Calling Allison Ayida Page 1 of 5 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 Nigeria 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 Shehu Shagari, Muhammadu Buhari, 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 http://www.nigerdeltacongress.com/carticles/calling_allison_ayida.htm 7/21/2008 Calling Allison Ayida Page 2 of 5 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 Africa), 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.