about amnesty as though it is the panacea to the crisis the government should first and foremost device creative ways of building and gaining the trust of the militants and the Niger Delta people, who, over the years, have been made to see the Federal government as deceptive renegades, who have no respect for their promises. One reasons here that the government, the oil companies, the militant groups and other stakeholders in the Niger Delta project should sign a ceasefire agreement of at least two years. During this period no gun-shot is heard, no oil facility is blown up, all members of Joint Military Task Force (JMTF), who have become agents of destruction, molestation, extortion and all kinds of abuses are withdrawn. This period of ceasefire would then be used by the government and the oil companies to implement some of the recommendations of the Niger Delta Technical Committee for the development and reconstruction of the region. A period like this is necessary to build trust and regain confidence. It has to be clearly known and accepted that the rise of youth restiveness, militancy and crisis in the Niger Delta region is not as a result of one single cause but a complicated web of vicious inter-related motives. Therefore the Niger Delta imbroglio can only be effectively addressed when such methods take care of these multifaceted linkages. This is certainly beyond amnesty.
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