Prof. G.G. Darah has been in the vanguard of the struggle for a better living standard for the people of the Niger Delta for decades. It has cost him time, finance, intellectual involvement among others. He does not appear to be weary yet in this pursuit as his role in the ongoing moves for peace in the area championed by the Pan Niger Delta Forum, PANDEF, has shown. In this exclusive interview with The New Diplomat’s South South Bureau Chief, JOHN OGHOJAFOR, Prof. Darah, among others, opined that the recent visit of the Vice President to the Niger Delta was a positive move towards the final resolution of the Niger Delta issue just as he commended PANDEF and the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Mr. Ibe Kachikwu, for the role they have been playing in charting the path to a peaceful resolution of the Niger Delta crisis.
Excerpts:
| You were at the PTI Conference Centre recently where the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, addressed the people of the Niger Delta based on the facts he gathered from his tour of the riverine area and other oil producing communities. Would you say his speech was reassuring of government sincerity towards an enduring peace in the region? |
The Vice President was sent by the federal government. He was not speaking for himself but on behalf of the federal government of Nigeria. Therefore, whatever he said at the Conference Centre has been said by the federal government. He has not acted as Prof. Osinbajo of Ogun State. The Vice President is the alternative president. And if his boss didn’t send him, he would not have come. It was not a private visit.
Can we now say that for sure, the federal government is interested in dialogue to end the crisis in the region?
You don’t say for sure in political engagement. You only express confidence and optimism because you are not in control of all the factors. Even the President cannot say for sure. If he says he wants to build a bridge from Warri to Escravos now, would he find the money to do it? Suppose it will cost $200 billion, multiplied by N500, he will need the national budget of the next 15years to do it. So, we don’t talk of ‘for sure’ when we engage in what is called reconciliation because conflict resolution requires that opinions are expressed, they are examined and parties review their positions from time to time to accommodate reality. If they will build railway from Lagos to Calabar, I don’t know how much is in the budget for this project. But they will not go overseas to steal money to do it. So, I will not use the word ‘for sure’, rather I would always say we are hopeful. PANDEF has only worked for four or five months and I would say that the results are very encouraging.
If we have been doing something like this for the past four or five years we would have made more significant progress. But the outcome of five months of selfless commitment has yielded this. A month ago, Femi Adesina (Media Adviser to Mr. President) was saying that there were no credible leaders in the Niger Delta, but he knew he made a mistake. He never repeated it. He was bashed from many sides and he knew he made an error. But Adesina was not talking as if he is from Osun State where he comes from; he was speaking on behalf of the President. So, we don’t know how much he was chastised for over-reaching himself. And three weeks after that, you saw that the Vice President came. So, you can see that they are already responding. That is how the process of conflict resolution goes; it goes on and off until you begin to count the qualitative gains.
In the Vice President speech he emphasized that there was no need to negotiate because all the issues in the Niger Delta were very clear to everyone. Does that foreclose dialogue?
I can say that the dialogue has started. If you are negotiating then you accommodate different opinions and you reconcile. What he did that day, was it not dialogue? He gave the floor to us and we expressed our views without any editorial intervention. People said whatever they liked – language, abuses – he absorbed all of it. He is a lawyer of jurisprudence. He would have said that he objected to our statement, but he did not say that. What we the initiators should appreciate is that the dialogue has started. It is not the formal declaration like parliament that constitutes dialogue. Dialogue has started. On November 1, 2016, it started in Abuja at Aso Rock.
Then the Vice President came on January 16, 2017 which was barely six weeks after. So, dialogue continues. If you were in Gbaramatu, you would have noticed the tenor of the language. If what people said was not enough, he went to Oporoza which is the administrative headquarters of Gbaramatu kingdom, which can also be called the West African headquarters of militancy. That was dialogue. He also went to Korotie where the take-off facilities of the Nigerian Maritime University are located and he admitted that they were exquisite facilities. He didn’t tell you that “Ah, we cannot accept the price at which they were bought.” That is a different matter.
So, those gestures are what the journalists should interpret. Reporting the news is something — they can use dramatic headlines. But after the news, you go to analysis. And we don’t see that. The newspapers are struggling over whose headline is more terrorizing. Nigerian journalism was better than that 20 years ago. I think newspapers proprietors are also, maybe, harassing their field workers to deliver on headlines. But this is not a subject of headlines. They are truly the subject of combined ecological and industrial catastrophe. One of them is generated by oil and gas exploration. The other one which none of you ever thinks of is the reduction in the volume of the water of the River Niger. That River was the one that used to distribute these bounties and harvests by means of flooding once a year. We call it ‘Owhe’. That flood (Owhe) starts in Futa Djallon Mountain in the Republic of Guinea and the water moves down. It takes 12 months to reach us here in the Niger Delta. By the time it reaches us, it has carried all the fertile soil of four countries and that is deposited in the Niger Delta, in our farms when it comes in. That water that enters the farmlands where the fishes breed, that is their maternity.
