By Mohammed Haruna
Abuja - Penultimate Monday, MEND, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, served notice that it will embark on a major act of terrorism in the North within the next two months. This, said MEND's spokesman, the mysterious Jomo Gpomo, in an email exchange with Sunday Trust (June 21), was because the region's "elite are taking us for fools and the majority of soldiers (fighting us are) from the North."
For over a month now MEND has been at war with the soldiers of the Joint Task Force (JTF) following MEND's ambush of the JTF in which it killed about a dozen Nigerian soldiers including two senior officers. JTF's predictable reprisal attack seems to have raised the ante in the long running crisis in the Niger Delta over the control of its rich oil resources.
MEND's threat against the North, whether or not it is carried out, says a lot about at least three things, namely the warped notion of development among the leadership of the Niger Delta militia, the success of media propaganda against the North and the popular perception of President Umaru Yar'adua as a weak leader.
First, the perception of Yar'adua as weak. Last month's JTF reprisal attack, as we all know, was not the first of its kind. During the eight years of President Obasanjo, Yar'adua's predecessor, there were countless such reprisals, the worst of which was the Odi massacre. In intensity JTF's reprisal hardly compared to Odi. And during the military reprisals under Obasanjo, the military command structure was dominated by Southerners (and still is).
Yet neither MEND, nor any of the myriads of the Niger Delta militia, including the Niger Delta Vigilantes, the Niger Delta Peoples' Volunteer Force (NDPVF), the Coalition of Militant Action in the Niger Delta (COMA), etc, ever threatened to carry out any terrorist act in the South West, Obasanjo's home region.
Why? Was it because Yar'adua has tried to enter into dialogue with the militia leaders? Obasanjo too did. Indeed he once held a misbegotten summit of militia leaders in Aso Rock Villa.
Probably the most critical factor was that while Obasanjo held out carrots to the militia leaders with one hand they knew the man as a general also held a big stick behind his back with the other hand. Yar'adua, as the first civilian leader we have had since 1983, has, they presumably reckon, no such big stick - at least nothing as big as Obasanjo's.
This suggests that the only language the militia leaders understand is that of violence. This much seems obvious from the email exchange between Gbomo and Sunday Trust which I have referred to at the beginning of this piece.
To the newspaper's question on why, from the word go, MEND chose violence instead of dialogue as a means of achieving their goals, Gbomo replied that "Dialogue has not worked before, and it will not make sense repeating the same formula. In the African context, dialogue is a time-wasting delay tactics that is not workable in Nigeria."
Reminded that dialogue seems to have worked in the end for the Ogonis following the compensation Shell paid for the families of the "Ogoni 9" that were executed in the course of the Ogoni resistance against Shell operations in their land, Gbomo said it was wrong to compare Ogoni's struggle with MEND's. It was instructive that he did not say how.
MEND - and by extension the other Delta militia groups - says it has three major goals. First, that the leader Henry Okar, who is on trial for treason, must be released unconditionally. Second, that the Nigerian military must be withdrawn from the Delta region and third, that the region must be given 50% of the oil revenue on the principle of derivation.
Only the last demand is reasonable and none of the three can be solved by violence. As a Hausa saying goes, any problem that cannot be solved through reason will not be solved by force.
"Aha!" I can hear champions of Sovereign National Conference say with a smirk. "Have you not always opposed such a conference?"
Of course I have. But I have never done so on the principles of it. My objection has always been based on the demand by champions of SNC that it should be composed of ethic leaders who are almost always self-selected.
In any case, as we can see from the constitutional conferences we've had since before Independence, an SNC is not the only form of dialogue nor can one SNC solve all of even our most basic problems once and for all.
I said MEND's demand for 50% oil revenue on the principle of derivation is reasonable. It is however not tenable, given the nature of oil revenue as an unworked for wealth and given also the imbalance in regional development such a percentage would create in our under-developed economy, an imbalance which has implications for national unity and stability. This is why the demand should be subject to continuous dialogue among the true representatives of Nigerians elected on the basis of free and fair elections.
However, if the demand for 50% of oil revenue on derivation sounds reasonable, the demands for unconditional release of Orkar and for pulling out troops from the region are not. As long as the region is part of Nigeria, the country's authorities have a duty to station troops there. They also have a duty to try any one who raises arms against the country like Orkar did and the MEND leaders are doing.
The difference is that Orkar was caught while they have not been. This is why they should lay down their arms and enter into dialogue with the country's authorities if they have the interest of the people of Niger Delta at heart.
MEND and other militias claim they are not terrorists but Delta nationalists. The problem with this claim is that they are not fighting an army of occupation. Instead they are fighting an army which has their brothers and sisters in its rank and file and in which these brothers and sisters occupy many of its command positions at all levels.
At the beginning of this piece, I said MEND's threat to project its violence into the North says a lot about at least three things. I have discussed what the threat says about the popular perception of Yar'adua as a weak president. Next week, God willing, I'll discuss what the threat says about the other two issues, namely the achievement of media propaganda against the North where Yar'adua comes from, and the warped notion of what the MEND leadership, like its counterparts elsewhere, thinks constitutes development.
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