‘Amnesty programme should be retooled to enhance environmental justice, resource control’
Posted 22 March 2011, by Charles Okonji, Nigerian Compass, compassnewspaper.com
The struggle for environmental justice in Ogoni has claimed lives and sent many people into exile. The International Project Coordinator, Ogoni Solidarity Forum (OSF), Mr. Barry Wuganaale, in this interview with CHARLES OKONJI, laments the plight of the Ogoni people, following the degradation of their land through oil exploration and production by International Oil Companies (IOCs), among other issues.
HOw would you assess the oil companies’ activities in the Ogoni land?
The enormity of my grammatical expression will fail me if I try to analyze the disasters and mess of Shell and their Joint Venture partners. But let me put like this, the companies have failed economically, environmentally and even within the spheres of human rights, which is intertwined with the geo-political oppression of the Ogoni region.
The operations of oil companies are a smack and an insult to transparency, decency and respect for the indigenes. Historically, how did Shell enter into Ogoniland? Not even my father’s generation can explain exactly how the company started drilling in Ogoniland. Many Ogoni people do not know that Shell did test-run-explorations in Ogoni for some years before the full scale operation in 1958. The question is: what is the amount of oil that was drilled in those years of test running operations? Economically, Ogoni will continue to suffer the impacts of the systematic strangulation by oil operators in its domain because Shell and its allies facilitated a criminal sequestration of Ogoni ethnic nationality. Ecologically, I think God is more an Ogoni than any other tribe because it does not add up how we have managed to exist against the well marshaled lethal war, which is in the order of a heartless conquistador and conscription.
The Federal Government has said that it has made some significant impact in addressing the environmental injustice in the Niger Delta. But do you believe this administration has done much to guarantee environmental justice in the region?
The term “environmental justice” is a very broad concept that is strange to third world countries, Africa in particular. So, I do not want to be under the illusion that this government will be able to facilitate, talk more of guaranteeing environmental justice for the Niger Delta. This government like others before it lacks the courage to correct all the environmental injustices; it lacks the will-power to undo the structures that breed endemic and systemic corruption which propels the compromise of environmental standard. To facilitate environmental justice means that the government has to be anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, fight against the local elites, support the working class and dedicated to drastic and uncompromising change in the Nigerian socio-political landscape, and above all, to put in place stern legislations that conforms to international standard.
But from my observation of the key actor in this government – in the person Jonathan – even though he is a Niger Deltan, his style of leadership is not congruent with or tandem to the kind of radicalism that will be able to usher in the kind of transformation that is the bedrock for environmental justice. Environmental justice is holistic, which is built four main components, namely, political, economic, socio-cultural and biophysical or ecological. Of these four components, the singular most important factor is the political. Now, bearing in mind how Jonathan came into power, you will agree with me that he had been forced to conform to the whims and caprices of the political principalities that give the proverbial node to who become who in Nigerian politics and these are the same people that are scrambling for oil blocks here and there. Does he have the gut to oppose the same forces that installed him and are about to help him to continue as president? I do not think so. What I foresee is a president that will want to give what belong to Ceazer to Ceazer, and a tiny fragment of what the people want to the people.
Why is it that the Ogoni people, in spite of Shell’s appeal to them to sheathe the sword, still do not want the company to continue oil exploration and production in the area?
The late Ken Saro-Wiwa assisted the Ogoni people to develop an organic intellectualism that abhors colonialism. More than that, the Ogoni people have come to the conclusion that Shell is an agent of British colonialism, imperialism and modern slavery. Until you appreciate the paradigm of the Ogoni people on this matter you will continue to be shocked about the attitude of the Ogoni people.
Linked to that is the fact that the Ogoni ethnic nationality were taken for a ride for too long. Considered as the symbol of failure and imbecility by even their close neighbors, this flawed mind-set gave national and state governments the audacity to exude in the assurance that Ogoni will be their laboratory for every kind of diabolical political and economic scheming and subjugations for as long as history can remember.
When the Ogoni people decided to confront the demons that held them down, they understudied the roles of each stakeholder in their oppression and the entity that held the evil mechanization together was military aristocracy seasoned by lopsided constitutional apparatus. While the Nigerian nation state system was suppressing Ogoni, Shell was lubricating the wheel of oppression, and without Shell oiling that wheel, probably, the oppression would not have got to the extent that it did. Therefore, Shell, to the Ogoni people was not a just a company that did business with underhand practices, we have evaluated Shell as a structure of Ogoni slavery.
