Dr. Chris Ekiyor as the president of the Ijaw Youth Council, IYC told |Saturday Vanguard that the organisation has impacted positively in the lives of the people in the Niger delta.  He spoke on the Henry Okah question and more. Please read

 
Nigeria runs a federal constitution with the federating states expected to run autonomous governments. They are expected to provide these social amenities you spoke about and also provide also infrastructure. Does it not concern you that the states of the Niger Delta  have not put to good use their own share of the federal allocations

I tell you the way the Nigerian federation is constituted and arranged is such that it pays lip service to the letters of the constitution. What is happening in the Nigerian federation if you’re not technically involved, you will just take this charade of an argument which states that the states are not performing.

I give it to you that the Nigerian state is a failed state. I will draw an analogy to illustrate the head and the rest of the body. When you see a mad man on the streets, he appears tattered parading everywhere with dirty foots. Very unkept because he hasn’t taken a bath for so long. The body system is still functional, in that if he eats food it will digest and when he goes to the toilet he will successfully defecate.  But the irony is that his head is malfunctioning. So the reflection of the head is what you see in the body’s physical appearance. So I keep saying that the federation should be held responsible. If you have genuinely committed federal government which of course has the largest chunk the national resources embarking on developmental projects, dealing with corruption decisively, then the state governments would have no other option than to key into the philosophy of good governance.

So once the governors key in, the local government chairmen would automatically embrace it as well. But what you have now is that before the council chairman gets his allocation, the governor would have taken more than half of it for his own purpose, so he too, because he is as dirty as the governor spends it prodigally. And the vicious circle just goes on and on.  And the National Assembly and other people in Abuja who share the money just keep sharing the money uncontrolled.

Who would hold any governor accountable when there no single federal infrastructure working in the states? If there are good standard federal roads, medical centres, teaching hospitals, then you can say the states are not functioning. But here the federal government has lost what it takes to lead. So there is a passing around of the bulk and that’s why we need a total overhaul.

We do not have a federation yet. What we have is a centre collecting revenue and re-distributing. It makes everybody lazy. Let every state go and truly be independent, generate funds and pay taxes to the centre. The more money you generate, the more tax you pay to the centre. The oil producing states would then be the el dorado of the country. A place like Bayelsa state would turn out to be like the American state of Texas, because of the massive competition and all these hue and cry of the people will no longer be directed at the federal government.

 It would now be channeled directly to the governors. And because the governors are nearer the people than the president, the people of Bayelsa would ask for the head of their governor, rather than the president’s. The supreme court of the federation would also have the constitutional power to probe a non-performing state

governor. The governor can be charged for corruption and other vices in the civil courts which are empowered to handled such matters.

The system is a cabal of corrupt people administering. The other day one mad minister said there were too many cars in the country and advocated that the people resort to bicycle riding.  And then I went to the UK and discovered that almost everybody own a car. This your Lagos they call mega city, there are no roads here. Smaller counties in the US have too much roads - so the reverse is the case scenario. Take an aerial view of Lagos you will see clusters of houses everywhere. The reverse is the case in the US. You will see cluster of roads everywhere. And immediately you get to the place you’ll discover there are enough houses in a small country much more than what you have in Lagos, because these places are structured and planned for the long term habitation of human beings.

The long term effect of that bastardisation of the Nigerian evil governance is that young people are nolonger motivated to go to school anymore. Except probably to an extent in the West here because it has become entrenched as part of their social fabric from days of the first Western government.

Whereas in the North, East and South there is no education. The Ibos are more interested in going to Dubai to import every garbage into the country because nothing works here. Whey would anybody aspire to higher education where he would not get jobs on graduation. It is even worse in our region because after toiling through all the educational systems nobody would consider you for a job placement. Going to school in an Ijaw community is like the proverbial camel passing through the eye of a needle and at the end, no job for you.

A graduate earns about N18,000 a month - that’s less than $200. Divide that by 30 days and it translates to less than $1 per day which is less than N200 a day. So what can you do? It encourages stealing because everybody now cuts corners to meet their family needs. The issue of wage increase must also come because there is so much money in circulation.

In Canada, there was a recent discovery of oil in Canberra and the government doled out $400 to everybody just because they struck oil.  Here we are enjoying oil boom with so much excess crude oil cash to stash away, yet the citizens wallow in abject poverty. They expect you pay tax; taxes you cannot see what they are using the money for. The billions that this federal government has stolen from people in the name of VAT has not translated to any meaningful development.

The legislature is a crazy arm they are just there entertaining the public with funny probes that amount to nothing. They are not making laws for the country to work. It is a jamboree for mad people everywhere trying to find space to occupy. It is a crab syndrome!

You touched a cord. The crab syndrome. Can’t this also be likened to what is going on in the creeks where every army occupy a space without a central command?

Yes, yes, yes. You see, in every movement there are revolutionary cops and reactionary elements, who are counter revolutionary. These groups live together and the beauty is that they also check one another. Unfortunately for the Ijaw people, we have over played it. The reactionary elements are money seeking individuals who are ready to sell their lives for a pot of porridge. In so doing, they throw dirty water into people’s meals.

