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Calling Allison Ayida

By

Ike Okonta

I am writing to you on the matter of the intrepid women of Ugboegungun, a small community in Itsekiri land where the US multinational, ChevronTexaco, operates a multi-billion dollar oil terminal. In the book, Where Vultures Feast, co-authored with Oronto Douglas and published in 2001, I accused ChevronTexaco and Shell of devastating the ecology of the Niger delta, exploiting the local communities, and sponsoring acts of terrorism, mass murder, and the rape of young women to cow the people the easier to steal their oil unchallenged. Oronto and I called on eminent and well-meaning community leaders, politicians, environmentalists and statesmen like your good self to intervene in this matter, and begin to work to reshape the Nigerian state and generate a bold new social and economic framework that will not only address the pressing needs of communities such as Ugboegungun but also put an end, now and for all time, the sundry depravities of Chevron, Shell, and their fellow travellers.

Some would argue that you have done your bit for and for your people, that you gave the most productive years of your life to the Nigerian project at the most critical point in the nation's history, that you acquitted yourself honourably, and that you deserve your retirement. I agree to all these. But I also insist that the time has come for you to come out of retirement and offer moral and intellectual leadership to a country about to hit the rocks. The tragedy of the Nigerian situation as I write is that the cup is not half full but half empty. The work that great patriots like Nana, merchant prince of the Itsekiri began, insisting that Africans and the people of the Niger delta must control their land and its resources, a project later taken up by Hebert Macaulay, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Saadu Zungur and many other heroes of the Nigerian struggle for independence, was given concrete shape in the political and choices of powerful technocrats like your good self in the first few years after de-colonisation in 1960.

Some of these choices were wise, visionary, and well-thought out; some were, I regret to say, informed by personal and parochial considerations, and worse, were not informed by the reality that Great Britain has never been a true friend and ally but a rapine bully, and would work, quietly as usual, to undermine the Nigerian project in whatever way it could, and shape policy and politics in the country to its own advantage using stooges, puppets, and paid mercenaries. I concede that some of these technocrats and 'super' permanent secretaries, including yourself, were young men barely out of their twenties when they were saddled with tasks and responsibilities that otherwise should have been the province of older and more experienced Mandarins, forged, burnished, and finished in the rarefied air of international politics and its cold logic of 'no permanent friends, but permanent intere , resourcefulness, and patriotism of some of these technocrats, young as you were, that Nigeria was able to shake off some of the bitter ravages of a self-inflicted civil war by the mid 1970s, and was indeed poised to emerge as a middle income country taking on the task of ending the five centuries of brutal exploitation, denigration, and self-abasement that has been the lot of the African world since Europe came calling in the 15th century.

But that was when the song stopped, and the rain began to fall on the Nigerian people again. The tragedy of the years of , , Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Abacha, and Abdulsalami Abubakar is not so much that these governments and regimes were corrupt and improvident, but that they singularly failed in the most important national project: rethinking and redesigning the Nigerian political space so that state and society are brought into congruence, so that power and policy-making are decentralised to reflect the complex diversities of Nigerian society, and so that ordinary people, aggregated in social and political communities that are measure and are sanctioned and legitimised by age-old codes of trust, good conduct and civic virtue, have a say in the way they are governed and the way resources are exploited and allocated. In other words, successive governments in Nigeria abysmally failed to entrench the legitimate hegemonic quest of the state by

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rooting it in the Nigerian people and their aspiration to become full citizens with the privileges and obligations that this entails.

You once spoke about 'the Nigerian revolution.' I confess that in a different incarnation I had dismissed the thoughts and arguments you advanced in that pamphlet as typically 'bourgeois' and not grounded in the urgent concerns of the impoverished majority of our people. It is in the nature of young people - more so those who love their country and its people passion people being ground to the dust by a combination of vicious local and global forces to become angry, impatient, and contemptuous and dismissive of political and civic leaders who had gone before them, blaming the latter for all the tragedies that have befallen their nation.

I, too, was part of this angry group. I am still angry, but I hope, too, a little wiser. Three days ago, monitoring the unfolding events in Escravos ( I hate the word, with its roots in the Atlantic slave trade that decimated ), and preparing to write this first of a two-part open letter to you, I sought out some of your books in the Bodleian Library here in Oxford. And it struck me that previous to now, I had missed your core concern: the urgent need to establish a thinking, intelligent, and caring Nigerian state, able to mobilise people and resources to do what states elsewhere in the world do: dominate their political, economic and cultural environment for the strategic objective of meeting the crucial need of the citizenry for social order, prosperity, freedom, and dignity. States and nations that are unable to fulfil these needs, you rightly pointed out, are neither sustainable nor secure. Present Nigeria is that nightmare state you warned so many years ago could emerge if appropriate policy steps were not taken.