Succinctly, Nigerian nation state system is the slave dealer while Shell is the slave master, and you cannot change the mentality of slave master. And to add insult to injury, they killed Ken Saro-Wiwa. If Shell wants to come back to Ogoni, let them bring back Ken Saro-Wiwa, Dr. Barinem Kiobel, Daniel Gboko, Paul Levura, Felix Nuateh, Nordo Eewo, John Kpuinee, Saturday Doobee and Baribom Bera.
If there is no more oil exploration and production in Ogoni Land, how do you think the government will get the resources to develop the area?
How many barrels of oil did Abuja and Minna lands contribute to the oil that Nigeria has been selling to develop their places? The only interpretation that I can make out of your question is that if there was no oil in Ogoniland that we would have been worse off than we are. You are saying that there would not have been any need for Ogoni people to be considered as Nigerians. If our development as a constituent part of Nigeria is dependant on our oil, then we do not need Nigeria. I mean this accentuate our concern that when our oil runs dry as it will surely do one day, we shall be forgotten and even expunged and obliterated from the map of Rivers state where they manage to fix us. It confirms what Alhaji Tanko Yakassa said in 1993 that the Ogoni people should be relocated to the deserts in the north and our land turn into oil fields.
Let us put it this way, about 900 million barrels oil has been usurped from Ogoniland since 1958, now, the government should use part of what was stolen to develop our land first, and then we can talk about what should be contributed further. It is only Ogoni, whose leader in the caliber of Ken Saro-Wiwa that has been murdered in the way he was, the number of people that has been killed in Ogoni cannot be compared to any other part of Nigeria were oil is produced. If Ogoni will not be developed without our oil, let them allow us to drill the oil by ourselves and develop our land and our people. If the reason why the oil producing communities will be developed is because of their oil, in that case, all the oil producing communities not only the Ogoni people have no business being part of Nigeria. It goes to show that Nigeria is hanging on the flow of the crude oil; it means that Nigeria does not exist or exists only for oil. It means that Nigeria is a gossamer nation as disintegration is waiting around the corner.
What is your evaluation of the recent study on environmental degradation carried on Ogoni by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)?
I have only heard from other people and have seen the reactions of some Ogoni people in America. I also picked snippets of the report from news articles, but as a person who is familiar with the orientation that determines the operations of UNEP, I did not expect any substantial result from the process. I am not sure what Nigerian government and Shell wants to achieve from what they are planning to do in Ogoni. Nigerian government and Shell are merely attempting to side-step the issues that the Ogoni Bill of Rights raised.
What is your view of the entire Amnesty Programme? Is it working because their have been calls for its retooling in some quarters?
Generally, programmes and government’s plans in Nigeria and the whole of Africa, except South Africa to some degree, are always golden on paper and technically flawed, needless to say that implementation is usually problematic. The amnesty programme is not an exception in this regard, and as such I will like to rather focus on the philosophy.
If you look at it from the point that the government was concerned about the fact that some of the people who claimed to be militants were using the struggle to perpetrate crimes and the government had to think of ways of taming the trend, the programme has assisted in bit but more need to be done. But even on philosophy, one could say that it leaves rooms for abuse, manipulations and dubious political scheming to promote sectarian interest.
But overall, from the viewpoint of decriminalisation of the Niger Delta struggle, it has scored a few points. If you measure against the broad frame of what are the damages and benefits that resorting to arms has done to the image of the Niger delta, especially arms that are carried when the said militants lack sound political ideological basis that inform principled demands, the amnesty programme has succeeded.
I do not understand the amnesty programme to mean an end to the agitations of the peoples of the Niger Delta. I believe that the underlying philosophy is that the former militants should develop and deploy their intellectual capital and constructive engagements to press for your demands, which is to say that even though you drop your arms and get government paid for your studies to USA, Britain or Poland it shouldn’t stops you from still being an activist. However, the danger here is that most of the former militants are being streamed into courses and vocations that should enable them to get jobs and when people have got jobs are they still going to fight for their people.
So retooling the programme so that it has a mechanism that make the beneficiaries of the programme to continue to be part of the broad struggle for environmental justice linked to resource control for the Niger Delta will be proper. Otherwise, when Jonathan leaves, the next president will have his or her hand full trying to contend a new wave of militancy in the region.
There are views in different quarters that the Ogoni are currently not speaking with one voice. Is it true?
It depends on what you mean or interpret as the Ogoni people. The Ogoni masses know what they want and they are not swayed about that. There is no loftiness of political jargon and manipulations that will deceive the Ogoni people from what they believe. But if you are talking about the Ogoni people that are in the corridors of governmental structures, chiefs, supposed leaders and self-style leaders of the Ogoni people, then you are right. They are the people that are not speaking with one voice because they have lost touch with the masses.
