The Unholy Alliance Against Nigeria

Friends, the opposition is sinister. Their bile is coming from a position of deep envy of a man who is proudly proud because he is not a rogue, because he genuinely wants to do the best for this country . Like I always say, I have looked into the heart of this President, my dear Bubu, I see innocence and purity-naivety also. I heard his heartfelt hurt -am I not ruling according to the Constitution? You are sir, we must assure you, but what is constitution when people are angry? Are they complaining by the book? When did you see Madam due process challenge your due process with records. They say you are marginalising them? Have they challenged this position in the law courts. Have they ever brought the facts of the marginalisation? I personally have looked at the Federal Capital Commission (FCC) website and analysed it In all MDAs that are in the South, there is FCC skewed towards the South. In fact in all institutions that are in the SE that are federal, 95% of staff in them are indigenes and no other state is crying marginalisation. FCC is not only about the service chiefs? Did the President not honour the Constitution in all Constitutional appointments like Ministers? Is the SE not represented in the Ministries according to law? The service chiefs in under the purview of the CinC and not subject to FCC and this is also law so no one can accuse the President of flouting the law especially as there are 4 positions to 6 zones. Is the NC or NW quarrelling about Marginalisation in the service chiefs?

I challenge, no, I dare SENATOR ABARIBE, OSITA CHIDOKA, KINGSLEY MUOGHALU, MADAM OBY to take the President to Court and challenge the alleged Marginalisation. If they do not do this, they are traducers and there is nothing in them that is truthful, only an agenda.

Twitter’s owner Jack Dorsey did what it has a right to do, that is fine. Nigeria as a sovereign has also done what she has a right to do-suspend Twitter and ask that all SM practitioners in Nigeria must register. I have never been ‘prouder’ of my President as I am now and finally Lai Mohammed is awake. I pray that the Attorney General Malami will also wake up so that our nation can be saved from the madness of unruliness.

On February 23, 1966, barely a month after first coup d’etat in Nigeria which took place on the 29th of January 1966, an Army officer of Ijaw descent, who was born in Oloibiri in 1938 and was from Kaima in present day Bayelsa, named Isaac Jasper Adaka Boro, declared the Niger Delta Republic (NDR) as an independent nation. He was just 27 years old and was at that time a student at the University of Nigeria Nsukka.

Adaka Boro was a radical through and through. He was a student union activist, who had once taken the Nigerian Government to court to challenge the 1963 Constitution. He trained a motley group of young men literarily behind his father’s compound and declared them as his army that would fight against the Nigerian forces and steer the NDR into independence from Nigeria. He called his ‘army’ the Niger Delta Volunteer Force (NDVF). As was to be expected, his secession was short-lived. It lasted a mere 12 days.

It is instructive that the secession was crushed by the Nigerian forces led by none other than Odumegwu Ojukwu who at that time in 1966 was the Military Governor of the Eastern Region. Let us recall that at the time of the declaration of the NDR, General Aguiyi Ironsi was the Head of State and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and he had appointed military Governors for the regions with Ojukwu being the military Governor of the Eastern Region where most of the Niger Delta states (Rivers and Bayelsa) were placed. Present Delta State and Edo State were in the Mid-west Region at that time.

Was Adaka Boro intent on the secession or was the declaration more of a cry for redress against perceived marginalisation and/or exploitation?

Let us read Boro’s own words on the day he declared the secession:

“Today is a great day, not only in your lives, but also in the history of the Niger Delta. Perhaps, it will be the greatest day for a very long time. This is not because we are going to bring the heavens down, but because we are going to demonstrate to the world what and how we feel about oppression…. Remember your 70 year old grandmother who still farms to eat, remember also your poverty stricken people and then, remember too, your petroleum which is being pumped out daily from your veins, and then fight for your freedom.”

The main reasons for the secession as given by Adaka Boro were the exploitation and marginalisation of the Niger Deltans (the ijaws specifically) by Nigerian Government in general and ironically, by the Igbos of the Eastern Region of Nigeria in particular. The allocation of oil resources which predominantly was being extracted from the Niger Delta region was not equitably being utilised according to the grievance laid out by Boro as will be seen below.

History records that oil was discovered at Oloibiri in 1956 after several years of exploration and that the first oil fields came on stream in 1958. Adaka’s grouse was that the region that owned the oil fields did not enjoy development but rather, many of the infrastructure that proceeded from the oil wealth were located elsewhere in the Eastern Nigeria. These are Boro’s words when he was giving an allocutus before Justice Phil Ebosie of the Port Harcourt Assizes that tried him and his fellow revolutionists on a 9-count charge of treason before he was sentenced to death:

“Economic development of the area is certainly the most appalling aspect. There is not even a single industry. The only fishery industry which ought to be situated in a properly riverine area is sited about 80 miles inland at Aba. The boat yard at Opobo had its headquarters at Enugu . … Personnel in these industries and also in the oil stations are predominantly non-Ijaw.”

“Most of the youths were so frustrated with the general neglect that they were ready for any action led by an outstanding leader to gain liberty…. we were clenched in tyrannical chains and led through a dark alley of perpetual political and social deprivation. Strangers in our own country! Inevitably, therefore, the day would have to come for us to fight for our long-denied right to self-determination.”