Niger Delta and YarAduas other blues

Tag : structural steels

Incapable of understanding or even appreciating the structuralflaws from which the crises in the Niger Delta region and otherNigeria’s impasse originate, the Yar’adua’sadministration have taken the most simplistic and effortless optionof creating a Ministry of Niger Delta.

This feeble administrative stroke will generate huge and fatpolitical cows as state creation and expansion of inept and corruptfederal bureaucracies have done in the past. Since the creation ofmore states and federal ministries and parastatals, few elites havegrown fat from corruption that feed from them, but it is on goodrecord that public infrastructure, social amenities, servicedelivery and general quality of life for the majority of Nigerianshave nosedived to scandalous level, even though the Nigeria’spolitical elites are totally inoculated to shame.

What appears like a public excitement at Yar’adua’sadministrative panacea to an issue of fundamental politicalchallenge falls into a pattern of previous and existing collectiveamnesia and hysteria. Previous myths about what ails Nigeria andexcitable solutions proffered against it have exploded in spite ofcherry public acclaim.

Such myths includes that military regimes are main reasons forpublic corruption and under-development. Between the civilianregimes since 1979 and now, public corruption have thrived andgrown to a level of culture that only those who dare not to becorrupt are treated as outcasts.
Another popular myth holds that the Northern part of the countryhas exercised political leadership to the detriment of the rest ofthe country and once a Southerner mounts that saddle, Nigeria willarrive at her manifest destiny of a prosperous, stable and greatnation. Again, Obasanjo exploded the myth.

Beyond these, boards, commissions, tribunals, committees ofwhatever shapes and colours have been instituted to address oneissue or the other, yet Nigeria is held back in inertia, doldrumsand atrophy. These persistency in the old ways demonstrate a hugedeficiency in original thinking and imagination by the politicalelites.

The worrying thing is that each of these false and redundant stepshave always been acclaimed not just by political jobbers as theyexpected to but even by a seemingly informed media.
Prior to the creation of the Ministry of Niger Delta, a committeeon Niger Delta was inaugurated. An unwieldy amalgam of thetraditional elites, everything that was said by government andresponses from the appointees did not deviate from the old banters.The Ministry of Niger Delta that followed the inauguration of thecommittee fits into the old ritual of corrupt administrativemeasure for a patently political challenge.

How would the Ministry of Niger Delta function that would bedifferent from how other ministries work? If a Ministry of Energyexists while Nigerians light up their homes with candles andlanterns, and companies run on electric generating sets, a Ministryof Steels exist, with the country unable to produce one sheet ofsteel, a Ministry of Public Works exists, with roads more likedeath traps, a Ministry of Aviation, with the country hanging onthe commercial airliner of an eccentric foreign businessman as anational carrier, why would anybody think that a Ministry of NigerDelta would banish poverty, environmental degradation, squalor thathave bedeviled the region. All previous government administrativeintervention including OMPADEC and NDDC have only helped to expandthe scope of public corruption. Recently, the suspended chairman ofthe NDDC was reported to have engaged a witch doctor at a whoppingsum of nearly one billion naira in a senseless ritual to remain inoffice for life.

The Ministry of Niger Delta will be, I dare, predict a conduit pipefor siphoning public resources to individual pockets. Many havetaken the discussion on the creation of the ministry to even lowerlevel of suggesting that it be sighted in the region. Such peopleeasily lost sight that the Gwari people in whose ancestral land thehuge federal capital is built in Abuja have been chased to theforests and mountains to hibernate with rodents while the politicalgladiators carved out their lands for choice estates and mansions.

The effect of Ministry of Niger Delta built on the creeks of theregion will not have any more effect as the federal capitalterritory has on the aboriginal communities in Abuja. The handlersof President Yar’adua claimed that the establishment of theMinistry of Niger Delta represents a fresh vigour and clear visiondesigned to terminate the umbilical cord that links it to herparent Obasanjo regime. This is a patent falsehood. Obasanjo wouldhave created Ministry of Niger Delta as long as it is a ruse toentrench the regime and whitewash the regime in the public, whilebusiness goes on as usual. President Yar’Adua is becomingquite adept at political chicanery.

In responding to the public anger that greeted his arrival topower, he inaugurated the Electoral Reform Commission. Thecommission has been posting public resources on meetings about thebest electoral formula as if Nigeria’s jinxed electoralprocess is a function of election formula. As far as public officeis the main vehicle for appropriating of public resources forprivate use, so long would no rule be strong as not to be broken orso sacred as not to desecrated and as long as the reward is toohuge and attractive. However, while the election reforms commissionjaws across the country, President Yar’adua saw to it thatelections held during the period under his watch both localgovernment and governorship re-run polls were “won”massively by his party, as usual without popular votes.

But as his election reform commission would toil in vain so wouldhis ministry of Niger Delta fall to the abyss, because both arecouched in deception.
The challenge of the Niger Delta as all other impasse of theNigerian conundrum is the fundamental political question of theNigerian State, stretching from its origin, structure and function.Deriving from a predatory colonial origin, the course of NigerianState have not deviated from this source, but has exacerbated bothon account of the crises of the global system in which it wasintegrated and its domestic content of extorting machine barelystealing from the people and oppressing them. The structure of analoof, unresponsive, inefficient and corrupt machine complementsits extraneous origin put in hostility to the people and in totaldenial of their essence and existence except as atomistic mass,rudimentarily subsisting to rationalize the existence of theextortionist state.

A state that exists in this form combines structural corruptionwith institutional weakness to produce total capacity failure.Exercises as creation of states, ministries are fringe politicalmaneuvers that does not impact on the structural malaise of afailing state. President Yar’Adua and his men are in too muchcomfort to understand the depth of Nigeria’s structuralcrises. A modest attempt at any meaningful solution should havestarted with a free and democratic choice of leadership byNigerians, making such leadership to owe its allegiance to thepeople and been accountable to them. As Obasanjo reforms wonacclaim and later turned sour in popular taste, so wouldYar’Adua new trick of Niger Delta Ministry explode in future,prompting the critical Nigerian question, which the Niger Delta isonly a part.