They speak without Ogoni people. This to me is the least that he should have done for the Ogoni struggle. Mitee failed in this regard because he decided to graft into the Ogoni strange strategies into struggle. Mitee thinks Saro-Wiwa was wrong in motivating the Ogoni people to rely on mass action. When I met his programme officer, Legborsi Pyagbara at the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi, what I picked up from our discussion is that MOSOP under Mitee thinks that mass action is no longer relevant.
But what they fail to understand is that the Ogoni people had been oppressed for too long, and Saro-Wiwa took the historical oppression, politically subjugation, economic exclusivity and systemic bias against the Ogoni people as the raw material for the Ogoni struggle. Saro-Wiwa brought the struggle from the laboratory and library to the street, while Mitee took the Ogoni struggle from the street back to a particular laboratory and library. Mitee’s activism is distanced from the people, so aloof and typically western in approach; he believes that he will get Ogoni people their liberation through polished English grammar and some political theorization that will sedate the Nigerian system to sympathize with the Ogoni people over their plights.
That is Mitee’s philosophy, but how that will work in a cruel country like Nigeria that believes in raw power, I do not know. Mitee understand NGOlization, he does not believe in mass movement. He is a very intelligent lawyer and he knows that mass movement is the antidote to the elitism that betrayed the Ogoni people.
Today’s MOSOP is an NGO and that is why it has office bearers instead of a functional steering committee. Sadly, many of the people that are fighting him do not even know the difference between the operations and antecedence of an NGO and a mass movement. For me, I am not shocked, because if Ogoni people remembers how Mitee came into MOSOP, and particularly that he came into the movement from the top and from the grassroots they will know that Mitee’s operation can never take us to where we all hoped that we were going to reach. Mitee appears as a politician in some cases and in other instances he speaks as an activist. He is simply too weak to declare his stance. He tries to operate in both worlds such that the party politicians often wonder if he wants to control the two strands. Politicians respect activist but they do not like you as an activists if you try to encroach into their territories. Eventually, we have a situation where Mitee’s MOSOP and patty politicians are competing to speak on behalf of Ogoni because the politicians are no longer wary of saying things that will contradict MOSOP.
What is the role of the Ogoni Solidarity Forum in all this? Does OSF have any part in this whole episode?
No. OSF is operating within a define parameter for now, but we have the best interest in overall situation in Ogoni. To understand us, look at the history of South Africa struggle. The African National Congress (ANC) was formed in 1912, and when full scale apartheid was declared in 1948 with the election of National Party, the ANC started its struggle. The ANC became docile at a stage and sometime in 1961 or 1962, Robert Sobukwe and other comrades formed the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). It was the PAC that resurrected militancy like the burning of the passes in Sharpsville and 1976 student protest in Soweto. In the 1983 United Democratic Front (UDF) emerged to fight against a dummy election in 1984, and in the process strengthen mass civil disobedience which eventually pressured the apartheid government to agree to negotiate, and, some how, ANC came alive again.
What are the specific demands of the Ogoni in Republic of Benin?
Very simple and straight, there are hundreds of Ogoni people that were forced into exile for carrying out a legitimate demand. They did not carry arms and weapons. Instead, they were the ones who were at the receiving end of weapons and arms bought with oil money. It will be an irony that the Ogoni are not included in the process of empowering activists from the Niger Delta. So the Ogoni people in Benin Republic should be given scholarship opportunities, vocational trainings and resources for those of them that want to do business so that they can recover their lost years in refugee camps because of the persecution which agents of state and Shell master minded against them.
Has this administration done anything to meet the demands of the Ogoni, which is set in the Ogoni Bill of Rights?
The question should “what has Ledum Mitee and others that worked Ken Saro-Wiwa done to pressure the government to accede to the Ogoni Bill of Rights?’ Liberation has never given to the people in any part of the world; it has always been taken. But how are you going to take the liberation when all the senior comrades are either in party politics or begging for contracts from the government and building family empires?
What is your message to the Rivers State government in all this?
Since 1967 that the state was created, there had always been one big problem with the state, which is that administrations are usually the surrogates of some clique and sycophancy. The clique is build around the camaraderie of tribal lords and elites, but it was Peter Odili that took the sycophancy element to a new and unprecedented height because of his intoxication for high office and popularity.
The majority of the members of the present government are progenies of the Odili’s shenanigans, aristocracy and government of shameless opulence. We know that Governor Amaechi fell out with his former mentor and he is now trying to invent and assert his own political ideology and personality. He has been trying to depart from the old order and by so doing he has been struggling with the same forces that use to be is allies. He has attempted to woe the masses to his side but by so doing he is falling into the same trap of sycophancy and into building a new clique or trying to orient part of the usual group to know that he is the man in charge now.
