Our beloved Sapele port
By
IT feels good sometimes when you make a statement and the concrete evidence keeps coming to vindicate your position or postulation. I have made the point over and over again that as long as we wallow in the atmosphere of politics in every decision we make in this country, and ignore sound economics, we will remain in the doldrums for a very long time to come.
So, we can continue to engage in conspicuous consumption or ostentatious living taking no cognizance of the fact that a nation must be economically productive in order to conveniently consume comfortably without becoming a debtor country. This is not original. Claude Ake of blessed memory said so, long ago at the First Obafemi Awolowo Dialogue. In his words: "Where is the wealth, which we are forever scheming to appropriate come from? We do not want to know. All we want to know is whether we can muster the power to appropriate it - the more, the better. As long as we are merely eager consumers we can never attain freedom, peace or development".
And has the situation changed? Of course not. Political instability is all over the country from Lagos to Lokoja, Minna to Maiduguri, Kaduna to Kwara, Kano to Kataf, Warri to Wukari, Brother we can go on and on. And as Bernard Chukwuemeka Odogwu in his lucid and educative book states there is 'no place to hide'. Political wahala everywhere as a result of the faulty political structure that is on ground, that you 'wanna laugh to cry'. You may have to read Odogwu's special appendix at the tail end of that book aptly designated - the foundation of disunity. In the early sixties when we were in our teens, Sapele was a very vibrant port.
Indeed, after Lagos, and perhaps Port Harcourt the town that easily came to mind was Sapele. And when we visited Lagos, there was a feeling of great reverence for us. It had to do then with a peculiar aura. A minimum of five ships at any point in time berthed on our River Ethiope. The sailors came to town most especially at Upper cemetery road, where they landed at 'Oxford Landing Hotel' and similar sports looking for the professional daughters of Eve. We became familiar with the human contour of global humanity in the faces of these sailors - English, Chinese, Americans, Soviets, Japanese, Koreans, Malays, Ghanaians etc.
In fact, the government in the seventies had built a modern port to revive these good old days. Unfortunately, the military autocracy in the era of IBB with Ikhomu at the helms of affairs in the navy, woke up one day on the wrong side and annexed this fine port for the navy, as if the invasion of our dear country from God knows where would commence from Sapele. Since then the Okpe people including our distinguished Royal Father, Orhoro I, the Orodje of Okpe have pleaded for the return of Sapele as a commercial port, as it were. No luck! The argument is a very elementary and sound one. Lagos has the navy operating with Tin Can Island and Apapa. Same with Port Harcourt, Calabar and Warri, though these ports are under utilised, for political reasons or other reasons. Certainly, not economic for these were, and still are natural ports exploited to the optimum by our colonial masters, the British.
Quite frankly, now that we have in place a resemblance of democracy or the existence of pockets of political disturbances or upheavals and youthful restiveness "a demonstration of craze" or "dem-all-crazy", those we have "voted" for at the local, state and National Assembly levels should demonstrate the political will backed by the sound economic reasoning to right this wrong against our beloved Sapele. Let us hasten to add that a Sapele 'boy' or 'girl' as it were, was anyone born in Sapele, schooled in the environs with a good command of the Sapele lingua franca, the pidgin English and its rich proverbs which we all still relish to this day.
Now, they are saying that the Sapele kids should study the "WAZOBIA lingua franca" as if these offsprings have enough time in the world to comprehend important and relevant science subjects, the arts and social sciences and two important languages that can fetch them international or global jobs, French and English. In the prophetic words of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh: "You fool some people some of the time but you cannot fool all the people all the time". Or as they say in French, "c'est ne pas la paine - it is not worth the trouble." So whether you were from any of the odd 245 ethnic groups including WAZOBIA, it did not really matter as long as you were born and bred in Sapele. Consequently, there was true brotherhood and sisterhood at that time. Then came military coups, counter coups, a fratricidal civil war which messed up everything. Everybody knows the Lagos ports are basically congested because we concentrated mainly on Apapa and Tin Can Island, precisely Lagos.
Meanwhile, Port Harcourt, Forcados, Koko, Sapele, Warri were politically neglected. A higher school classmate in the Customs long time ago made an observation jokingly about the business acumen of the Aba commercial people. They own and control the goods from the Port Harcourt ports. They bring these goods to Aba. The traders at Port Harcourt come to buy some of these goods from the Aba businessmen and transport them back to Port Harcourt for Port Harcourt end users or consumers. So dry port or no dry port, Aba is already a "port" using the Port Harcourt seaport effectively. Why make it dry, whatever that means? God help Mr. President with sound economic advisers like those that made US President Bill Clinton a great and admired US President from an economic viewpoint, that is unemployment at its lowest ebb and a significant rise in real income as a result of increased concrete productivity.
May 2003