BY GABRIEL ENOGHOLASE
BENIN—THE Ijaw of Edo State have said that their demand for the creation of Toru-Ibe State from Edo and Delta states was to save them from the oppression they suffered in the hand of the Bini people, which they said was more than what the Israelites suffered while in bondage in Egypt.

They also reacted to comments by the Bini monarch, Oba Erediauwa and some Itsekiri chiefs at a recent meeting in Benin,  that not an inch of their land would be ceded for the proposed Toru-Ibe State.

They described the claim by the Bini that all Ijaw riverine communities in the state belonged to them as, “a bundle of lies and deliberate falsehood carefully crafted to bamboozle, misinform, miseducate and mislead governments of Nigeria, especially members of the National Assembly who must be very wary.”

Addressing newsmen in Benin, yesterday, spokesman for the Ijaw in Edo State, Prof. Christopher Dime, insisted that the Ijaw will never cede an inch of their land to any ethnic nationality in the country.

He added that the Ijaw had been the aborigines and the customary owners of all land covered by the proposed Toru-Ibe State.

He said, “despite their posturing, blind guessing and  recent attempts at historical revisionism, it is clear that the Benins do not know, and indeed cannot know when the Ijaws came into the Ijaw lands of present Edo State because the Ijaws were on the land long before the Benins migrated from Yorubaland.

“That the Ijaws were among the oldest ethnic nationality in Nigeria and indeed in West African sub-region is not doubt. That they are indigenous to the Niger Delta and its fringes to the West, East and North is equally no news. There is a pool of incontrovertible scholarly evidence and documentations in support of these claims.

“Among them are Chief Jacob Egharebva of blessed memory, the best known and celebrated Benin historian with Benin Royal blood, who in his “A Short History of Benin”, said, ‘many, many years ago, the Benins came all the way from Egypt to found a more secure shelter in this part of the world after a s short stay in the Sudan and Ife tradition says that they met some people who were in the land before their arrival.”

Prof. Dime claimed that the people Chief Egharevba, referred to were the Ijaw aborigines, adding that the ferry man also referred to in the book that Prince Oranmiyan, the father of Oba Eweka 1 and his courtiers encountered with much trouble at Ovia River, was an Ijaw man.