THE NIGER DELTA STRUGGLE AND THE "WEAPON OF NAKEDNESS"

By

Mike Ikhariale

Many people who are watching the sordid and endless carnage going on in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories do not seem to readily grasp the profound psychological rationale for the extreme condition in which a person would gleefully wrap himself up with deadly explosives and detonate them just to inflict some grievous harm on his otherwise invincible enemy, knowing fully well that he would be the very first casualty in the blast, a phenomenon now generally referred to as "suicide bombing".

Ordinarily, no sane person, just for the vengeful satisfaction of hurting his enemy, would resort to taking his own life. It tends to defy commonsense and everyday rationality; but the bitter truth starring the world in the face today is that, for every Palestinian youth growing up in the horrors of the intifada, the option of suicide bombing is a better one than living under the looming prospects of perpetual hopelessness in a land that used to be theirs. In one word, suicide bombing is the ultimate expression of ultimate frustration: hopelessness! I am afraid that a culture like that is already evolving in the Niger Delta and nobody seems to have effectively noticed the development.

To some people, why on earth would incidents like those gory cases of oil pipe explosions that have taken more human lives in the petrol producing Delta areas of the country than in the entire anti-Taliban bombing raids by the US in Afghanistan happen? In many respects, it is ‘suicidal’ for anyone to pick a container and go to the very inflammable oil pipe lines crisscrossing their backyards just to scoop some cup of petrol with the dimmed hope of exchanging same for food, an enterprise for which thousands have so far lost their lives. But for those jobless kids of the Niger Delta, the whole thing ‘na for survival’ – the desperation to live which is ironically driving them to commit mass suicide! That is the dilemma confronting social scientists who are ever interested in understanding recurring and bizarre human tragedies such as suicide-bombing and other kamikaze endeavors and it raises the fundamental question of what really is rationality? Why do certain things happen?

Unless we are deceiving ourselves, the events that occurred in the Delta area last week in which the women of these communities took up the gauntlet for the resource control struggle and headed for the flow stations, is a very, very serious development of emergency proportions. But I do not know how accurately our leaders are reading these critical handwritings on the wall. Simply, these are dangerous times!

The story is that, tired of waiting for justice; tired that none of the promises of the reparation of the Niger Delta enormous problems are never going to be fulfilled; frustrated that OMPADEC, constitutional democracy and judicial reviews, NDDC and other administrative palliatives have never reached them beneficially; now faced with the reality that there may be no humane political responses to their elongated plight; these women, the Amazons of the waters of the Delta, decided to abandon their husbands, children and homes and headed instead for the nearest oil terminal to their villages and did the unthinkable – seized the facilities and held hundreds of workmen hostages. Needless to say that during the siege, no oil flowed and the encounter was not one of men-to-women love encounters but that of combatants in battle.

As if that was not enough, these frustrated mothers in the resources control struggles were reported to have threaten to or indeed resorted to stripping naked before their bewildered male POWs, a process which one of their spokesperson, Ms. Edworitse, explained to be their "weapon of nakedness". And as the BBC African Service puts it, a fact which any true African must already know much well beyond the pornography of the act, "the display of nudity by wives, mothers, grandmothers as a damning protest and an act to shame all those it is aimed at". As they say in ‘Wafa’ (Warri), see me, see trouble o!

Any serious security analyst should have known that with the last Supreme Court decision that operates to deny the people of these riverine areas ownership of the oil deposits that are found off-shore their backyards, that the provocation of the Nigerian state against these long-suffering people would have gone a bit too far. It must either be crazy or naive or both, for any one to expect that things would just go away quietly. Offshore or onshore sophistry has no meaning to these people who were born and raised inside the waters of the Niger Delta and, in deed, would ultimately die inside the same water someday. All they know is that it is all theirs and no law, no Supreme Court judgment or a written constitution can take it away from them. That appears to be the rationale for all the drama.