My message for the government is that you cannot be for the people and for the comprador elite that blunder the state at the same time. If you not for the people, you are against the people. Period!
What are some of the international efforts the OSF is embarking on so that its demands can be met?
Currently, we have opened discussion with the International Desk of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the All African Conference of Churches (AACC), Friends of the Earth International, Amnesty International, Congress of Democratic Left (CDL) and other civil society and human rights groups whom we are mobilizing to pressure the government of Goodluck Jonathan to look into the issue as immediately as possible.
Specifically, can you tell us what the state of the Ogoni in Republic of Benin is like?
The Ogoni displaced asylum seekers and refugees are scattered in different towns and villages in Benin Republic because the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and the host nation all succumb to the ploy of the post-Abacha administrations that employed its international clout to attempt to eradicate the impacts of the Ogoni struggle internationally.
The coming of Obasanjo was designed to restore the lost place because there is no vacuum in international politics or politics for that matter. You will agree with me that Nigeria is a dominant force in the West African sub-region because the economy of their neighbours are linked to Nigerian hegemony, but more than most of the neighbours, Benin Republic closet appendage, so Obasanjo deployed the highest form of international relations seasoned with diplomatic bullying on some occasions to seduce the government of Benin Republic and the local office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to turn down asylum applications and refugee protection for the Ogonis that opposed the return of Shell.
The former president was brought into power to steady the ship for the Nigerian aristocrats and to entrench military comprador elitism, and in order to achieve that he pressured the international community to buy into the propaganda that the Ogoni struggle was against the military. Nigeria has always seen Africa as the centre piece for its foreign policy and the ECOWAS region as its domain of power, which it lost with the tones of dirt of Abacha, and the Ogoni refugees were viewed, as a dent on the international status of Nigeria and the ECOWAS agenda.
Ogonis were forcefully ejected from the UNHCR refugee camp in Kpomasse, people were severally arrested and detained. This situation and many other incidences forced the Ogoni people to move into nearby towns to Kpomasse, they even set-up make-shift camps for security purpose.
Being in exile or refugee is not a thing that any person enjoys because it incapacitates morally, psychologically and emotionally. There is no rosy refugee camp or situation under the sun and the Ogonis had always suffered in refugee camps since 1996, however, their plight of Ogonis assumed a mega-tragic turn from 1999 when General Olusegun Obasanjo took over the leadership of Nigeria for two reasons.
The greatest of theses attacks was occurred on the 25th and 29th of July 2000, when the government sent mercenaries to exterminate Ogonis, under the guise of coming to research an agricultural project in the official refugee were Ogonis are staying, they came with two government vehicles with registration numbers RVGH 155 and RHGH 175.
The vehicles went into the official refugee camp and it was apprehended with help of refugees from other nationalities. It was the same A. I Paragalda, the Nigerian embassy staff who led the Beninese army to rescue the vehicles in order to do away with the evidence. It was when I arrived Cape Town were I to meet one of the hired hit men or a person that was involved in the whole plan, a Rivers indigene.
He eventually fell out with the Odili administration and escaped to South Africa, he explained to me that the whole plan, why and how it flopped. The two vehicles were only part of a small convey, that an advance and hit squad had arrived Cotonou several days before the coming two government registered vehicle, why at Cotonou, some members of the hit squad could not convince themselves to kill innocent and poor refugees and an argument ensued. Those of members of the advance team that which to call off the hit moved to Accra – Ghana and decided to call the government official who was in charge of the plan that they are calling off the hit, threatening to expose the plot if anything happened to the Ogoni refugees.
But obsessed by their plan, another set of hit men were hurried put together. The plan B was to use the Songhai project that had a small poultry in the refugee camp as an excuse, otherwise, the government was originally for the purposes of ferrying the weapons and the balance payment which would have been paid to them and their journey overseas facilitated through Ghana. Mr. A. I Paragalda and his colleagues were brought in to do a damage control measure by using every available means to rescue the vehicles, and in the process the head of the UNHCR from Genuine at the time succeed in copting the supposed leader of the Ogoni refugees in the UNHCR camp – one Mr. Monday Torue and that is how he got his resettlement to America.
Some of the boys who were brought to Benin Republic to kill Ogoni activists metamorphosized into militants and eventually turn around to get scholarships and educational empowerments, while the activists leak their wounds. Based on these facts, the Ogoni people are saying that if the amnesty programme is truly about rehabilitating and empowering from the Niger Delta that took part in the struggle, then, the Ogoni people in Benin Republic should be provided with educational opportunities and career developments, businesses and others.
