INTERVIEW: “They Want To Take Our Water” – Ijaw President Accuses

Mohammed Oluwatimileyin Taoheed reports,

In this interview, Professor Benjamin Ogelle Okaba, the President of Ijaw National Congress (INC) and the Dean, School of Post Graduate Studies, Federal University Otuoke (FUO), Bayelsa State speaks on contemporary issues.

Read the Excerpts here:

Ahead of the 2023 general elections, all the political parties have concluded their primaries and elected their standard bearers. How would you assess the entire process?

First and foremost, I think the pattern of transition with respect to internal democracy in the various political parties tends to have some departure from the past where there was lot of imposition. So, what now held sway, a common denominator among the political parties was the power of money; so, from imposition of candidates, the evil that we have to now deal with is vote-buying.

It is very unfortunate that, after decades of democratic transition, there are people who get votes because of the amount of money they were able to give particularly in a country where we are calling for change. Rather than select people who have credibility, content and capacity to deliver and usher in the needed change, politicians, particularly delegates, still allowed themselves to be swayed by pecuniary means.

So, at the end of the day, what we saw from the primaries, both at the state to the federal level, is that those who had large pockets had their way. So, what do you expect at the end of the day, maybe going to the elections, is the fear that the same persons must have amassed a lot of money particularly where you discovered that almost all the candidates are persons who had something to do with government.

The presidential candidates, none of the big four developed independently. They were at one point or the other at the helm of affairs of the various political systems and administrations as governors or whatever; they were not business people, they were not industrialists. So, it goes to say that the fastest way to make enormous wealth is politics. And if they have amassed this kind of wealth, it is to also encourage systemic corruption moving forward.

Yes, the old order has brought up significantly Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu from the two parties and there seems to be a third force which is Peter Obi. We just believe that the rhetoric will be translated into action but one good thing that has already been thrown up is that the people are now enthusiastic.

here is high level of crave to participate, the people are going for their Permanent Voter Card, PVC, and this is very important against the background of the body language of INEC that has shown that they are ready to come up with very credible elections, that the peoples votes will be the deciding factor and the injection of the new electronic transmission of election results will also help.

I think the demonstration we had in Ekiti and also Anambra is that the popular candidate won amid the issue of vote-buying. We also believe that at the end of the day, money politics might be there but people will still come out to say this is what we need to transform this nation.

Are you comfortable that despite the agitation for power shift to the South, not all the political parties complied?

Political parties are organisations whose primary targets are to win elections, governance is secondary. So, political parties will always want to come up with the strategy to win elections, we have to be very fair to them. Now, the clamour for power shift from the North to South ordinarily shouldn’t be an issue in the country, we should be talking about competence regardless of where the person is coming from.

But the Nigeria situation is peculiar in the sense that some individuals, over the years, have arrogated to themselves the ownership of this nation such that they feel that it is their birth right to perpetuate themselves in power whether they are competent or not, leveraging on the fact that they have entrenched themselves in the commanding heights in the economy, military, politics, policies and security agencies.

They have also taken advantage of the fact that other sections of the country believe that they don’t need to be in those positions to earn a living and that what they need is the enabling environment for them to strive. And number two, that they are also gullible in the sense that at, every point in time, they go cap in hand begging for peanuts, it could be in form of political privileges and all that.

That is where it becomes worrisome to continue to allow a section of this country to hold on to power. It becomes immoral that in a country where we have over two hundred ethnic nationalities and we have broad divisions, it is not healthy that a section to rule particularly counting on what has befallen this country in the last couple of years where we see infiltration of all kinds of criminalities, things that we have never heard of before.

Today, life is almost meaningless with the death rate, nowhere is safe, we have never had it this bad even in terms of institutional decadence. Look at inflation, look at our currency, look at the level of insecurity. And again look at the issue of secession, non-inclusiveness, marginalization, cries of frustration; look at the policies most times against the people from the minorities.

Talk about the Petroleum Industry Act, PIA, where people who produce the oil and suffered deprivation but at the end of the day a pittance of 3% is what is earmarked for their development while over 30% is set aside for frontiers where nobody knows whether it will come up with any result.

Water Resources Bill

It is very obvious, look at the reintroduction of the Water Resources Bill, that is catastrophic. If you look at the bill in its entirety, it is an affront on the existence of the people of the Niger Delta because if you go by the dictates of that bill, for the Ijaw, for instance, where we are totally aquatic if you take off the required five kilometers, you take off every area.

All Ijaw communities are riverine settlements, so that means every part of us will just be under the control of the Bill declaring with the kinds of intentions they have in giving these resources to foreign entities to manage and so we now become slaves. And those are things that are agitating the minds of the people to say that look, we cannot be this.

You have taken our oil and now you want to take our waters, no it’s not possible, what are you leaving for us? So, for that reason, let there be a paradigm shift, if the PDP, looking at the psychology of Nigerians who vote along ethnic lines, is that returning to power is by bringing somebody who belongs to the same domineering group so that they can come back to power, and what is more important to them is power, that is the justification for what they have done. A

PC has given it to a southerner but the question is whether he has the capacity. Is he not part of the old order that has brought us to where we are now? What is the difference between the APC presidential candidate and the incumbent President and if the APC candidate now comes out to say that he is there to continue with the policies of the present administration, the legacies of the present administration, what legacies are we talking about?

