SINCE he was nominated by President Umar Yar’ Adua as the chairman of the impending Niger Delta summit, major stakeholders in Nigeria’s oil-rich zone have rejected him.
The most prominent militant outfit, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) announced it was not going to participate in the summit. It even rejected the Federal Government’s offer of amnesty to its members who are willing to drop their armed rebellion.
Those who do not understand the deeper meaning of the Niger Delta crisis will be surprised that an international diplomat and scholar of Professor Ibrahim Gambari’s standing would be considered a misfit by his own countrymen to preside over a summit in which white collar diplomatic skills will be called to play.
As an Under Secretary General, Gambari is currently the highest ranking Nigerian in the United Nations system.
Before he joined the United Nations service in 1999, he was for a long time Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the UN and in fact, presided over its Security Council in 1994 and 1995.
He has served as a member of the UN Security Council missions to South Africa, Burundi, Rwanda and Mozambique.
Gambari has gathered enough experience in the theory and practice of negotiation and conciliation of conflicts to be of immense benefit in the effort to bring the Niger Delta crisis to a peaceful end.
However, the opposition from the Niger Delta has less to do with who Gambari is than what he is. Beyond his heavy academic and diplomatic medallions, the militants are seeing a cultural product, who is more likely to approach his assignment a “true son of his father” than as an impartial arbiter.
He is seen as a representative of the opposite side of the drawn battle line. Gambari is a Fulani; a prince of the Ilorin Emirate, the fourth in rank out of the seven most senior emirates of the Sokoto Sultanate. In other words, as far as the militants and their sympathisers in the Niger Delta are concerned, he represents the North.
They have made it clear that the chairman of this summit must not be a person from any of the majority ethnic groups of Nigeria. In fact, they have voiced their preference for a foreigner, who is more likely than most Nigerians to approach this job with the open mind of an impartial umpire.
The Niger Delta militants have their historical reasons for not wanting the majorities to lead the summit. At the heart of their demands are political and economic “emancipation”, the letters of which are contained in the Ogoni Bill of Rights and the Kaiama Declaration of the Ijaw nationality.
It was re-packaged and presented before Nigerians at the Obasanjo Conference of 2005, which was supposed to culminate in a constitution amendment. In their own wisdom, the Niger Delta groups believe that the majorities have never really taken their needs into account because they don’t understand where the shoe pinches them.
Their first struggle was for freedom from political control of the Igbo ethnic majority. An Igbo person, especially a South easterner, would still be considered unfit to lead the summit just like Gambari.
The simple reason is that though a lot of Igbo territory lies within the Niger Delta zone and produce oil and gas (with a lot kept as strategic reserve) Igbo territory lies in the upland.
The Igbo don’t live in the creeks and marshes. Even though the delegates of the South East at the Obasanjo Conference endorsed the demands of the Niger Delta delegates, it did not remove from the historic fact that the Southern Minorities have demonstrated time and again that they want to maintain their own autonomy, as they are the only ones that can address the challenges facing them.
THE Obasanjo presidency did not do much to increase the faith of the Niger Delta groups in the ability of the Yoruba to look out for them.
Even though majority of the Yoruba social and political activists support the Niger Delta struggle, it is on record that at the Obasanjo Conference, the delegates of the South West did not support the Niger Delta agenda, which Chief Edwin Clark was mandated to present before Nigerians.
Niger Deltans also remember that Dr. Bola Ajibola is to the law profession what Gambari is to the diplomatic area in terms of international clout and visibility, and yet Ajibola and Chief Richard Akinjide (SAN) were unable to prevent the Bakassi Peninsula of the Niger Delta from being awarded to the Republic of Cameroun by the International Court of Justice.
In the case of the North, there is a contradiction of sorts when their political relationship with the Niger Delta is considered. There is a much touted “traditional alliance” that exists between the two sides. This alliance arose as early as the 1960’s when, against the run of play, Dr. Melford Okilo, a founding father of Ijaw nationalism, won elections with a local ally of the Northern People’s Congress in his area.
Also, when the two military coups of 1966 took place and Colonel Yakubu Gowon was seeking ways of consolidating as the new military Head of State, Chief Harold Dappa Biriye, a pioneer Ijaw activist, reportedly rushed to him a memo that led to the creation of the twelve states, which effectively “freed” the Rivers and Cross River States from the old Eastern Region and core Igboland. It also created a political playing turf for the Ijaw.
This was mainly responsible for the decision by the minorities to join the federal side in the war that temporarily took the Igbo out of political contention.
That traditional alliance made the Ijaw very influential in Rivers State and at the federal level, where they produced top level ministers. It also helped the Southern Minorities to produce for the first time in 1979 the President of the Senate in the person of Dr. Joseph Wayas.
However, it did not result in the physical development of the Niger Delta. Port Harcourt and Warri, the foremost cities of the oil-rich zone, are little more than glorified shanty towns.
The Niger Delta hinterland was completely neglected even though it was the scene of extensive oil and gas exploitation and has provided over ninety per cent of the revenue of this country for over four decades. In spite of the “traditional alliance” Niger Delta young elite, as from late 1980’s started realising that few, if any of their own people, were major stakeholders in the oil business.
All the big concessions and oil blocks belonged to Northerners and South Westerners.
All the oil companies exploiting in the Niger Delta had their headquarters in Lagos, which had taken the lion’s share of heavy federal investment, which resulted in its status as Nigeria’s economic capital.
Within a space of two decades, a virgin federal capital city, Abuja, emerged as one of the most beautiful cities in Africa.
In the last twenty years or so when the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) arose under the late Ken Saro-Wiwa to seek “autonomy” (having realised that the “traditional alliance” did not really have the interests of the minorities at heart), they found that their complaints fell on deaf ears.
The oil companies and the Federal Government would try to bribe some influential local chiefs, but when that did not contain the rising agitations, the federal government sent punitive expeditions, first to Ogoniland in Rivers and later to Odi in Bayelsa States. Nine Ogoni leaders, including Saro-Wiwa, were hanged.
THE gulf between the Niger Delta militants and the Federal Government remains very wide. Gambari’s appointment reminds Niger Deltans of Justice Ibrahim Auta who headed the Judicial Commission of Enquiry that recommended the hanging of Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaders.
The Nigerian state has become so dependent on the oil and gas resources of the Niger Delta that there is simply no way it will accede to the full resource control demands of the militants.
It would seem to me that Yar’ Adua’s agenda for solving the Niger Delta crisis has failed even before it is put into play. It is unlikely to break the stalemate.