Our struggle for the creation of Delta State

By Charles Kumolu  & Ogechi Ohaegbulam
Lawyer and civil rightsactivist, Mr. Fred Agbeyegbe, was Secretary of the Movement for the Creation of Delta State. Barrister Agbeyegbe in this interview reflects on the expectations that preceded the creation of the State in 1991 and how he received the configuration of the State. Excerpts:

Is the Delta state created by the Babangida administration that of your dream?

To a large extent, yes.

In what sense?

In the sense that when the proposal was put forward, it was put forward by the indigenes of what was then the Delta Province, as it was known, which did not include Agbor and Asaba.  Asaba and Agbor had always been administered from Benin; they were part of Benin province. Delta was Delta province and had 5 ethnic groups: Itsekiris, Ijaws, Isokos, Urhobos, and the Ukwanis.  Now, perhaps because of the agitations within the group, Babangida found an opportunity, so we believe, to slot in his in-law’s territory, Asaba. And because of the rather strategic position of Agbor, he lumped them in together as one largely because, if he didn’t do that, that’s my belief, Agbor would then have been a pseudo-Ibo enclave which would have remained in the Benin Kingdom.

Fred Agbeyegbe

You were in the movement. How did you receive the news of the shape of the new State?

Well, I remembered that on the day it was declared, we were at a lawyers’ conference in Owerri and when the announcements began, all my lawyer friends came and said, ‘Fred, Fred, Fred, where are you? It’s coming!’ and I came and sat down. The expectations were very high. And after the announcements, (saying) not only that it included Asaba but that the headquarters was going to be in Asaba, everything failed.

There was this silence in the room as if someone had died. And do you believe I did not finish that conference with my fellow lawyers because a few hours after, this was very late at night, Sunny Odogwu and the present Asagba of Asaba sent a car to come and bring me from Owerri? I spent a week after that in Sunny Odogwu’s house in Asaba because they were expecting so much trouble. They thought the Urhobos would go haywire. They thought people would not accept the creation of the state and I was called upon to come and do some fire-brigade work. Then, we had a meeting during the period I was in Asaba cooling tempers. So, to an extent, it was that disappointing.

So, 20 years after, how would you assess Delta State?

Well, looking back now, even wondering if this was what it was all about, there were a few other rather personal things too that I recall. For example, my Itsekiri people did not want Delta state. So, I went against the claim, as it were, in championing the cause but I believed in it, like I still do today. The irony now is that an Itsekiri man is Governor now.

I knew that my fellow Itsekiris would have had my neck at the time. If we were in a society that went back far into the glorious days of Itsekiri hegemony, I would have lost my head, I assure you.

To think that that thing has been going for 20 years and there were people who struggled to bring about Delta State and they have not one occasion remembered those people from Michael Ibru, EK Clark, Fred Agbeyegbe and many others. It is a shame, a very big shame. One would have expected that on an occasion like this that they would have at least listed those names and said these were the founding fathers of this state.