Is it the legacy of poverty, hardship, frustration, legacies of insecurity, impunity, monumental corruption? What is that legacy that he intends to push? That is the big question. So, Nigerians are actually in a dilemma and, at this point, we can only say “God please help us” but we also have a responsibility by looking straight into our faces and say “let us get it right this time around”.

Recommendation

Since I am not a politician but a leader of an ethnic nationality with my members who are staunch members of all the political parties, I will not recommend anybody, I will say irrespective of our political leanings, let us vote right so that we can have things right in this country. Sentiments this time around will not help us; where you belong, who is your political leader, your party is not important. Let us rally behind somebody, we may not have the money to spend, but let us rally round somebody who can turn things around, anyone of them, whether he has money or not, let us rally round somebody we believe can turn things around for this nation. Nigeria is blessed but we have decided to visits hardship on ourselves by our own decisions to go by those things that will satisfy us momentarily and entrenched us into perpetual slaves. If Nigerians say let us defy gratification, let us suffer a bit, let us sacrifice that little money that will come. Nigerians need to be told that poverty does not know religion, hardship does not know where you come from, so we must help ourselves by doing the right thing this time.

The leader of the PANDEF in Delta State Prof G.G. Darah recently declared that Niger Deltans are determined to secede to form Atlantic Republic. Do you share this thought? Was he speaking the minds of the ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta?

Prof Darah is a chieftain of Pan Niger Delta Forum, PANDEF, and a very highly respected scholar, a journalist of high repute and a very concerned citizen of the Niger Delta and I have so much respect for his views. But in terms of whether I concur with his declaration, I think that is a different ball game.

Significantly, Prof Darah’s speech is borne out of the sentiments we all experience and expressed at different fora. Yes, we must secede because the situation in this country is hopeless; we must secede because, on a daily basis, our existence in this country is threatened politically, socially, threatened by criminals, bandits.

For us, threatened by the fact that our oil and gas resources that sustain this country is the reason for the unity of this country is benefitting people outside the region. You allocate 90 percent of the marginal oil blocs to people who are not affected, we’ve gone to court, we have a court ruling but government still went ahead to allocate because they think we don’t matter. You are pushing us as a people, so these frustrations are everywhere.

Yes, the issue of the declaration of the Republic of the Niger Delta, Darah is not the first person, Adaka Boro of blessed memory, the hero of Ijaw struggle for self-determination, has done that as far back as the early 1960s. I think Darah is only re-echoing and giving it a different coloration by mentioning Atlantic Republic.

But we have said, as Ijaw people, that we are going to pursue self-determination using peaceful legal means to ensure that we get what is due to us in this country but if that fails, we are not going to be part of Oduduwa Republic or Biafra or any other, particularly Biafra, we don’t want to pass through what we went through during the era of regionalisation, we don’t want to go from one level of slavery to another.

As a people we have all these at the back of our minds. So, the question of Atlantic Republic, if at the end of the day the entire ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta agree, why not? We now form what is a configuration of independent ethnic groups converging to have some leadership on top but with some level of autonomy given to the various units, so that is being canvassed.

So, Darah is not speaking for all of us per se because he hasn’t been given that mandate to do so. The Ijaw have not decided to join the Atlantic Republic but we share the sentiments because the issues being canvassed are the issues that are common to us and they concern us even more than where he (Darah) comes from but the structures and the dynamics are not as he has spoken, we have not gotten to that point yet because we believe that we have to go systemically. We have to look at our past, we have to retrospect and introspect; we have to take so many things into consideration so that our transition is smooth, legal and legitimate.

What is the relationship between PANDEF and INC and other ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta?

The Ijaw National Congress, INC, is the apex socio-cultural organisation of the Ijaw people across the states and overseas, PANDEF is a selection of leaders from the various ethnic groups in the Niger Delta. Some Ijaw leaders are part of PANDEF. There is also another body called the Conference of President Generals of the Niger Delta Ethnic Nationalities.

The difference between the Conference of President Generals of the Niger Delta Ethnic Nationalities and PANDEF is that while PANDEF is made up of leaders who threw up themselves, got interested, got selected and came together, the president generals were elected by their individual ethnic groups. INC elected me, we have the Urohbo Progressives Union, UPU, which elected their President, the Isoko Progressives Union, IPU, the Itsekiri Leaders of Thought, elected their Presidents, Ndokwa people elected their President, the Presidents from these groups form the Conference of Presidents Generals of the Niger Delta Ethnic Nationalities.

Now the big difference is that the Presidents General were elected and are the spokespersons of their ethnic nationalities, like I’m the spokesperson for Ijaw nation. So, that is the difference but all the same we are not working at cross purposes because the problems of the Niger Delta are multifarious; so we actually need so many organisations of the same capacity for us to deal with them from various aspects, so we complement one another, we are not fighting one another but it is important that we know this difference.

Like the INC is not an affiliate of PANDEF, we are an independent organisation but we respect the leadership of PANDEF, they are elders, they are Ijaw people, we respect them and we work together. So, where the issues are common to all, we come together to address them either from the perspectives of PANDEF or from the point of view of the Presidents General of the Niger Delta Ethnic Nationalities. We are complementing one another and we need even more of these organisations to tackle the hydra-headed debacle that we face as a people.