We have challenges I must confess, even among the Ijaw national leadership. There is so much distrust and pull-him-down (PHD) syndrome. We’re nolonger looking at merits anymore, rather, we are looking at: What can I get from all these? Unfortunately, the Ijaw are known for merit. Our fathers advocated merit and so if you meet a fellow Ijaw man in position of authority, he will first seek to know if you merit what you seek.

Infact, the Ijaw have never been back-benchers within the Nigerian society.
In every field of endeavour you will find an Ijaw who can hold his own. If you are looking for literary giants in the land, there are the likes of Professor JP Clark, Gabriel Okara and the rest of them who will stand head and shoulders with the likes of Professors Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. But we’ve always been held back by the PHD elements.

What we are doing now at the council level is to galvanised a kind of unity that the reactionary elements would not be able to penetrate and continue their destabilisation acts in collusion with the federal government to short change the struggle. Once we identify you as an enemy of the struggle, we’ll lock our doors against you and treat you as one. We will get there soon.

Already, we’ve started a move to checkmate corruption within the Ijaw community. We have written a letter to Sylva, (Governor Timipre Sylva, Bayelsa state) demanding for an all inclusive and a more open governance. We’ll do same where there are Ijaw in authority - NDDC, ministers, commissioners etc.

The minister of petroleum was talking on TV the other day about building mega filling stations. That is utter rubbish! In the past three years they’ve been talking about building mega filling stations without any concrete evidence. There are no petroleum products in the creeks and here he talking about mega stations in three years without evidence to show for it. The commitment is not there, that is what I have against this government.

After 12 months of negotiation with the federal government and cease fire, we don’t know what to tell our boys again. And it is not yet uhuru, I keep telling them. We would soon lose ground and would return to the hey days of kidnaping, hostage taking, altercations with the Nigerian Armed Forces and a general breakdown of law and order in the region. Why should anybody respect the law when they are hungry in their stomach?

To what extent is the trial of Henry Okah, affecting your stand with the federal government?

Sincerely, in all my interviews, I have tried not to talk about Henry Okah, as an individual. This is because the issues we the Ijaw are addressing are beyond Henry Okah, Asari Dokubo or me. It is even beyond Isaac Adaka Boro. It is an Ijaw issue. Anyone who decides to get involved should not reduce the issues to himself. So I like not to mix Henry Okah and the struggle.
He is a component of the struggle that with or without him must continue. Adaka Boro died, the struggle continued. Asari was locked up while the struggle went ahead. He is locked up and the struggle is still moving ahead. Our concern here is that in our search for justice, Henry Okah, should not be treated like a nobody. He is an Ijaw man and stood for the struggle and we are saying that that kind of criminal justice administration they want to apply is not acceptable to us. He should be treated with respect and be given a fair hearing in a public court.

 So that whatever he says will be known to the general public. Why he got involved in the struggle will be known to the public. Okah’s secret trial is not acceptable to us as a people. The secret trial itself is capable of igniting fresh crisis within the region because he has his loyalists who are committed to his vision, as he is committed to the larger vision of freedom. Give him an open trial, he is bound to spill some truth and if found guilty, send him to jail. What they are charging him for, treasonable felony. There must be some other fellow co-conspirators in this vicious circle, now they intend to shield those people for him to be a scapegoat.


How long is your cease-fire with government still going to hold?
I have just said that one year of cease-fire is enough time, and for now we cannot guarantee anything. I as president of Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) cannot guarantee anything today again. I don’t have any story to tell the people. I am already requesting to meet with the president and the committee again, to let us find out what to do next. I can’t go back. I have been going back and forth from the creeks with no results. I tell them there is hope. But they are not seeing this hope. I see this hope because we’re planning. The people in the creeks are not seeing this hope. They hope that they will see is when they see actions and they feel it. And I have told the government to roll the machines into the neighbourhood. Initially, it was said that people cannot move in; people are moving in now.

So what is delaying the process of developmental activities? Roll the machines in and show more commitment and we’ll keep buying more time. The government may be banking on its perceived superior fire power to go and over whelm the people in the creeks. I wish them luck if that is the path they choose to go.

You don’t think there are genuine fears that it is still very dangerous to move into the creeks to do actual construction work with all the kidnapping taking place? Are you saying investors can really move into the Niger Delta region?

All those talks are propaganda jargon. Right now Messrs Setraco and Julius Berger construction companies are handling projects in the region. As I speak with you right now they are constructing the East-West road. The oil companies are still discovering new wells and laying pipes as we speak now. Daewoo is working there, Agip is working there, Shell is working. If anybody shut down their rigs its because of their lack of commitment to the people or their host communities.

In Ogoniland for instance, there have not been any cases of kidnapping but they are shutting down. For ten or fifteen years now they shut down the place. And the government is telling Shell they can leave because they cannot find a working relationship with the host communities. These multinational companies must get to develop the communities.