The skanky notes slushing out of the common patrimony of the oil-producing areas have done incalculable damage to the memories of the heroes/martyrs of the famed Niger Delta struggle.
If the dead could indeed peep into the affairs of men, Major Isaac Adaka Boro, Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni eight compatriots as well as the ‘Ogoni Four’ whose blood watered the crucible of freedom would today be turning uneasily in their graves.
If the dead could decipher the present, they would shake their heads in sadness at the putrid stench induced by sleaze oozing out of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), a body which evolved from years of struggle to liberate the Niger Delta people from socio-economic oppression, exemplified by environmental degradation, infrastructural decay, ecological depredation and the paradox of grinding poverty in the midst of plenty.
Marginalisation was the lexical catch that defined the struggle and it evinced sympathy for the Niger Delta people home and abroad.
Born in the oil rich town of Oloibiri on September 10, 1938, Isaac Boro, a pioneer of the minority rights activism, shot into national and international reckoning in 1966 with the ’12-day revolution,’ which he had engineered.
He was an undergraduate student of Chemistry and the student union president at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
But he abandoned school to lead an armed protest against the exploitation of oil and gas resources in the Niger Delta areas.
He formed the Niger Delta Volunteer Force, an armed militia, which declared the ‘Niger Delta Republic’ on February 23, 1966 to liberate the area from the Eastern Region’s hegemony.
The group fought the federal forces for 12 days before they were defeated. Boro and his comrades-at-arms were jailed for treason.
But the Gen. Yakubu Gowon regime granted Boro state pardon on the eve of the outbreak of the civil war in 1967.
He then enlisted in the Nigerian Army and was commissioned a Major. He was, however, killed in mysterious circumstances on May 9, 1968 during the war at Ogu near Okrika, Rivers State.
Boro remains a folk hero to his people and an inspiration in the Niger Delta struggle.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, diminutive in stature but a giant in intellectual process, later took up the environmental campaign but adopted a non-violent approach.
Wiwa, a writer, television producer and a minority rights environmental activist, was born in Bori near Port Harcourt on October 10, 1941.
His Ogoni homeland had been a target of crude oil extraction since 1950s and had suffered extreme environmental damage from decades of indiscriminate petroleum waste dump.
The beautiful Ogoni landscape, he had bemoaned, was turned into a wasteland and the waters were polluted by large seeps of oil.
He led a non-violent campaign against the operators of the multi-national petroleum industry, especially the Royal Dutch Shell Company, over their hurtful activities and the federal authorities for their alleged reluctance to enforce environmental regulations in the area.
His activism was, however, brought to a sudden tragic halt in 1995 when he was arrested by the Abacha regime and tried by a special military tribunal for allegedly masterminding the gruesome murder of four Ogoni chiefs – Edward Kobani, Alfred Badey, Samuel Orage and Theophilus Orage. Saro-Wiwa and his eight other Ogoni activists were executed on November 10, 1995.
Those executed along with him were: Saturday Dobee, Nordu Eawa, Daniel Gbooko, Paul Levera, Felix Nuate, Baribo Bera, Barinem Kiokel and John Kpuine.
Niger Delta youths much later relived the Boro era when they took abode in the creeks and began an armed struggle to call attention to the plight of the region.
This brought them into bloody confrontations with federal forces in a fratricidal battle launched to enforce peace. Resource control agitation also took the centre stage at political/constitutional conferences between 1994 and 2005.
Niger Delta representatives at those conferences made a big show of their famed ‘Resource Control’ caps and dresses.
There was a major filling to the struggle in year 2000 when the Olusegun Obasanjo administration established the NDDC with the sole mandate of developing the oil rich Niger Delta region.
The commission, which replaced the existing Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC), was established “with the mission of facilitating the rapid, even and sustainable development of the Niger Delta into a region that is economically prosperous, socially stable, ecologically regenerative and politically peaceful.”
Sadly, however, there is a big drawback to the fruit of the labour of the heroes of the struggle. From all indications, the NDDC has deviated from its noble mission and has become a cesspit of corruption.
Today, the commission has become a sizzling pot for corralling a share of the proverbial ‘national cake’. The ‘octopus’ that should feed the goose that lays the golden egg is today being held down and mercilessly pillaged.
What came out of the Senate investigation into the spendings of the commission between 2019 and 2020 was simply mind-boggling.
The upper chamber had on May 5 raised a seven-member ad hoc committee, chaired by Senator Olubunmi Adetunmbi (APC, Ekiti North), to investigate the alleged “financial recklessness” against NDDC’s Interim Management Committee (IMC).
The move by the Senate came against the background of the allegation that the commission had spent N40billion “without recourse to established process of funds disbursement, which has opened up further suspicion among stakeholders of the Niger Delta region.”
Unable to match the trillions of naira that the Federal Government had released to the NDDC and the actual work done, President Muhammadu Buhari had in October last year ordered a forensic audit of the commission.
The Prof. Keme Pondei-led IMC, which replaced Nunieh’s, is also now embroiled in a web of alleged fraud, leading to the Senate investigation. The House of Representatives has also raised a similar committee, which is still sitting.
The Senate report uncovered a regime of sleaze perpetrated under all kinds of guises. According to the committee chairman, Adetunmbi, the NDDC paid all kinds of questionable allowances to its staff between 2019 and 2020.
It was a bazaar of a sort. Some of the expenditures were actually ludicrous. For example, about N4.9billion was spent solely on medicals within the period.
A stupendous amount was also paid to staff as “overseas travelling allowance” at a time there was worldwide lockdown and international flights were put in abeyance owing to the COVID-19 pandemic!
Also, as admitted by Pondei himself, the staff helped themselves to a sum of N1.5billion as COVID-19 ‘relief fund!’
The Senate thus directed that all the spendings that were in breach of procurement process and approvals be refunded to the commission’s account with immediate effect.
Such unjustifiable spendings included N4.9billion paid to the staff as medical/allowance; N85.7million for overseas travels to UK; N105.5million for scholarship grants; N164.2million for union members’ trip to Italy; N1.9billion for Lassa fever kits; N1.1 billion for ‘public communication’ and N1.5billion paid as COVID-19 relief fund!
This is the sordid state into which a body established to squarely address the systematic rot that had been the lot of a critical region producing the common wealth has slid.
While I hope that the Senate recommendations will be implemented to the letter, let Niger Delta critical stakeholders rally to save their patrimony from being milked to death.
This they can do, among other options, by partnering with the government to put forward a regime of credible experts who will run NDDC efficiently and return it to its founding mission and mandate. (The Nation)