That water remains for two months. By the time it dries, the fishes are strong enough to go and fend for themselves. So, all the rivers were full of fishes. That was why we left Benin and came here to settle. We used to catch fishes with our bare hands. Then they built Kainji Dam in 1968 and they built Jebba Dam in 1972. Then of course, they built Shiroro Dam. Those three dams added together, have blocked the volume of water that comes to us in the Niger Delta. As a result, the fishing industry died. If we don’t have a scientific attitude to this thing, we may only fight over pipelines and oil wells in our villages that we are oil-producing.
So, as I look at the reportage and journalistic coverage, the science is not there. That oil that is in Uzere or in Agbarha-Otor, Shell can pump it from Asaba if they want. Yes, they have that engineering skill. In the true sense of it the oil is not in Uzere. Five kilometers below, the oil is flowing like a river and the river is not in one village. I was arguing with a TROMPCOM official and Chief Okirika sometime ago and they said that the oil-bearing communities are the owners of the oil. That argument is only political. But political argument is not enough, you must add knowledge. And knowledge dictates that you must call on the oil explorers to give you the maps of the underground. You will discover that even in Effurun where it is assumed that there is no oil well now, there is oil ten kilometers below. But they suck it in Ughelli because it is more convenient to suck it there. If those who are going to negotiate do not have this fact, they will not be thorough.
Does that mean there will not be any formal process of dialogue?
In view of the demands so far made, if the Nigerian Maritime University is opened next month, that would mean that one item must have been secured. If they put another N50 billion in the East-West Road, we don’t need dialogue for that one. You don’t need to sit down to argue. I was the academic consultant to the Maritime University. I prepared the syllabus. So, they are taking it step by step. They are trying to approach it from their own angle by reducing the items so that when negotiation starts the items will be fewer and less controversial. That is the way I see it.
In all of these, what would you say has been the role and achievement of the Pan-Niger Delta Forum, PANDEF?
The most significant non-governmental intervention in the Niger Delta resolution process is the emergence of PANDEF. If it was founded by governors or legislators you will say that they are using peoples’ money to travel and hold their meetings. But this is an organization which you can call a super-NGO. Everybody pays his bills. You go for meetings in Abuja you pay your transport fares and when you get there whether you sleep on the corridor or not, that is your problem. Nobody gives you any allowance. It means only those who are truly committed are the ones who are attending. I have not seen any effort to even appraise PANDEF in the newspapers. It’s only titles and headlines – ‘Itsekiri disagree with Ijaw’, ‘Urhobo did this or that’ and so on. The newspapers are poisoning the environment. And they will be held accountable by history. People are going to do research into this thing in 20, 30 years’ time and they will discover that the newspapers went for glamour and drama and left the substance.
So, it is PANDEF’s emergence that has raised the stakes because the government’s response is in appreciation of its intervention. Before August 19, 2016 different groups were shouting and making several demands but they did not receive the government’s attention the way we (PANDEF) have it now. And if you have a government headed by a conservative man like President Buhari who against all odds, had listened, then you should know that there is real climate change in the political outlook. Don’t forget that oil does not float unless there is water below it. So, all these developments that have taken place in the past few months are to the credit of PANDEF.
I have told you something about two features of PANDEF – one is its voluntary feature. Each person who is attending volunteers his time and resources, not because they want to earn allowance, manage claims and hotel bills, no. The second quality is the ability to bring all major groups into one union. It has never happened in the past 50 years. So, what we should be doing now is to work hard to sustain that tempo and sustain the quality of leadership. It is this that will convince the government that whatever it invests in that place now will make impact. If you want to count the number of dignitaries, it will give you the level of integrity rating of that organization. Is it former governors, ministers, senators, professors? Is it monarchs? They are all there.
You know people like Chief E.K. Clark; he will be 90 in a few months’ time. In many parts of the country, they will just say “I’m so old now, let me stay at home and be eating and safe-guarding my health.”
But look at how relentless he has been. So, PANDEF has taken the struggle to a higher level by improving the conditions for a peaceful resolution.
It has been observed that the reassurance by government to the people of Niger Delta is being reciprocated by the agitators who have maintained a ceasefire. When is government then withdrawing the troops from the Niger Delta?