It is all very well to blame ChevronTexaco for treating the people of Ugboegungun worse than vermin. But the oil company has been able to get away with murder these past decades because the Nigerian state has lost the capacity to regulate the activities of local and foreign social and business actors, including the malign and malicious among them. And such western oil companies as ChevronTexaco do not act alone, without local support. As I write, Sola Omole, the company's spokesman and spin doctor extraordinary, is busy working the phones, speaking from both sides of his mouth and assuring concerned Nigerians and the international community that Chevron is the embodiment of corporate social responsibility, that it is the quintessence of a caring company that protects the interests of its stakeholders, and that it is doing all it can, in the face of 'great difficulties' to provide social amenities in its host communities.

All these are lies of course. In Where Vultures Feast, Oronto and I accused Chevron of procuring mercenaries to murder community people in Ilaja and Ijoland, and Sola Omole of not only aiding and abetting this grisly act but also lying about it. Where Vultures Feast is available in book shops in Nigeria and in the major American cities. It is also available on such on- line book shops as amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. I am not aware that Mr Omole and his sponsors have applied to a US court to ban the distribution of the book on the grounds of libellous content. Nor have we the authors be charged to court. These have not happened for the simple reason that everything we wrote about Chevron in the book is true. Curiously though, Sola Omole is still walking about a free man, and worse, continuing his well-paid work of holding the hapless and unprotected women, men and children of the Niger delta down to be raped by western interests. Mr Omole is neither British nor American. He is a Nigerian; one of us. And the Nigerian state, ravaged from within and without, has not been able to raise a finger to admonish her erring son. To echo Saro-Wiwa a few minutes before he was murdered in Port Harcourt Prison: 'What kind of country is this?' It is, as I said, now fashionable to blame western multinationals operating in Nigeria for all the country's woes. I am not saying that there are no grounds for this. A cursory glance at Royal/Dutch Shell's record in the oil- producing communities of the Niger delta will easily bear out the thesis that the overwhelming majority of these enterprises in the country do not create wealth but remove it; they do not promote social order and concord but spawn anarchy and disorder in order to make good out of the ensuring chaos; they do not promote democracy and development but work with successive dictatorial and corrupt regimes in the country to hold the forces working for good, democratic, and accountable governance, at local and national levels, down. Nnaemeka Achebe, former deputy head of Shell Nigeria clearly articulated the general attitude of these interests when he told members of the Irish Parliament in early 1996 that companies like Shell in Nigeria favour military dictatorship because a political arrangement whereby the overwhelming majority of Nigerians are removed from political and economic contention is good for profit.

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But this begs the question: where were the Nigerian state and the Nigerian people when these foreign interests and their local accomplices were pulling strings and manipulating levers to create political outcomes in the country favourable to their rapine designs? Were they sleeping when Nigeria's effort to indigenise and control its oil industry through the NNPC was progressively and systematically undermined to the extent that today the western oil companies, represented by the Shell- owned SNEPCO, are now moving to bury the joint venture arrangement with the government and strike out on their own?

In such countries as Mexico, the government and people not only dominate the oil industry, they set very strict standards and rules under which foreign companies operate. In other words, they have the likes of Shell and Chevron on a tight leash, and promptly punish them, and severely, when they indulge in the usualpractice of environmental pollution, human rights abuses, and cooking their books in order to evade the taxman. India, since independence in 1947, has progressively brought foreign firms operating in that country firmly under control, permitting them to participate in economic activities but only in so far as they do not undermine national social and economic progress.

Nigeria, it must be admitted, began well in this regard. It was the military government in which you played such a pivotal role that enacted a series of edicts and decrees in the late 1960s and early 1970s designed to bring the then fledgling oil industry, dominated by such majors as Shell and British Petroleum, under the auspices and guidance of an intelligent and forward-looking national framework designed to take ownership of the nation's strategic resources and bend them to the great task of national development. It is significant that these nationalist pillars erected by your generation of technocrats to protect the country and its people from predatory interests have toppled progressively as the cords holding state and society together have weakened. In other words, Chevron can do what it has been doing in Itsekiri land these past decades for the simple reason that there is no Nigerian state to hold it accountable; whose moral and political presence it would be constrained to factor into its corporate strategy. To put it bluntly, the labouring peasants of Ugborodo are like chicken to Chevron's hungry kite. And Mother hen? That, sir, is the question.