I know that many people who have nothing to do with the Niger Delta have been running their mouths roughly over the matter, apparently blaming the victimized people of the Niger Delta as Oliver Twists. But we tend to conveniently forget that the peoples of these areas were already there before Lord Lugard came to these parts of the world; they were already there before Nigeria was born. With oil exploration, their lives have deteriorated badly while some have been unduly enriched by the same oil wealth. So, it is completely erroneous to want to rationalize the injustice of the revenue allocation and resources control processes in Nigeria by pointing to totally oppressive laws and policies that were crafted by the same people who wanted to use the Nigerian system to perpetually exploit the minorities of the Niger Delta.

On this matter, the Federal Government must act fast and fairly too. What would make women, in a land full of taboos, to take to the trenches in a way calculated to shame their men into action is too serious to be papered over. For all intents and purposes, these events point to the fact that they have crossed the Rubicon. I have been privileged to read and listened to several of the pros and cons on the debates over resources control and the solutions proposed therein. Certainly, one of the best and by far the most intellectually consistent set of solutions suggested till date are those ably developed by Prof. Itse Sagay, SAN, a scholar from whose pen exudes inestimable logical outpourings. I don’t know President Obasanjo’s personal position on this matter. But I want to suggest that he sets aside his official or political veils and consults with this scholar and many others who are prepared to tell him the truth about the reality and enormity of the danger posed to the Commonwealth by a faulty response to the challenge of resource control.

The potentials for suicide bombing and something worse are there for all who are not biased to see. There is no use hoping to draft troops to communities that are already fed-up with the hope of intimidating them and like most occupying military the world over have come to know, there is no military solution to a resistance motivated by frustration. Every piece of oppression has its limits and when women gets into the battlefield, there is nothing left for the menfolk. It is then a matter of honor. The world was shocked at the Palestinian phenomenon when young ladies who should be gossiping about their boyfriends and thinking ahead about their careers are joyfully enlisting as suicide bombers. The incident of last week in which Chevron and Texaco facilities were seized by women who wielded no guns, not even brooms, could halt oil production and draw the attention of the world media to the plight of their husbands, their children and their families should be a clarion call to those in charge that the time for dilly-dally over resources control is over.

I am glad that a spokesperson of Chevron Texaco, Dick Filgate, solemnly admitted that "we now have a different philosophy, and that is to do more with these communities". The bottom line is that social and moral responsibilities by these oil firms to their host communities would help but only a little. The real lasting solution at the end of the day is for the Nigerian State to accept the imperatives of a just and equitable resources control arrangement. Merely tinkering with the laws and the constitutions without a fundamental response to the issues of true federalism and a realistic derivation mechanism is only creating recruitment grounds for potential suicide bombers or ‘mammy-water raids’ as the case could be.

Let us not allow things to progress beyond the current "weapon of nakedness" level to that in which no one can safely predict the outcome, as the omen are all there. I fear that the current dismissive attitude of those who do not see the moral and, indeed, the political justification, for the resource control debates to want to wish it away. I am assured in the fact President Obasanjo himself, a one-time war hero, would easily see the conflictual dangers ahead, no matter how disguised, much less, as funny as this recent one maybe. These women are crying for attention and the President should then go beyond the limits of officialdom and do whatever that is right in the amelioration of the problems of the Niger Delta. Surely, he did not start the problems but it is now his historical opportunity to begin to fix them. And I need not tell him that his enemies would rather wish he does nothing about it so that they can again point to that as evidence of his failure and insensitivity.

I think the time has come for a very decisive presidential intervention because the duty to preserve the integrity of Nigeria is primarily in that office, the number ‘one citizen’, and not that of those who presently see the doctrine of separation of powers as veritable avenue to self-aggrandizement but with no regard for the core of the issue at stake, i.e., the harmony of the nation and the peoples therein in an atmosphere of unity, peace, respect and love for one another. I don’t want to see our mothers to again go out to fight for the justice of resource control with their nudity.

August 2002