By G. G. DARAH

THE phrase “resource control” derived from this manifesto. When the government resorted to crude force to suppress the agitations, the Ijaw groups re-invented the Adaka Boro formula of armed struggle. By the time the elected governments assumed office in 1999, the stakes had been raised to include kidnapping of expatriate oil personnel for ransom and damage of oil facilities.

President Olusegun Obasanjo inherited this insurgency and he compounded the crisis by his ill-omened invasion and destruction of Odi community in Bayelsa State in November 1999. Obasanjo reluctantly set up the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, in 2000 but deliberately underfunded it to a point of impotence.

He had provoked all the oil-producing states from Ondo to Cross River by deliberately reneging on implementing the 13 per cent derivation clause in the constitution he swore to defend. At this point, even the elected governors and legislators of the Niger Delta joined the fray and applied the “Resource Control” mass campaign to compel him to do so in April, 2000.

Late Sani Abacha

The NDDC gesture was too little and too late. The short-lived truce evaporated by 2005 when armed guerrilla groups sprang up in the creeks, among them were those by Alhaji Dokubo-Asari, Ateke Tom, Generals Boyloaf and John Togo, and later the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, MEND. The groups combined the chemistry of advanced ideological orientation and sophisticated weaponry to paralyse the oil industry. Nigeria’s daily oil production nose-dived from about two million to a third of that figure. Consequently, the economy was heading to bankruptcy and social explosion.

This was the dire situation that confronted President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. He took sagacious and audacious measures to halt the country’s descent into the brink of collapse. With the indefatigable support of his Vice-President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, Yar’Adua reached out to Ijaw patriots for intervention. The likes of Chief D.S.P. Alamieyeseigha and Timi Alaibe did a yeoman’s job of mediation and persuasion.

The prime negotiator was Jonathan who braved the mined marine routes and creeks to connect guerrilla commands. These heralds of peace dialogued with the youth in Ijaw language and they appreciated the depth and candour of Yar’Adua’s patriotic intentions. Like the angelic dove that he was, the President signed an armistice with the militia groups and proclaimed the Presidential Amnesty Programme in October, 2009. Weapons were publicly surrendered and oaths of allegiance taken by the militia commands.

The guns went silent in the hitherto rumbling creeks; notable leaders of the Ijaw freedom movement like Government Ekpemupolo (Tompolo) and Kingsley Kuku were incorporated in the Federal peace-building agenda. Over 26,000 former freedom fighters dropped their bayonets for the ploughs of education and professional training.

Professionaltraining

The oil wars were over, at least for now. The Yar’Adua peace plan worked and by 2010, oil production had peaked again at over two million barrels per day. The bumper production has continued unabated ever since and Nigeria is swooning, one again, in the deluge of petrodollars.

Committed to peace like South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, President Yar’Adua took a pro-active step early in 2007 by creating the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs.

As further proof of his statesmanship, the President appointed Chief Ekaete, an Akwa Ibom technocrat and former Secretary to the Government of the Federation as the pioneer minister. He immediately toured the area to hold talks with various stakeholders. The President knew that this was a token gesture with little material substance, yet it sent a pacific signal to the Niger Delta and the international oil market.

I have written elsewhere that the Nigerian Amnesty Programme is the most successful of such initiatives in all post-war settlements in recent history. Just as South Africa’s former President W. F. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1990s, President Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan have earned their place of honour in the pantheon of Africa’s greatest statesmen of peace and nation-building.

It is regrettable and unpardonable that the top echelons of the Northern elite who ought to be polishing Yar’Adua’s credentials for a post-mortem award of a global peace diadem are the same ones desecrating his memory and vilifying his compatriot, Goodluck Jonathan. History will not forgive these short-sighted ingrates.

Short-sighted ingrates

Here are the sinister schemes that shall witness against the anti-Niger Delta plotters. From the first week of the work of the Devolution Committee, it was clear that delegates from the resource-famished states were determined to divert more oil wealth from the Niger Delta to irrigate their ailing economies. In clear disrespect to the memory of Generals Musa Yar’Adua and Sani Abacha, and President Umaru Yar’Adua the jingoists called for the scrapping of the NDDC, the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, and the Amnesty Programme. They demanded more pounds of flesh, namely, that the 13 per cent derivation quota be reduced to five per cent and that the onshore-offshore dichotomy resolved in 2004 be reinstated. At this point, we knew that an adversary who hauls stones at your hat is actually aiming at your skull.

