By Ochereome Nnanna

I ONCE watched an interesting documentary on National Geographic Wild channel, which brought home to me the elders’ saying: “No matter how well you treat a wild animal it will still have its eyes on the bush”.

Conservationists had stumbled upon a leopard cub which lost its mother to a pride of lions. It was only a few weeks old when they took it back to a neat little private zoo.

They provided it with formula milk and fresh meat and gave it all the veterinary care it required. Years later it had grown into a young female adolescent able to fend for herself.

The conservationists decided to return it to the wild but they were afraid that the high level of attachment it had developed with its human saviours might make it reluctant to accept its home in the wild.

But how wrong they were! As soon as she was released from the cage, she stunned me – and her “benefactors” – with the speed and alacrity with which she fled into the bush and up a nearby tree! The elders were right, after all!

When the deadline granted by the late President Umaru Yar’Adua to the militants of the Niger Delta to surrender the their weapons and embrace the amnesty programme drew nigh, groups trooped out of their mangrove hiding places and handed in their weapons, even though many doubted whether these were all the militants and weapons there were.

Few months after, the wheel of fortune turned in favour of the Niger Delta, politically speaking, as former Vice President Goodluck Jonathan was sworn into office when Yar’ Adua eventually died. For the first time in the history of Nigeria, someone from the Southern Minorities was President, Commander-in-Chief.

By this turn of fate, one of the agitations of the Niger Delta – the emergence of a Nigerian of South-South extraction as President of Nigeria – had been achieved.

The political status of the region had suddenly changed from that of an area faced with imminent all-out war with the Nigerian state, with all the humanitarian disasters that would have entailed, to that of a people now calling the shots.

The leaders of the ex-militants won a privileged position on the king’s banquet table, as they have now become major power brokers in the affairs of the region. A people who, some 27 years ago, gave two of their damsels away to an ageing President Shehu Shagari in worshipful appreciation of his visit to Rivers State, are now the ones both Northerners and Southerners are trooping to for favours.

Surely, this moment of dizzying political arrival is not one in which the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) would resume hostilities in the creeks.

Surely, the Niger Delta now has an unparalleled opportunity, through their son the President and their other sons and daughters who are occupying the most prized federal posts to address the problems of the region if indeed neglect was the prime trigger to the armed rebellion.

Surely, this is the moment for all sensible Ijaw and Niger Delta people to close ranks and show Nigeria and the world the sound leadership that the North and West in their domination of Nigeria’s politics since independence, were unable to display.

Surely, this is the time to prove that indeed, Jonathan’s presidency is the greatest guarantee of peace and stability in the zone from which the resources for the sustenance of the nation are derived.

Those who are masquerading as “MEND” and resuming hostilities in the creeks either do not know the strategic interests of the people of the Niger Delta or their rebellion has nothing to do with those.

If the interests of the zone were paramount, they should be in the forefront of the campaign for peace and stability not just for Jonathan to serve out his longest possible period in the presidency but also for developmental efforts to resume.

One is, therefore, led to conclude that those who have chosen to go back to the creeks at this juncture are nothing but the pirate elements who need to create an atmosphere of conflict in order to resume their outlaw activities of oil thievery, illegal gun running and warlord lifestyles. Perhaps, life outside the creeks and under the laws of the land had taken away the thrill of freedom to do as they wish within their camps and enclaves.

Perhaps, rather than being fighters for justice, some of these chaps are nothing more than the type of freelance rebel outfits that exist in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the drug mafias in Southern America. These are the “MEND” with tarnished halos.

The attitude of the world around does not view the activities of the renascent “MEND” with the same level of credibility and empathy that the pre-amnesty groups enjoyed. Even the Ijaw evangelists who used to jump to television stations to justify the activities of the old MEND no longer have the voice to exonerate today’s “MEND”.

Nobody should be surprised that the Federal Government under President Jonathan is pressing ahead full steam to stamp out the rebels without pulling a punch. It is in Jonathan’s personal interest to do so.

He has to demonstrate that he has what it takes to defend this nation and her interests from internal and external threat, even if it is coming from his father’s doormat.

Otherwise, he will compromise his own skin and position as President.
It took an Olusegun Obasanjo to bring down Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) in the South West.

No Hausa or Igbo man could have achieved the same thing and gotten away with it. It will take an Ijaw man to quench the rebellion in the creeks. Good enough, Jonathan seems equal to the task.