Suddenly sentiments are riotous in the Niger Delta: deploy the military and don’t deploy the military; declare a republic and don’t you dare deploy the military; we are the authentic mediator and you are not the authentic mediator. Since the Niger Delta Avengers and a handful other militants groups emerged to ‘make the country ungovernable’ for President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, the region seems to be in more confusion.

It has not always been like this.   The Niger Delta was once part of Nigeria without the appellation of this current moniker.

The present agitation is anchored on the failure of past governments to develop the area from the humongous oil resources that have been exploited from our land for decades now even with the attendant degradation that has led to the stage that for some communities that fishing and farming are no longer possible.

However, while we have every right to agitate for greater control of our natural resources, we must, for a start, seek understanding of how we got to where we are and on the strength of that better articulate where we want to go. The agitations, as currently shaped, whether it is for resource control, greater regional autonomy, fiscal federalism or most of all the sick notion of breaking up Nigeria, are all solutions that will turn out to be worse than the problem if the processes are not deliberate. We could find ourselves being worse off than South Sudan whose people suddenly came to the painful realisation that they were their own worst enemies as opposed to being victims of the old Sudan before an ill-advised partitioning.

As an indication, those of us currently lamenting the neglect of our areas by the government and oil multinationals often omit the fact that there were monies allocated from these two stakeholders for several decades and that a   key problem was the self-declared contemporary chiefs who abused their influence as the interface for their people to demand that developmental projects be monetized so that they can share the proceeds with equally dubious collaborators in government or the companies not minding that what came to them were mere fractions of the funds that would have developed their communities.   When youths started becoming restive, these same leaders were the ones that went into negotiations on behalf of the communities only to further mortgage the future of the region.

The militant agitation that gave rise to the Amnesty Programme under the late President Umaru Yar’Adua marked a sharp bend from which we can only pray to be able to make a return. While the chiefs and other self styled leaders were able to make some cut for themselves from that negotiation, the militants came away as the largest bounty winners from what, to me, has turned out to be the greatest misadventure yet of the Niger Delta.

This unholy arrangement is what has created the situation where the rich-poor divided yawns widest in the South-South with two of the states being the epicentre of that chasm. It is a normal sight to have a ‘general’s’ mansion overlooking the most depressing slum the mind can conceive or the fact that so destitute are the poor that they can no longer even form the thought train to question why the chiefs, militant generals or their people in government can have all the fancy boats and send their children abroad when they can barely feed once a day.

The region’s ruling class will not do anything to improve on the quality of life for the larger populace since it was never their intention and they definitely would not want the poor to be emancipated to the point where they will begin demanding accountability. Our South Sudan will come upon us when after getting out of Nigeria they begin to turn the component ethnic nationals of the Niger Delta against each other so that they can keep the population busy fighting needless battles.

Let us say enough is enough and give peace a chance to flourish while we attract the needed development to our region without becoming slaves to a new master class.

Ken King  an environmentalist, is resident in Asaba, Delta State.