Thus we the federalists countered their specious arguments with more scientific statistics. On the onshore-offshore dichotomy, we drowned their cacophony about the 1982 United Nations Convention of the Sea by citing the actual wording of the legal definition of what constitutes land and its water-logged extension or the sea. Article 76 of the Convention states that “the continental shelf of a coastal State comprises the seabed and subsoil of the submarine areas that extend beyond its territorial area throughout the natural prolongation of its land territory to the outer edge of the continental margin, or to a distance of 200 nautical miles (360 km) from its baselines from which the breadth of the territorial seas is measured where the outer edge of the continental margin does not extend to that distance”.

Professor Itse Sagay’s studies on the matter became handy to the federalist delegates. According to this international scholar of jurisprudence, “…the law of the continental shelf simply follows the physical fact of coastal state adjacency to the sea and continuity of its land mass and resources under water. If land territory is submerged by rain water it does not stop being part of the territory of the relevant state for the duration of the submersion. As the Atlantic Ocean gradually advances into Lagos State coastal areas, particularly in the Victoria Island area, those areas being submerged by the sea do not lose their character and status as part of Lagos State to become part of the Federal Government territory simply because they have become covered by water”.

Here is Sagay’s clincher as the Convention applies to the coastal states and the rest of Nigeria: “within the context of Nigeria, made up of a Federal State (Government) and 36 States, each of these 37 entities has its territorial space over which it has sovereignty and jurisdiction. Some of these territories have coasts and others do not. The States that have coasts are Cross River, Akwa Ibom, Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta, Ondo, Ogun, and Lagos.

Again, within the context of Nigeria, these are the only States with continental shelves and margins. Specifically, and especially, the Federal Government and the remaining 28 states are landlocked. Again, within the domestic maps of Nigeria, the other 28 States and the Federal Government have no continental shelf”.

These legal explanations put to rest the politically corrupted judgement of the Supreme Court of April 2002 that disinherited the coastal states of their inalienable right to the continental shelf and all its riches.

Onshore-offshore dichotomy President Obasanjo who claims to be an internationalist, knew his grave error in the legal rigging of that judgement. That was why he quickly atoned for his political sins by the signing the National Assembly law of 2004 that restored the rights of resource democracy to the eight coastal states.

Otherwise distinguished anti-Niger Delta delegates in our Committee ignored these glaring facts and asked for the return to the regime of illegality of the onshore-offshore dichotomy. Their gambit failed. But we know that were not done yet as they are desperate to appropriate waterlogged wealth of the Atlantic coast. We are waiting for them.

The federalists responded with more counter measures. The conservative Northern establishment wants to possess the oil wealth of the coastal states. But they have no right to it. The inheritors of the Northern militariat want President Jonathan out of office by fair or foul means. The 19 landlocked states in the North contribute close to nothing to the Federation Account.

The figures for four years (2009-2012) from the Federation Account Allocation Committee show that the South-South Zone contributed an average of 68 per cent, the South-West 23 per cent, the South-East 8.5 per cent while the North-Central, North-East, and North-West zones accounted for zero per cent.

Yet not minding their impecunious situation, the Jonathan Administration has done more for the Northern States than it has done for the Southern or even the Niger Delta of his nativity.

HERE are examples of Jonathan’s pro-North programmes: •several multi-lane highways and boulevards completed in three years in all Northern States; the East-West federal highway in the Niger Delta started eight years ago is yet to be completed, •the first-ever Nigerian standard gauge railway from Abuja to Kaduna,

•10 Federal Universities opened in 2012 in the Northern States, including areas where secondary school attendance is dwindling due to violent conflicts and insurgency,

• over a dozen water dams and irrigation projects being constructed in the North only; there is no comparative one in all of the South as if people there do not need potable water and irrigation for agriculture,

• not less than N195 billion spent by the Petroleum Equalisation Fund in four years (2009-2012) to ensure that fuel sold at the same official price on the coastal areas as on the fringes of the Sahara Desert, • billions of Naira committed to the over 1,000 km-long Green Wall tree-planting project to check desert encroachment.

