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Tag: Ochereome Nnanna

  • Journey through “reborn” Ogoniland, by Ochereome Nnanna

    Journey through “reborn” Ogoniland, by Ochereome Nnanna

    Thirty years ago, the Ogoni people’s struggle finally pierced through the iron curtain of the international community’s attention. It took the spilling of blood and emasculation of the Ogoni elite for the world to take note.

    In April 1994, I had the privilege of encountering foremost author and Ogoni activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, at a seminar in Enugu aimed at fashioning a common Igbo position as the nation prepared for the National Constitutional Conference, NCC, empanelled by General Sani Abacha. Saro-Wiwa was a guest speaker. The event offered him and former Biafra leader, Chief Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the opportunity to “reconcile” after playing historical roles in opposite sides of the Nigerian Civil War.

    That was virtually Saro-Wiwa’s final public outing. A few days later, mayhem exploded in Ogoniland. Four prominent Ogoni leaders, known as the Ogoni Four – Albert Badey, Edward Kobani, Theophilus Orage and Samuel Orage – were gruesomely murdered. Their corpses were never found. Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, MOSOP, were arrested, summarily tried and hanged for the alleged incitement that led to the lynching of the Ogoni Four.

    The Ogoni elite had been torn into two mutually destructive camps. The Ogoni Four were accused of “compromising” the struggle by being soft on the Federal Government and Shell, the oil company responsible for the environmental devastation of Ogoniland. On the other hand, the Ogoni Nine were perceived to have precipitated the killing of their counterparts. The Abacha government ignored all entreaties to spare the lives of Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues.

    These sad events placed the Ogoni struggle on the agenda of the United Nations which became gravely concerned over severe environmental pollution of Ogoniland after over 50 years of irresponsible oil exploitation. In 2006, the United Nations Environmental Programme, UNEP, sent experts to investigate the environmental disaster in Ogoniland and submit a report that would guide remediation. In 2011, the UNEP Report was submitted to President Goodluck Jonathan.

    It was not until April 2022 when the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, HYPREP, was created that the “Ogoni clean-up” programme concretely began. Because of the prolonged period of lip service paid to the project, many Nigerians, including major media stakeholders, never knew the amount of world class action going on under the leadership of Professor Nenibarini Zabbey at HYPREP’s Project Office in Port Harcourt. Indeed, when I sent a Facebook post from one of the shoreline reclamation project sites in Goi, Gokana LGA, people were pleasantly surprised that the clean-up was real and not mere propaganda.

    We had two days of intensive tour of all four local government areas of Ogoniland – Tai, Eleme, Khana and Gokana. We visited the HYPREP regional water scheme at Kpoghor. About 30 communities whose water resources were polluted now enjoy potable water piped to them from these waterworks. In Ajen Okpori and Ogale in Eleme, we witnessed how the polluted soil and underground water were excavated and cleaned by experts, and land restored for normal human activity. Soil and underground water purification are going on simultaneously in 39 communities across Ogoniland.

    The most eye-catching and obviously largest of the HYPREP projects is at Wiiyaakara in Khana LGA. The Centre of Excellence and Environmental Remediation, CEER, under construction by the China’s CCECC, is much like an international university town, complete with its research faculty buildings, residential zone, solar farm, sports complex and massive laboratories. It will incubate experts in all aspects of practical environmental science from all parts of the world.

    By far the most exciting adventure for us was the visit to Goi in Gokana LGA. It is a shoreline community where technicians were labouring with machines to suck out spilled oil sludge from the muddy soil of the shoreline. The experts said the presence of live periwinkles in the mud meant the shoreline restoration was beginning to work. Shoreline restoration is taking place in five communities throughout Ogoniland.

    We took a 45-minute boat ride to Bomu, also in Gokana LGA, where mangrove trees were being replanted after soil restoration. Each of us had the privilege to plant a mangrove tree! In a few years when the trees have matured, the mangrove ecosystem will hopefully be fully restored, provided that the HYPREP activities are sustained and re-pollution prevented. According to HYPREP officials, the Ogoni clean-up is just the first step towards the extension of same to all parts of the Niger Delta and beyond.

    Ogoni people and Ogoniland are harvesting the benefits of their struggle. Ogoni has become a pacesetter in many ways. Other Niger Delta agitators sprang up due to the attention the Ogoni struggle elicited from all over the world. The Ogoni clean-up is being conducted mainly with the expertise and manpower of Ogoni indigenes. The Centre of Excellence will draw experts from all over the world. Even after the clean-up, the knowledge, expertise and experience that the Ogoni men and women are accumulating will be exported to service polluted communities throughout Nigeria and beyond.

    HYPREP has trained 2,500 Ogoni youth with International Maritime Organisation, IMO, Levels 1 and 2 certification in shoreline clean-up and mangrove restoration, which they are freely deploying to make a living.

    There is a saying: “No pain, no gain”. The Ogoni struggle attracted a scorched-earth military pacification mission on the people. The names of Abacha’s hit men, Major General Obi Umahi and Brigadier General Paul Okuntimo, will remain indelible in Ogoni history. They lost their best, the Ogoni Four and Ogoni Nine. But today, Ogoniland occupies a place of pride in all Niger Delta because of dividends that the HYPREP projects are bringing on the people and their ancestral land.

