By Ekanpou Enewaridideke

Continued from yesterday

PEACEBUILDING, peacemaking, and peacekeeping as the sine qua non  for rapid development of the Niger-Delta is the refreshing, invigorating and vivifying intellectual ozone offered in the book, Government, Security and Peace-building in the Niger Delta: Essays in Honour of Kingsley Burutu Otuaro authored by Mathias, Jarikre, Nsikanabasi U. Wilson and Abiodun J. Oluwadare – a book whose birth is a tribute to the peace-building capacity and efforts of the Deputy governor, Kingsley Burutu Otuaro. This is a work intellectually designed to awaken people to the desideratum of peace in the Niger-Delta – to awaken readers to the methodologies needed to be adopted for peace sustainability for the birth of sustainable development. Oweilaemi’s insidious policy of displacement has remorselessly destroyed this temple of peace intellectually built, thus bringing this generation backward by many kilometres.

Okowa-Otuaro

The promissory threat to frustrate Okowa-Otuaro’s campaigns is an open letter to chaos and violence which the book seeks to eliminate in the Niger-Delta. It is like NDA threatening and giving us the practical counterpart of their threats. Where Otuaro points to the mechanisms of sustainable peace realisation, Oweilaemi points to the opposite; where development is desired, Oweilaemi contextually represents backwardness in his policy of displacement targeted at Okowa-Otuaro. No policies of displacement and categorical pronouncement directed at Governor Okowa as regards 2019 when the Deputy Governor is an Ijaw man could be more dangerous than Oweilaemi’s orphaned two policies of ME-MEISM and no YOU-YOUISM in the Niger-Delta.

By whatever standard or method of data collection, collation, accumulation and analysis, Oweilaemi’s policies of displacement and categorical pronouncement sound rash and ill-conceived because they do not intelligently strike any intersection point with the realities available. The policies are too overly suffused with suffocating spirogyra to chart a navigable course for the people. Even when the fondly nicknamed political Egbesu of Africa, the political Akpabia of Africa, Senator J.E. Manager, whose sacred words are carriers of political invincibility for power-seekers, whose words create rivers, bridges and roads connecting the people for transformation, when the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Delta Ijaw Political Assembly, Barrister Kingsley Burutu Otuaro, the Chairman of DIPA, Mr. J.T. Government, by the sheer avoirdupois of the development indices in the Ijaw areas, have consensually ENCORED the orchestrally counterpointed musical composition of Okowa-Otuaro and be allowed to be wafted to every homestead of Ijaw people because the song carries the probability of masterful progressive reinforcement, masterful reworking of its rhythm, refrain and melody in the years ahead for the preclusion of the accumulation and growth of filamentous green algae in the river of politics, why should one still be bothered by the venomous dance of  Oweilaemi?

After all these efforts followed by public communication of their consensual stand ‘DIPAD’ (fully supported by Delta Ijaw Political Assembly), the highly cerebral Oweilaemi, the latter-day critic, the latter-day activist, the latter-day Isaac Boro of Ijaw, says the Delta Ijaws contextually deserve some strokes of the cane for that supportive verbal recklessness borne out of chronic limited vision and improvidence comparatively UNOKAIC like Chinua Achebe’s Umuofia. So Oweilaemi turns the first man to trample vaingloriously on the collective resolve of DIPA in 2019 without giving us a better alternative to Okowa-Otuaro ticket even in his proverbial far-sightedness and remote sensing acquired long before the birth of the DIPA elders?

The remote sensing supposedly used by Oweilaemi in the analysis and assessment of development projects which apparently underpins his policies of displacement and categorical pronouncement, is unknown in the business of project-evaluation and performance-assessment of office holders because such business thrives on visible evidence and visible data systematically collated and analysed. Therefore, remote sensing becomes another terminology wrongly infused into Oweilaemi’s two policies of displacement and categorical pronouncement viciously alloyed.

Most questionable is his claim of developmental nothingness against Okowa because nothing can give rise to something, because nothing can give rise to DIPA’S support for Okowa-Otuaro, because nothing can give rise to Senator Manager’s support for Okowa-Otuaro if there is absolutely nothing on the ground. This categorical affirmation of a claimed developmental nothingness against Okowa is the agonising part because truth is being vindictively interred here to score non-existent points.

The ideas of Oweilaemi built into his maliciously alloyed two policies form a barricade to societal progression. This is why the policies should be exposed and murdered before they proliferate beyond annihilation or emasculation. Doing this counter-work constitutes the only potent inoculation against being influenced and afflicted by his pernicious policies individually pursued. By this positive stand, I am clearly built and nourished by Lee Kuan Yew who says: ‘But wrong ideas have to be challenged before they influence public opinion and make for problems. Those who try to be clever at the expense of the government should not complain if my replies are as sharp as their criticisms’ (From Third World to First, 131).