This money-guzzling afforestation effort has yielded minimal results and the beneficiary State governments cannot account for the funds they have received. No Northern pressure group or mass media has demanded accountability from their less than prudent governors handling these huge funds. But the persecutors of Niger Delta people torment us with charges that monies meant for the region’s development are misapplied by our governors.

• an average of N100 billion budget per year for the Office of the National Security Adviser whose engagement is nearly entirely in the Northern sections of the country, • periodic “dash” of cash to so-called victims of Boko Haram and other violent conflicts. Contrast this generous carrot with the failure of the same Federal Government to pay the compensation for the 1999 military destruction of Odi community in Bayelsa State as directed by a Federal High Court in Port Harcourt.

No less incomprehensible is the scandalous fact that the Federal Government owes arrears of about N600 billion of its statutory subvention to NDDC. The Federal Government contributes only 15 per cent of the NDDC funds; the rest are subscribed by the nine NDDC states (50 per cent of their Ecological Fund) and three per cent of the annual budget of the oil companies operating there.

The much-trumpeted funds devoted to the training and rehabilitation of the 26,000 ex-militants are no more than four weeks of oil revenue. If the Northern hegemons truly want a similar post-conflict scheme for their Boko Haram insurgents, they have to first fulfil two conditions: (a) identify the insurgents and make them surrender their weapons in public (b) source the money from the revenue from the insurgency-infested states to fund the programme. Niger Delta oil money and taxes from Lagos shall not be diverted for the purpose.

The antagonists of the Niger Delta people want all the federal intervention agencies in the region scrapped so that more oil money will be available for their states to share. None of them thinks of fairness and equity by similarly advocating the termination of all the numerous federal intervention agencies and programmes located in the economically dependent North. Some of the elite involved in this tendentious propaganda are products of the best universities and administrative institutions in the world, including Ibadan, Ahmadu Bello, Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Oxford, and London. As the saying goes, in politics, there are only interests, never justice and equity.

Owing to the selfish pressure of the non-revenue-contributing States in the Confab, the delegates are being persuaded to create a five per cent stimulus fund for mineral exploration.

This is aimed to open up the vast vaults of mineral deposits in all parts of the country, particularly the Middle Belt States of Plateau, Nasarawa, Kaduna, Niger, and Benue. In spite of this historic concession to the cash-strapped states of the country, some die-hard opponents of the oil-producing states are obstinately resisting the proposal to raise derivation from 13 per cent to about 20 per cent, calculating from the 20 years since the 13 per cent was introduced in 1995.

Despite these fraternal handshakes across the Niger and Benue Rivers, their delegates are deaf to the request by Lagos State for 50 per cent of its consumer tax revenue seized by the omnipotent federal government to spoon-feed states that do not even know how to tax consumption. The revenue-contributing states of the South have made more than enough sacrifice to accommodate the less financially viable states.

We now demand that the beneficiaries of these pro-federal gestures should cultivate our understanding and show appreciation; on the contrary, some of them are exhibiting imperial arrogance, ignorant of the fact that what the conference fails to achieve amicably will be settled in other theatres of self-determination and freedom struggles. But we nurse the faint hope that the spirit of nationalism and consensus will overwhelm that of parochial hatred and colonial impunity.

If the Confab plenary is able to resolve the derivation debacle fairly and equitably this week, then the entire enterprise would have merited the energy and time invested in it. When this happens, the souls of the late General Sani Abacha, General Musa Yar’Adua and President Umaru Yar’Adua might regain the right to rest in more perfect peace.

Thenceforth, those dancing on their graves now, in and out of the conference, may soon find themselves alone on a deserted arena! We are rest assured that history will absolve us.

G. G. DARAH, Professor of Oral Literature and Folklore, Delta State University, Abraka, is a Delegate to the National Conference