TO tackle the menace of militancy in the Niger Delta, the new administration of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua may engage the services of foreign conflict resolution experts, particularly from the United States (U.S.).
According to sources, Yar’Adua has specifically instructed Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to be in change of the efforts to engage international conflict resolution experts across the world. They are to develop conflict resolution ideas and strategies to resolve the restiveness in the oil rich region. Jonathan was said to have started the job.
The Guardian learnt that in the first week of May, the then President-elect Yar’Adua sent Jonathan to Boston in the U.S. to start discussion with some conflict resolution experts at the Consensus Building Institute.
Speaking on Tuesday at his inauguration, President Yar’Adua noted that “the crisis in the Niger Delta commands our urgent attention. Ending it is a matter of strategic importance to our country. I will use every resource available to me, with your help, to address this crisis in a spirit of fairness, justice and cooperation.”
The Niger Delta crisis has since attained a militant dimension and drawn consistent international attention in the western media, thereby raising the stakes dramatically, and, according to sources, compelling the new President and his deputy to seek ideas from international sources on the best way forward.
It was learnt that Yar’Adua and Jonathan are both keen on a peaceful and lasting resolution of the Niger Delta crisis. When Jonathan visited Boston, he spent days in Boston at the Institute and at Harvard University, participating in brainstorming sessions on new strategies that the new administration can use.
The Consensus Building Institute (CBI), which organised the sessions for Vice President Jonathan is a not-for-profit organisation “created by leading practitioners and theory builders in the fields of negotiation and dispute resolution and the institute works with leaders, advocates, experts, and communities to promote effective negotiations, build consensus, and resolve conflicts.”
A CBI source explained that the institute “improves the way that leaders use negotiations to make organisational decision, achieve agreements, and manage multi-party conflicts and planning efforts.”
Also, CBI uses proven principles, processes and techniques that improve group decision-making on complex public and organisational issues. The institute has been involved in consensus building on a variety of issues from the economic to environmental, both of which are at play in the Niger Delta crisis.
The strategies that the Yar’Adua administration may adopt on the Niger Delta crisis according to a CBI source, “have been developed through the Programme on Negotiation and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Programme at Harvard Law School, where a number of CBI staff and board members are affiliated.”
CBI’s Managing Director, David Fairman, confirmed that the Vice President visited the institute a few weeks ago after the election, but declined to go into the specific details of their meetings.
According to Fairman, also a United Nations-recognised expert on conflict resolution, “we were asked to do a little work with the Vice President as he was preparing to take office.”
Another official of the CBI who pleaded for anonymity said “lots of our work is confidential because we do mediation. We met with the Vice President and his delegation to talk about the Niger Delta crisis, which is a complex conflict.”
He said Jonathan and his delegation came here in the first week of May to study and to explain, and exploring new kind of dialogue to resolve the conflict.
CBI was founded by Lawrence Susskind, a world-class professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Urban Studies and Planning. MIT is one of America’s top ivy universities.
CBI’s directors, Fairman and Patrick Field, are experts in consensus building and negotiation theory and practices and the staff are senior professionals who provide training, facilitation, mediation, assessment and research services to clients on local, national, and international negotiations and collaborations. CBI also works with well-known senior partners and consultants who further expand its areas of expertise and capability.