In 1998, December 11 to be precise, youths of Ijaw extraction gathered at Kaiama, Kolokuma/Opokuma Local Government Area of Bayelsa State for an important meeting.
At the end of the meeting, they came up with what is today known as the Ijaw Youth Council, IYC.coupled with other far reaching resolutions, all encapsulated in the famous Kaiama Declaration.
The highpoints of the Declaration was the condemnation of the activities of the oil exploration and exploiting companies in the Niger Delta in connivance with the Federal Government and demanded for resource control.
The youths were saddened by the lot of the region, the devastation of their environment, their squalid living conditions especially when compared with the splendor and exotic living conditions in far away places like Lagos and Abuja which were heavily developed by the resources from the Niger Delta.
Curiously, many of the youth had participated in the infamous Youths Earnestly Ask for Abacha, YEAA, program, coordinated by one Daniel Kanu which was aimed at amassing support for the transmutation of then military Head of State, Late General Sani Abacha to a civilian president.
They had just returned from Abuja where the program held fresh with memories of the beauty and serene Abuja environment only to behold a diametrically opposite setting even when the money used to transform Abuja was flowing from the region.
The seed of agitation was thus sown after the meeting in Kaiama and fuelled by the government’ established cavalier approach to issues concerning the Niger Delta.
The agitation had metamorphosed to arms struggle as many youths in the region were forced into the trenches in the creeks where they targeted oil installations. Their actions dealt a devastating blow to the nations crude oil production targets, bringing the economy almost to her knees.
Late President Umar Musa Yar’ Adua who had come on board at the height of the militancy as president needed to calm situations so that the nation could survive.
Yar’Adua not only granted amnesty to the warring youths with a monthly stipend, he went further to create a specific purpose ministry to cater for the interest of the Niger Delta people. re-echoing the recommendations of the Willinks Commission of the 1970s which had singled Niger Delta as requiring a peculiar and special development effort.
Niger Delta ministry was thus birthed and coupled with the already existing Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC established by the Obasanjo administration, frayed nerves in the region were considerably contained.
What followed thereafter was however the usual syndrome of under funding as the ministry continued to be cash trapped and couldn’t execute any major project including the East -West Road that is supposed to be signature project for the ministry.
Amidst this disappointing performance by the ministry which is majorly attributable to poor funding and perhaps corruption,no one would have contemplated that the Tinubu administration would come up with the scrapping of the ministry or even merging it as it were with other regional development program of his government as he has done.
What would have been most plausible would be to find out via due diligence why the ministry has failed to live up to expectation and through policy ensure the void is covered and then provide fresh impetus to the ministry to perform because it is a child of circumstance.
But by lumping the ministry into the wider regional development program of the administration, the government is no longer seeing the ministry as a child of circumstance which had informed its creation to address specific and peculiar challenges of a people.
At its creation, the mandate of the Niger Delta ministry was spelt out as follows, “To formulate and execute plans, programs and initiatives aimed at fast tracking the development of the Niger Delta region”
Late president Yar’Adua threw more light on the mandate at a function in Lagos few days after launching the ministry saying, “The (Niger Delta) ministry will coordinate our efforts to tackle the challenges of infrastructural development, environment protection and youths empowerment in the region”
What president Tinubu has done therefore simply means that the mandate enunciated above had been consumated.
Already the president appointees and spin doctors are potificating that the scrapping or merging of the ministry is apposite as it would be more result oriented.
The minister of the defunct Niger Delta ministry, Abubakar Momoh who has now transmuted into minister of Regional Development is already singing the praises of President Tinubu for the changes he has done.
Momoh described the changes in glowing terms as a forward thinking initiative by Tinubu designed to centralize regional development efforts and boost service delivery across the nation.
He further stated, “This is about ensuring that all regional commissions work together more effectively. Our goal is to ensure that every part of the country benefits equally from federal development initiatives”.
However, the minister’s effusive explanation is sadly an obvious deviation from the goal and mission of Niger Delta ministry as defined in its mandate.
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First, it is a specialized ministry to handle specific challenges in a particular region that has been subjected to years of deprivation despite their enormous contribution to the socio-economic well being of the country.
Secondly, the ministry was intended to somehow insulate the region from the bottlenecks of “centralized development” which had for years kept the region at the back burners of national development efforts.
Succinctly put, the ministry was supposed to be an elixir to heal social injustice that has been visited on a people for many years.
So now that every region has one development commission or the other and Ministry of Regional Development has been created to “enable every part of the country benefit equally from federal development initiatives”, where is the extra or uniqueness that the Niger Delta ministry was supposed to bring to the Niger Delta as the people bearing the brunt of the consequences of oil exploration and exploitation that is yielding the petro-dollar being used to drive all these amorphous creations by the current administration?
Clearly, what the Tinubu presidency has done is just an extension of the weird reforms he unleashed on the populace from the day one of his presidency.
Interestingly, many stakeholders in the Niger Delta have been calling out the president since he came up with the latest voodoo kind of reforms in subsuming the Niger Delta ministry under the new ministry of regional development.
Ijaw leader and former federal minister, Chief Edwin Clark first raised the alarm and called on president Tinubu to reverse the scrapping of the Niger Delta ministry.
Similar positions have also been taken by the Pan Niger Delta Forum, PANDEF, Ijaw Youths Council, IYC among other civil society organizations.
President Tinubu should thread with caution and think through his policies before making them operational. His off-hand removal of fuel subsidies is still reverbrating with untold hardship all through the land.
He should no more gather ant infested faggots because definitely, he would play host to an audacious agama lizard.
The Niger Delta militants only laid down their arms, they didn’t set them ablaze.