Mother hen is prostrate, battered to the ground by a succession of little men and women masquerading as statesmen and visionaries. The Nigerian revolution you spoke so passionately and eloquently about has been ambushed by graft, political illiteracy, and a stunning inability to see the larger picture, to see where Nigeria and Africa fits in a world that turns on fierce competition for diminishing resources, and tailor policy, nationally and continentally, to ensure that our people are not reduced to fodder by those who have arrogated to themselves the right to do with the earth's wealth as they please.

Nigeria in October 1960 was not a perfect federal state. But the founding mothers and fathers recognised that the way to go about creating the Nigeria of our collective dreams was to begin with creating a fair, and just compact between the state and the complex of communities, ethnic, religious, regional, and occupational, that constituted it. The Independence constitution was robustly federal in vision, temperament, and structure. It recognised that a measured dose of local autonomy would conduce to national stability and prosperity. It recognised that unity in diversity was not a contradiction in terms, but a brilliant tool of political engineering designed to turn fatal human weaknesses into strength - creating enough social and economic space for distinct and imagined communities to pursue their various destinies unhampered by their neighbours, but also collaborating with them in key arenas out of mutual interest.

This hopeful and daring experiment was put to an end in January 1966 when the young angry majors sacked the First Republic. And it has been down -hill since.

But I argue that temporary setbacks need not turn into permanent disasters. The United States fought off imperial Britain to secure and consolidate her independence. Then she too was convulsed in a civil war that pitted north against south, a conflagration that nearly dismembered the nation. The argument turned on alternative economic visions for the new republic. Southern planters wanted to keep their African slaves, roll back the wheel of industrialisation that was creeping in on the cotton and tobacco plantations of Alabama and Mississippi, and generally live off the land like feudal grandees stuck in a time warp. Northern industrialists would have none of this. Britain and continental Europe were rapidly industrialising. Their entrepreneurs were fanning out into the world, taking choice picks of raw materials and converting these into manufactured

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goods and making staggering fortunes out of it. America had to join the scramble or risk being re-colonised, this time by vastly more superior economic forces. The southern grandees stood in the way. Entreaties and sober explanations did not make them budge. National interest dictated that these cogs in the wheel of progress be removed, forcibly if it came to that. The civil war was the result. When the gun smoke cleared, the southern planters had been reduced to historical curiosities. America surged forward to embrace the future. The powerful nation that bestrides the world today like a Colossus has its roots in that bloody war when thinking men with the courage of their conviction did what had to be done.

The difference between the American civil war and the tragedy that was the Biafra-Nigeria conflict is that while the former was fought on grounds of clear economic and moral issues, with the overarching national interest the driving force, the Nigerian civil war was born of petty and parochial political considerations, designed to serve the short term and short-sighted interests of political entrepreneurs and their foreign accomplices who saw the young nationonly as a cow to be milked without thought. When the gun-smoke cleared, the victors proceeded to do just that: milk the cow without thought. That is why the cow is now dying. I argue, sir, that the dying cow can be given a new lease of life. I also argue that you and other patriots of your vision and temperament can play a pivotal role in this project of national regeneration. Some would find it curious that I, a relatively young man, would fly against the wind of prevailing orthodoxy and its hymn sheet of 'It's time for younger people to govern' and call on certain members of the Independence generation to return to the trenches and salvage the nation.

I should like to clarify matters here. I am intensely proud of my generation, the group of young Nigerians who graduated from institutions of higher learning in the country in that long harmattan of discontent - 1982 - 1987 - when the likes of Shehu Shagari, Muhammadu Buhari, and Ibrahim Babangida, were tearing Nigeria limb from limb. We fought this perfidy as best as we could, with the modest tools at our disposal. I would argue that the finest moment of this generation was, and still is, 1993 when, fighting shoulder to shoulder as journalists, human rights and pro-democracy activists, and trade unionists, they helped force Babangida out of power.

This is no mean achievement. We lost lives - dear friends, comrades, colleagues, lovers, neighbours. Some lost their careers, for life. Some emerged out of those trenches emotional and physical wrecks, the shadow of the happy, purposeful, and well- adjusted individuals they once were. Yet others fled into exile, to dry up in the spiritual desert of Europe and America. My generation is still counting the cost as I write; still trying to come to terms with the holocaust that is October 1979 - May 1999. And this, I think, is one of the primary reasons for its seeming inaction in the face of the tragedy that is about to befall Nigeria yet again, three years into the Obasanjo presidency. A dog licking its wounds from a previous conflict is not the keenest of mai guards. It tends to be self-absorbed; disoriented; even self-pitying. Wise counsel would urge that it be given a breather.