    Where would the Ogoni people be today without the Ogoni struggle?

  • 2027: North is powerless against Tinubu (1), by Ochereome Nnanna

    2027: North is powerless against Tinubu (1), by Ochereome Nnanna

    In exactly four months, those elected in 2023 will be celebrating their second year in office. Shortly after, the politics of 2027 will increasingly occupy the attention of politicians and Nigerians as a whole. Such is the dialectic of politics and government in a democracy.

    I was prompted to address this topic by the utterances of some Northern politicians and activists, especially those threatening to snatch power from President Bola Tinubu in 2027. On this topic, the North (the heavy political, Muslim North, that is), are still divided. To be sure, this bloc, with the South West and state power in tow, played the leading role in putting Tinubu in power in 2023.

    However, some are already regretting their action due, partly, to Tinubu’s draconian hunger and poverty-inducing economic policies, subsisting general insecurity, extreme nepotism and Tinubu government’s self-isolation from the realities that the ordinary Nigerian faces daily.

    To add salt to their injury, Tinubu’s bold and revolutionary tax reforms (especially the derivation-rewarding VAT component), have brought out many Northern leaders and politicians across party lines in face offs with the president. I will take as my samples two voices that have gone so far as to threaten the president’s second term ambition with the North’s electoral power. One is a professional noisemaker and rabble rouser. The other is a tested politician. The tested politician is Governor Bala Mohammed of Bauchi State. He said the North will show Tinubu their “hue” in 2027.

    Bala is the Chairman of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) Governors’ Forum. He contested in the PDP presidential primaries in 2022 and lost before hurrying home to retrieve his second term ticket from his carefully handpicked placeholder, Ibrahim Kassim, whom he promptly rewarded with reappointment as Secretary to the State Government. Funny, Kassim resigned on 14th December last year over his rumoured

    governorship ambition in 2027, which generated rancour between him and the Governor.

    It is generally believed that Bala Mohammed will present himself on PDP platform as the North’s arrowhead to unseat Tinubu. Bala is also a slick political dealmaker. As an All Progressives People’s Party (ANPP) Senator, he supported the “doctrine of necessity” that enabled former Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to assume power when President Umaru Yar’ Adua died. Jonathan rewarded him by appointing him Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) on 6th April 2010.

    Shortly after, the senator decamped to PDP. Since then, he has been the major pillar of the party in Bauchi State and the North East. Despite his perceived sabre-rattling, nothing stops Bala Mohammed from making a deal with Tinubu before 2027 and going back to his original party, now called the All Progressives Congress (APC). Tinubu is the kind of president who can bring people like Bala over if he deems it necessary. The current sabre-rattling could merely be Bala’s positioning for 2027, one way or the other.

    Now, the noisemaker, Yerima Shettima. He operates under the platform of Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG, sounds like compressed natural gas) and Arewa Youths Consultative Forum (AYCF). Yerima is threatening Tinubu, yet he has no electoral value. But he sure packs plenty of nuisance. The most annoying thing is that because he shares the name: Shettima, with our amiable Vice President, His Excellency, Kashim Shettima, many people, especially Southerners, often mistake them for each other.

    It was this Yerima and one Abdulaziz Suleiman that fronted the laughable “Igbo quit notice” issued by CNG and others in August 2017. Ironically, it was Kashim Shettima, as Governor of Borno State and Chairman of the Northern Governors’ Forum that cornered Yerima and his group and made them swallow their ultimatum. VP Shettima is a notable friend of the Igbo nation. Yerima was also made to lead a delegation of his fellow

    attention seekers to Owerri to sign a “peace pact” with Ralph Uwazuruike’s MASSOB, which had nothing to do with Mazi Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), the group actively pushing for Biafra exit from Nigeria at that time.

    It was also Yerima’s voice that was captured in an apparent viral telephone conversation with former Governor Adekunle Amosun of Ogun State. Yerima was spewing his usual trash against the Igbo, buccally haemorrhaging about how the Igbo should be “cut down” in Nigeria, while Amosun did his best to persuade Yerima to tame his outburst. Till today, many Igbo still erroneously believe it was Kashim Shettima that perpetrated Yerima Shettima’s Igbophobic outbursts in 2017. Yerima cowered and never came out to own up.

    You will never see this fellow involved in the search for a lasting solution to the North’s millions of out-of-school almajiri children, tackle the deep-seated poverty there which makes Nigeria the “poverty capital of the world” and end the multi-faceted insecurity, Boko Haram and herdsmen terrorism, banditry and mass abductions for ransom which threaten not just the North but the whole country. You will never see him among groups strategising to foster peace and unity among Nigerians, which will also benefit the North. All Yerima does is weaponise the North against the rest of Nigerians in the dumb belief that he is promoting Arewa’s interest. He and his cohorts are mere attention seekers and should be ignored.

    No region has the sole power to grab power. It was possible for the North during the military era. But under democratic dispensations, there must be alliances between the North and at least, one major bloc, such as the six states of the South West or the eleven states of the South East and South-South. Secondly, no region is capable of electorally unseating an incumbent president, unless certain conditions exist in the polity to aid them. Finally, Tinubu is the last political leader you can expect to deny his second term, his abysmal performance in government notwithstanding.

    These are issues I will discuss in the second and final take of this article.