Ogoniland cleanup: Restoring peace, development in Niger Delta
(Nigeria) By Fegalo Nsuke
The Nigerian government has not hidden its penchant for the
Ogoni oil. In alliance with The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria
Limited, an affiliate of Shell International, the government has in the past
deployed very brutish and repressive techniques to force the Ogoni people to
submission and gain access to the oilfields it abandoned some 20 years ago.
The Ogoni struggle is without doubt, one of the biggest
challenges the Nigerian government has faced outside the civil war which broke
out between 1967 and 1970. More than twenty years later, the government is
still grappling with an approach to resolve the problem.
In 1994, in an effort to break the Ogoni resistance, the
government laid false accusations against some Ogoni leaders. Ordered their
hanging on November 10, 1995 and began a series of manoeuvre to resume oil
production in the area. Both Shell and the government had disagreed with every
claim of environmental pollution of Ogoniland until the damning report by the
United Nations in 2011. some 21 years after the issue was raised by The Movement
for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP).
Having failed to return to Ogoniland, Shell's experiences
that followed were not so palatable and i am persuaded to think that Shell, in
their most difficult moments against ruthless Niger Delta militants would wish
there was someone like Saro-Wiwa who commanded so much respect in the region
and who could call the agitators to order. But injustice and repression had
long sent Saro-Wiwa to the grave.
Saro-Wiwa represented the leadership that the young people
still had confidence in and would have willingly listened to and obeyed. I am
certain that Saro-Wiwa had the capacity to call our young people out of the
creeks. But a Nigerian government had
seen him as the threat to free flow of hydrocarbon and ordered his hanging in
1995. Today, billions had been lost to oil theft, pipeline vandalism and
illegal bunkering. None had been able to fill the gap and to provide a
leadership that can restore order like Saro-Wiwa, a man whose peaceful approach
to the fight for freedom gave hope not just to the Ogoni people but the entire
Niger Delta.
Ogoni appear, in every way to be a special gift to the Niger
Delta. It has been instrumental to the establishment of the special agencies
for the Niger Delta - both the Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development
Commission and later the Niger Delta Development Commission and now, the
establishment of HYPREP following the release of the environmental audit report
by UNEP will see to the eventual cleanup of the Niger Delta region.
The Ogoni cleanup will indeed represent a right start to
addressing this lingering problem. It presents itself as another opportunity
for the government to move away from the repressive posture of trying to force
the people to submission. Implementing the UNEP report on Ogoniland is a right
step to peace building which will open the doors for further engagement on
development.
Saro-Wiwa's hanging in 1995 was not just a judicial error
and state murder, it was an opportunity missed to resolve the Niger Delta problem.
Implementing the Ogoni UNEP report and the eventual cleanup of the Niger Delta
will offer itself as another opportunity to mend fences and open doors for
further peaceful engagement to address this problem. This is an opportunity the
government must be fully committed to. For it it fails, it will not only
destroy the people's confidence in the Nigerian system, it will also create
room for renewed agitation.
The people on their part must avoid the mistakes of the past
and give their total support to this process. I believe that had the Niger
Delta risen and saved Sao-Wiwa, Odi and Kaima wouldn't have been decimated by
the Obasanjo's regime.
The killing of Saro-Wiwa without acrimony misinformed the
government to reason that the Niger Delta is not just weak, but are a people
who are too afraid to stand in the face of terror and speak against injustice.
A notion the government could by this time have clearly judged to have been
misinformed. This is the time to be united for justice. It is another opportunity
for a peaceful match towards development. Let us be united to make it work.
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