But we need to realise that the new challenge is not simply that of forcing a military dictatorship out of power, but one of re- dreaming Nigeria, re-articulating what constitutes the core national interest, and using this as a basis for constructing what I term the New Nigeria Project. This is a big task, a task for young activists full of sap and strength. But also a task for seasoned statesmen of your calibre, equipped with the vision, patience, and wisdom only age and deep learning can confer. To pull down a termite-infested house like the one that Babangida and Abacha built required strength and courage. But to rebuild it on wiser and more enduring pillars? That is a task for philosophers and statesmen.

I should like to outline in summary, what I consider as the main pillars of the New Nigeria Project. These are as yet tentative thoughts: The Nigerian state, it is now obvious to all, suffers from a legitimacy deficit. State and society do not fit, the former breathing down on, and suffocating the latter. This structural misfit, as I have argued severally in this column, is at the heart of the Nigerian crisis. It needs to be corrected. In other words, what am saying is that the argument for an intelligent restructuring of the Nigerian state need to be won; not in the OPC and Ohaneze sense of it ('We want regionalism because the North has been ruling since 1967') but simply because it is the right and sensible thing to do, yielding a win-win outcome for all in the country, in south and north alike.

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This would necessarily involve a new constitutional compact between state and people. The 'Federalist' debate is as old as the country itself. What is required now is creating the critical political and economic mass necessary to make the idea of 'restructuring for development' the basis of a new politics in Nigeria. Nigeria's economic and political elites, north and south of the Niger, have to be convinced that it is in their object interest that the national political framework be altered in such a manner as to free up society and unleash the creative genius of its various elements. The only reason why Nigeria is reliant on oil as its key source of foreign exchange is because present politics and policy punishes enterprise and resourcefulness, centralises power and resources in Abuja, and asks the rest of us to simply sit down and wait for Shell to sell the oil and give us the dollars to share. The debate needs to be shifted from complaints of 'marginalisation' to arguments for 'devolution for development.' Those in the Niger Delta who wave the flag of 'resource control because of the area's abundant oil reserves are short-sighted. What will our riverine communities subsist on when the oil runs out? Those in the north opposed to restructuring, fearing that they will lose out on the oil have no sense of their past. The great trading states of Hausaland, with Kano city as its crown jewel, were not built on oil. The debate needs to transcend the parochial politics of oil. There are larger issues involved here, key of which is the crafting of a new Nigerian state where the centre is rich because the regions are rich, where the centre is powerful because the regions are powerful, where the centre is virtuous because the regions are the source of all virtue.

I have been following Dr Patrick Utomi's arguments for a new Nigeria that can take advantage of on-going global shifts in the division of labour and make good out it closely. Dr Utomi stands on solid ground when he censors President Obasanjo for building a multi-billion naira stadium in Abuja instead of new railway lines to move goods and people more efficiently in the country. The New Nigeria Project will seek to address the economic illiteracy on which politics and policy in the Obasanjo presidency turns. It will have to set out clear, measurable, and achievable tasks, linked to deadlines. To reiterate, it will have to reframe Nigerian politics so that it is animated by, and nourished on the important question: How do we achieve the nation and in doing so, achieve ourselves?

This, sir, is task for giants, moral and intellectual. It may well be that Nigeria will prove yet again a headstrong child, insisting on walking the path of self-destruction and laughing wise counsel to scorn. But there is also the tantalising possibility that the child, beaten into a coma by the neighbourhood bully in a stolen army uniform these several decades, has learnt its lessons and is now eager to learn and make amends. There is window of opportunity here.

Nigeria's economic and political elites are not thinking. Someone must now think for them. They do not see the dark clouds gathering in the horizon; someone needs to make them look up at the sky, to make them see the link between the tide of armed robbery that has now enveloped our cities and the raging sea of anarchy, powered by the young, poor, and hopeless that will batter them and the nation into oblivion if they do not act quickly. My work here in Oxford is done. Last week, wading though the book stacks in the Bodleain for perhaps the last time, my thoughts went back to your generation, what you must have felt in Oxford as you finished your studies and prepared your mind for the tasks ahead. Excitement? Hope? Trepidation? Or a mixture of al three? Mine is a bitter cup, calling out to you and others like you for help in the great Nigeria project some four decades later, instead of striding forth confidently from the sunlit quadrangle of St Peter's College to help build on what your generation has left behind. I do this because much of what you built has been pulled down, squandered, trampled underfoot.

Nigeria has to be rebuilt. And it is not a task for one generation. Ugborodo is one lament too many.

Sept 2002

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