PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

FSR and Government’s Resort To Blackmail (II)

ndajika@yahoo.com

Except for Malam Nasir El-Rufa’i, a former minister of the Federal Capital Territory, and Pastor Tunde Bakare, the convener of the Save Nigeria Group and the vice-presidential candidate of the CPC in the last elections, who the advert by the Ijaw Youth Council barely stopped short of naming, it did not directly identify the names of those in the group that it alleged were after the president.

Even then the signatories to the advert hardly left anyone in doubt that the group was the usual suspect of Muslim Northerners whose presumed crime was that they had insisted the ruling party obey the provisions of power rotation among the country’s six geo-political zones written in cold print in its own charter and to which the president himself was a signatory.

“For the first time in Nigeria’s 51 years,” Mr. Kuromiema, et. al. said, “they are not in power and the current president is not their anointed candidate.” These villains, they said in a thinly disguised attempt at pitching Igbos against Northerners and Muslims against Christians, “are the ones breeding and sponsoring Boko Harm, (the) devilish group (that) is currently killing innocent Igbos and Christian minorities in the North.”

Obviously, the fact that the group has killed many Muslims, including leading Islamic clerics who disagreed with the sect’s version of Islam, seems lost on the IYC leaders.

Even more obviously, the fact that Malam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, a scion of the most powerful emirate in the North (Kano) – the most authoritative is Sokoto – is the most vigorous and rigorous defender of FSR - Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, the finance  and co-ordinating minister included - seems to have escaped the blinkered eyes of the leaders of the IYC.

Likewise the fact that the protest against the FSR has been organised and led by leaders of a coalition of labour unions, civil society and other organizations, supported by legislators in both chambers of the National Assembly across ethnic, sectional and sectarian divides, seems to have escaped the hate-filled eyes and minds of the IYC leaders.

Not surprisingly, they proceeded in their bigoted publication to single out the North for attack over the war on the FSR and to renew its call for “Resource Control.” The Kaduna Refinery, they declared accordingly, is “an illegal refinery” and they will “no longer allow any drop of oil extracted from Ijawland to be refined outside Ijawland.”

They also threatened to “secure” the country’s oil rigs should PENGASSAN, the union of oil and gas workers, carry out its threat of joining the NLC/TUC strike if the federal government did not reach an agreement with the unions by the penultimate weekend.

The IYC concluded its publication by issuing the ominous threat that “President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan may well be the last President of a united Nigeria. So be it.”  

That the government is complicit in all these crude blackmail and threats is obvious from its deafening silence over the threats, in sharp contrast with its vigorous and loud reactions to the threat from Boko Haram.

In blaming the North for the Delta region’s grinding poverty in spite of its oil riches, it is obvious that Chief Clarke himself has all too soon forgotten - and militants like Dokubo have probably never read - some of the things the Ijaw leader told newspapers about the causes of the region’s poverty as recently as less than five years ago.

For example, in an interview in The Nation (August 11, 2007) he decried what he said in effect was the kid-glove treatment of the governors of the Delta region by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in its war on corruption. “Nigerians,” he said, “are worried ...why recent activities of EFCC resulting in the arrest of certain governors in the country has not affected the former governors of the Niger Delta who were known all over the country and world as the most corrupt and investigated governors by EFCC.”

Earlier in the interview, he had talked about how he could not defend the governors of the region over allegations of corruption during the 2005 National Conference under President Olusegun Obasanjo. “It would be recalled that in 2005 at the National Conference,” he said, “the South-South delegates under my leadership...could not defend accusations by other delegates from the other five zones that our governors were corrupt and that if the 13 per cent paid as derivation to develop the area had been judiciously utilized, the crisis in Niger Delta would have reduced if not ended. Sadly we had no answer because the truth is bitter and we could only tell them it was an internal problem which we were going back to address.”

Apparently the chief could not make up his mind whether the issue of the alleged corruption by the governors of Niger Delta region as a, if not the, primary source of the grinding poverty in the region was a family or a national affair.    

In yet another interview in The Guardian (September 9, 2007) the Ijaw leader wondered why people were talking about the alleged corruption of “(Saminu) Turaki (the governor of Jigawa State) and other governors who received very little money from the Federation Account whereas (Peter) Odili (Rivers) received about N 20 billion...(James) Ibori (Delta) received over N 10 billion monthly.”

“But where is the money?” he asked. “Does Asaba look like a capital city after eight years? It does not. So that is the problem. Benin is worse than when we were there in 1975 during (Dr. Samuel) Ogbemudia’s administration.”

Even more damning about who bears responsibility for the sorry state of the Delta region were the remarks of Professor Sam Aluko, veteran Economist, in an interview in The Country weekly newspaper (May 20-26,2002), since rested. “When I was chairman of NEIC (National Economic Intelligence Commission),” he said, “we monitored OMPADEC. It was calamitous. You would weep for the people seeing what their own leaders did for themselves. They were living like lords and ladies at the expense of their own people. Now they are blaming Nigeria.” Aluko’s wife of many decades, incidentally, happens to be Esan from the South-South.

In threatening to revive their demand for resource control, it is obvious that the hot-headed militants of the IYC have either never read the wise counsel of Dr. Sunday Mbang, the former Primate of the Methodist Church who comes from the oil producing Akwa-Ibom State and who was himself a fiery president of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), in an interview in the Vanguard (April 1, 2001), or the militants have chosen to ignore his prudent words.

Asked by the newspaper if he believed in resource control, he replied emphatically that he did not. “We are,” he said, “living in a funny country. Those who are pushing for resource control may have resources today. Do they know tomorrow? The southern governors pushing for resource control because it suits their purpose for the moment are being short-sighted. If the oil for which they are pushing for resource control gets exhausted today and tomorrow something more valuable is found in the north, what happens? They go to the north to beg them to reverse the situation?”

The retired senior cleric concluded by telling the champions of resource control in effect to shut up. “Don’t,” he said, “talk about resource control because when you start the resource control grammar you don’t know where it will end. Now it is the state, before you know it, it will be the local government. Before you know it, it will be the community... I come from Akwa-Ibom and I can assure you if you press for resource control in Akwa-Ibom, the local government where those things are located will soon say they should control them. And there will be no end to it. So let us be careful.”

When President Jonathan declared his candidature for the presidency at the Eagle Square, Abuja, on September 18, 2010, he said he “...came to launch a campaign of ideas not calumny. I have come to preach love, not hate. I have come to break you away from the divisive tendencies of the past which has slowed down our drive to nationhood. I have no enemies to fight.”

Very fine and inspiring words. Trouble is, the way the man’s presidency has all too often winked at, and possibly sometimes even instigated, the divisive utterances and tendencies of so many elderly and not-so-elderly leaders and groups from his region and his religion suggests he never meant what he preached that fine day sixteen months ago.

Truth be told, the man has talked and acted more like he is the president of a section of this country than that of all Nigerians. In spite of those fine and inspiring words, his presidency has been the most divisive and clueless the country has ever had.