The agitators have been very fantastic, I must say. It is not the deployment of troops that is the primary problem or cause of conflict. There was a report I read which shows that the Nigerian Army is operating in 32 states in the country. It shows that there is a greater crisis of insecurity nationwide. And the government in its own wisdom thinks that it can restore peace by deploying instrument of violence to scare people to avoid criminal acts. This is the government’s thinking. But that thinking may not be correct. Soldiers are all over the country now. JTF may be older here in the Niger Delta, maybe eight to nine years, but I don’t think they are the primary cause of conflict. They are in Lagos, they are in Enugu, Benue, Kaduna etc. If you put the withdrawal of military presence in the Niger Delta as number one item to be removed, what will you do to the ones in the middleBelt? The country is under the siege of kidnappers, commercial kidnapping of human beings for ransom. It is not only in the Niger Delta, it is even worse in the South West and in the Eastern region. Are you going to demand that government should withdraw all those soldiers before peace talk? No, that is not a fruitful approach. The nuisance that they pose now can be accommodated if higher goals are achieved.
What would be your advice as a stakeholder in the Niger Delta project at the moment to the people and of course, to the media?
As a stakeholder and one of the most committed professors on resource control, I can advise my professional colleagues in the mass media that the resolution of a conflict of this magnitude cannot be an event, rather it is a process. And if it is a process, sometimes it takes a long time; if you are lucky, it may be short. But even if you have restored amity and the guns are silent, it does not mean peace has come because the consequences and scars of the conflict will remain there for some time. It is the enthusiastic highlighting and persistent focus that have prevented the government from just looking the other way. So, the media is a pivotal institution in the whole process of revisiting the issue of injustice in the Niger Delta. As we Marxists will always say, the educator must be educated. The mass media constitutes the first level of public education. Therefore, the owners, proprietors and practitioners of the various media should engage research and professional training in order to catch up with the information, scientific data and the language to express this knowledge. It is a global challenge. So, a few media houses can combine, even if just a one-day intensive workshop on environment. You don’t know how much information you will get. I used to do it for DESOPADEC. I will bring biologists and zoologists, Prof. Moses Ogbe who is now in Lafia; Matthew Dore from Ministry of Agriculture then, he is now heading UNDP Environmental programme. They would come and talk about crayfish, periwinkle, mangrove, raffia-palm and other sources of wealth outside the oil, to open peoples mind to the reality that Niger Delta is the richest Delta in the whole world. It is also the most populated Delta out of 20 Deltas in the world.
So, the Niger Delta is a very precious territory for the global community. It is not just for us who are living in it now. For example, zoologists and fish experts know that all fishes from Mauritania to Angola come to breed their young ones in our mangroves every year. They breed them for three months, nurse them for three months before returning to their various locations. Don’t you see how important our mangrove is to the international community now? So, if we blow up one oil pipeline in my village and that place can no longer host the fishes when they come for breeding, the damage is not just to my village now but to a fisherman in Angola or Ghana who may be affected. So, there is a lot of knowledge to be upgraded. Apart from legislative knowledge, how many decrees and laws have the federal government made for the past 30 years that affect us? Do you know that there is a law which provides for death sentence for anyone who walks on top of an oil pipeline? It may be inside your farm, but there is a law which says if you step on it, it is sabotage and you can be executed. Our people should know this. It is not just about knowing the name of one militant and keep repeating it, that is not journalism. So, that is the task for the mass media.
My second advice to the people of Niger Delta is that we must be on top of the knowledge aspect of the struggle. It is only then the international community will respect us. When the EU officials come, they know which journalist to meet and ask because they know you have the knowledge. When the Americans send their people to come to check how far, they will look for journalists because they know journalists are people who learn every day. We ought to raise our intellectual status. That is where we can guide the agitators, negotiators, mediators, arbitrators and others because they too need knowledge but they don’t have the time to go and do the research themselves. How many oil wells are in the Niger Delta now? How many of them are operating? They say SPDC has left Urhobo land and Isoko land, who bought the assets? How many oil wells does NPDC have now? How many barrels of crude oil do they produce in a day? There is more work to be done. The more of these that are reflected in our reports, the more respect we get from Abuja. When Abuja sees these types of concrete reports they will know that we have woken up and that we are no more rabble-rousers. Whenever foreign embassies interact with the President, the questions they will be asking will make the Presidency know that we have educated the whole world from the correct perspectives.
So, I think with the recent VP’s visit to the Niger Delta, we are in the right track. Apart from thanking PANDEF, I also thank the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu. He is the apostle in the government circle and it is because of his stubborn refusal to surrender and give up, that we have reached this level now.
