By Dr. Ugoji Egbujo

She has rolled over many times. But they never come to their fill. They have taken her milk and her peace. She is desolate and inconsolable. But they are implacably ravenous. Many shades of hyenas. The latest, the avengers. A beautiful bride isn’t heart broken because her beauty would be consumed. She wants love and care , some requital. Niger Delta. The goose that has laid the golden eggs since Oloibri. Adaka Boro was prescient, fairness is not a given. The civil war left her frightened, and she went for safety.

Like Saudi Arabia in the arms of America , her immediate neighbours were her nightmare. So she rolled over , and they , whom she trusted, plugged in. They shared and occupied all her teats. And left her bruised by their inconsiderate teeth and implacable greed.

The military was a national agency with a northern soul. Until 1999, military rulers owned the country. Their pretense to law and order and correction could not resist the lure of the bosoms of the delta. They shared the blocks and fields amongst themselves and amongst their friends. Scavengers. Yes, the treasure lies in the midst of misery and anguish. The forefathers of this Canaan were happy with local brews and with crumbs. And with name-dropping. Until Saro-Wiwa was struck by his epiphany. Colonialism is better by Europeans.

Their exploitation may be loaded with derision but their cruelty is moderated by their claims to civility. They would have known that roads and hospitals are not luxuries. Saro-Wiwa was a threat to the tapeworms that had fastened to the lumens of the Delta. The military junta, masters of divide and rule, sowed dissension amongst brothers. And killed Saro-Wiwa. But Saro-Wiwa had lit a flame death cannot quench.

Oil may have dispossessed them of their women. Many answered the call of prostitution. The conspiracy between abject poverty and the debauchery of oil workers intoxicated by petrodollars proved too much. But oil shouldn’t deny them rights to health care, good education and peaceable living. Oil that has fattened strangers cannot be a curse. It has turned rivers to sludges and stolen their livelihoods. Without arable lands, without education and now , without peace. Multinationals mouthed human rights and conservation of nature. But they funded crackdowns and ignored calamitous spills. They let Saro-Wiwa die.

Abject poverty inevitably breeds frustration. And breeds raw anger if the poverty is inflicted by dispossession. The oil that built cities on water in Dubai has been hopelessly impotent in the Niger delta. And those who should know, self-professed arbiters of morality, chose the easy course of unscrupulousness. They will settle local chiefs and noisy youths , buy their peace. Servility can be subtle. But the greed and selfishness they endorsed predictably became uncontrollable.

And after spending billions on the community relations , attending to the private fancies trouble makers and lackeys, the multinationals could point to nothing concrete their Machiavellianism achieved. The elders, accomplices, contributed active collusion and cowardice . They left jarring injustice. The youths imbibed indolence and greed and bellicosity. Before long they acquired effrontery and grew wings.

But instead of starting the cleansing from within, from local collaborators who pocketed monies meant for the region , they went after white oil workers. It was ineffectual. Because in truth the foreign companies are not the government though they have a leash on it. So the youths that found righteous anger managed to let local officials continue their incest. Leeching worsened and greater resource control yielded nothing. Local officials grew gravid with putrid money. Hopelessness helped the youths find moral justification for illegal oil bunkering. “Na our oyel”. Work ethic was repudiated, spoils of public office and illegal oil bunkering were the paths to success.

With guns everywhere and peace no where, the region was a furnace. Amnesty came in time. The whites had left, and kinsmen had turned on their kith. War lords had sprouted everywhere and every village had a General. Boys had stopped going to school because they were told they were all oil sheikhs. Every boy enlisted in one real or imagined gang and was duly recognized as a strongman entitled to some nursing.

The tendency to cheap violence was valorized. The amnesty programme was to buy peace. Militants pocketed millions and took to frolicking in Dubai and other exotic locations in the name of rehabilitation. Well, they are not more fortunate than others who had for many years done nothing but sell contract papers in Abuja and built dachas in the middle east.

The buying of peace has been the order since Saro- Wiwa. There are still no hospitals, no bridges, no roads, no food. Militants lay claims to freedom fighting but have the attitude of wretched mercenaries. They have remained mercilessly greedy and thoroughly selfish. Like those who came from far to appropriate all the wells and blocks, these ones disregard the local communities in even more cynical ways. They can stop the construction of a community hospital , demand the money and share it.

Schools are built in the region at more than 5 times the real costs. Everybody who has a hand must be settled. Host communities have to be bribed to allow establishment of basic social amenities. Listen to the tales surrounding the maritime university. And these charlatans are freedom fighters? In the midst of squalor they erect grotesque mansions – proceeds of theft , criminal collaboration and opportunism. In their lifestyles they are more like Columbian drug lords than Saro-Wiwa.

The cost of extraction in the delta is astronomical . Companies , all drilling companies have thousands of ghost workers on their payroll. People are paid monthly for staying home. A crippling sense of entitlement has bred widespread indolence in the Niger delta society. Genuine enterprise has been banished. On the street where President Jonathan lives a certain General has a mansion many times bigger than that of the ex- president.

His gates have bold inscriptions screaming at passersby. He is still a general after exchanging his arms for amnesty cash? He is a visible role model, the path to certain success. A hero – he was able to grab something. Well, the other billionaires from other distant tribes didn’t invent anything. Did they?

And now the avengers. Pretenders to a higher cause. They are blowing pipelines and flow stations at will. The other militants who have renounced militancy must not be made to feel like losers. The avengers are defenders of narrow private interests that are in conflict with the welfare of the poor people of Niger Delta.

The avengers have the debilitating selfishness of those who took all the oil blocks and became emergency billionaires while the oil communities writhed in pains of poverty. They are as contemptuous of the people of Niger Delta as the Ostriches who want the bill for North East Development Commission fast tracked but want the PIB stalled. They are all scavengers.

But the avengers are more stupid . They are brainless surrogates, pawns. What needs avenging a few months after their kin , with whom they were well pleased, left office? If they have any real bitterness it should be towards those who took their turn but didn’t ,in real terms, uplift them. But we would be supposing they are genuine freedom fighters. Were they real freedom fighters they would fight for greater resource control while concentrating their vengeance on scavengers that have eaten the trillions meant for the development of region. But they are pawns of petty politics.

So their priority is to avenge the grievance of a bitter dissipated elite: the north was alleged to have made the country ungovernable for the last regime. They are taking secret high fives from co-conspirators disavowing them publicly. States can barely pay salaries. Saro-Wiwa wrote a bill of rights. These ones , soliciting for the stoppage of criminal trials of thieves, cobbled together incoherent nonsensical demands. Descent into the abyss. Anyway thugs need not meet demands of reasonableness. They want Biafra. They want it now. That put a finishing touch to their stupidity. They like “abandoned properties”.

Militancy in the delta now, even by insane avengers, is a wasp perched on a swollen scrotum. It has to be eased away , not crushed. Poor Niger delta. Too many scavengers.