The office of IYC  should be deployed broadly in any areas that would benefit the entire Ijaw nationality as an independent creation willingly let free upon genuine agitation, questioning national policies that would compromise the growth of this generation and the next generation of Ijaw people, not infatuation with non-existing development issues in Delta State. An IYC President, no matter the imagined agony and anger bottled, should verbally guard against categorical pronouncements bound to incubate violence and endanger society because all the wars or conflicts in the world were created by reckless categorical pronouncements like Oweilaemi’s. Oweilaemi should feel obliged to abandon his two policies and draw inspiration from Yew’s Singapore so that his often communicated vision would be one that would approximate to the Singaporean model that drives on pragmatic deployment of knowledge, diligence, sustainable peacebuilding strategies, cultural awareness, laying the groundwork for the happiness of the next generation through the culture of saving and prioritisation of education.

If Oweilaemi could be guided by this groundwork, away from his two policies punctured here, he would not blunder again because this would mark a visionary approximation to the Singaporean standard, even if fantastically, as these words daily reawaken in him dead faculties, widely beneficial vibrations  and contextually sensitise his rebellious conscience: ‘Why did Singapore develop and not the others, what was missing in the others? I  could only tell you what I thought were three primary reasons: first stability and cohesion in society; second, a cultural drive to achieve and a thrifty, hardworking people always investing in the  future, with high savings for a rainy day for the next generation; third, a great reverence for education and knowledge’ (From Third World to First, 426).

The cause of Ijaw is not pretentiously championed by a media falsehood, media scarecrow, systematically  created by Oweilaemi who claims Okowa has done nothing for Ijaw people in Delta state in terms of development. Let Oweilaemi organize workshops for talent-hunt and capacity-development. If talents are discovered and developed in different ways, people would be equipped to face the challenges of today and tomorrow. The talents of Ijaw youths cannot be discovered and developed when the IYC president who should lead the Vanguard for talent-development is the manufacturer of a conspiracy to frustrate the campaigns of Okowa-Otuaro; talents cannot be developed when there is a lurking danger teleguided and sponsored by Mr. Oweilaemi in the name of uncrowned floundering IYCSHIP unfortunately blessed with two different heads in one indivisible body –  undeniably Oyintebeic like the proverbial two-headed snake in Ogbobabou forest.

Oweilaemi is not bothered by the today and future of the Delta Ijaws – part of which future is encapsulated in Okowa-Otuaro ticket. Talents that should be discovered and developed are now gathered and brainwashed by Oweilaemi to form a conspiracy to frustrate the developmental moves of Okowa-Otuaro in 2019. Gathering people to frustrate Okowa-Otuaro’s campaigns in 2019 is a demonstration of abuse of talents that should be developed to move society forward. This contextually throws Oweilaemi up as a hater of the Ijaws in Delta because his supposedly principled stand is contrary to the wise words of Lee Kuan Yew who affirms the power, potential and potency of talent-development in the transformation of a society: ‘When all this happened in 1949, I did not understand the importance of talent, especially entrepreneurial talent, and that trained talent is the yeast that transforms a society and make it rise’ (554).

The man Oweilaemi is a highly respected lawyer who occasionally sounds too complex and indecipherable in his verbal notation recognizably legalese in identity. The whole thing could now therefore mean a rare case of misunderstanding. Oweilaemi must have been grievously misunderstood by the public when he says Okowa has done nothing for Ijaw people; perhaps, he actually meant to say that Okowa has executed a commendable number of projects in the Ijaws areas of Delta state to merit re-election. His legalese, his arcane phraseology, must have caused this horrible misunderstanding. Now that it has been dialectically conceded that Barrister Oweilaemi was misunderstood and cast as a child who has perfected a conspiracy to dismantle the structurally rigged campaign ship, mistaking Okowa-Otuaro for a floundering, rudderless, non-performing ship already torpedoed by people who should be the custodian of the Okowa-Otuaro ship, let us gracefully render apology to him for a public communication misunderstood and therefore erroneously interpreted. Similarly, Barrister Pereotubo Oweilaemi should henceforth strive to be understood whenever he is on the podium, using only unambiguous language that clearly communicates the fact of the demise of his two policies of displacement and categorical pronouncement because they are the reasons why he has just been terrifyingly misunderstood.

Interestingly, now that Barrister Pereotubo Roland Oweilaemi has been unambiguously confirmed grievously MISUNDERSTOOD, Okowa and Otuaro have been equally unambiguously understood by him and the public. Therefore, this reincarnated Oweilaemi, this repackaged Oweilaemi, this rebooted Oweilaemi, this re-aligned Oweilaemi, this rebuilt Oweilaemi, this painstakingly coupled Oweilaemi brotherly bathed with the right anointing oil of truth, now radiating a new effulgence beyond conquest, marks the remarkable coda to my triumphant journey here – knowing fully well that, by this redemptive reversal, Oweilaemi has comparatively become Arkady Babchenko about whom Owei Lakemfa wrote skillfully in the Vanguard of 8 June 2018 entitled ‘Living with  fake people’, that veteran  journalist of Russian roots but resident in kiev, capital of Ukraine, who deceitfully feigned being assassinated in Ukraine on 29 May 2018 in order to provoke corresponding global outrage against Russia and jeopardise the Russian HOSTSHIP of the 2018 World Cup just like our own Oweilaemi whose target is to provoke public outrage against Okowa-Otuaro over imaginary non-performance claims and undeservedly deny them of re-election in 2019.

Mr. Enewaridideke, a public affairs commentator, wrote from Akparemogbene, Delta State.