There is no doubt about it that it is the FCT Minister Nyesom Wike’s recent angry chant in a live media chat that the Ijaws are a minority of the minorities and that they are not the only ones who can blow up oil pipelines has some direct or remote bearing on the recent destruction of oil pipelines. It is also the main reason that led to the State of Emergency declared by the President on Rivers State.
A threat was issued challenging the capability of the Ijaws to sabotage the economic or any other security interest of the nation and a few days later the pipelines were blown up. It is only God who can testify that it is not the Ijaws or their sympathizers who visited that calamity on the nation’s jugular and He would be believed by a few Nigerians. But for the overwhelming majority of thinking Nigerians, it is the Ijaws who are the culprits of the most recent acts of sabotage against Nigeria.
But whatever is the provocation, this act of bravado is bizarre. Do the Ijaws need to take any hostile action against the fatherland in order to prove anything? Even if they are the minority of minorities and they are therefore deemed impotent or powerless, is it not our wise elders who in their timeless wisdom say that a leper may not be able to milk a cow but he is more than capable of destroying any milk milked by able bodied men and women? And the Ijaws have just affirmed that piece of wisdom!
Well, now that the Ijaws have shown how capable they are in sabotaging their fatherland, I call on them to now calm down and consider the wisdom in the saying that no wise person can be goaded to cut his nose in order to spite his face. The environmental consequences of polluting the lands that also belong to the Ijaws are too weighty to be waved aside in order to prove any point to any one.
I have been privileged to watch footages of once flourishing lands with lush vegetation that have been turned into wastelands by pollution from oil exploration and exploitation. Oil spills have turned many oil bearing communities into desert and people are not ever going to inhabit those lands for generations. Some of those lands were exactly as luxurious and prosperous as the Ijaw lands that they themselves are now helping in their despoliation.
I think that over the years the Ijaws have made enough sacrifices for the sustenance of Nigeria. None of them should therefore allow their community or ethnic nationality to be thought inconsequential or weak and impotent to be misled into acting injuriously against themselves.
Apart from bearing a vital resource that is considered the mainstay of the nation’s economy, the Ijaws have over the years produced first class materials that have served the nation in administration, law, the military and many other areas of the country’s governance. His Majesty, Alfred Diette Spiff, one of the longest reigning public figure this country has ever produced is Ijaw. E.K Clark who recently passed on is another Ijaw man who has been in unceasing public consciousness for such a long time. These men may not have seen their dream for a better Nigeria fulfilled but in their individual private lives, they are not personalities who will ever complain, or have ever complained that God has dealt unfairly with them.
For Diette Spiff in particular who is still here with us, I have never seen a Nigeria who has received such a fair deal from God as him. This man has been around in public office since 1967 when he was made the military Governor of the Old River State. Thereafter, he ascended the throne of his forefathers and became a first class traditional ruler. He is one of those chiefs the late Ken Saro-Wiwa would describe as ‘’eating chiefs’’. He has been in many positions to eat for so many years that I think that the man should stage a national thanksgiving event and thank God profusely for giving him such a long, peaceful and prosperous life. That man must be in his late 80s or early nineties now.
The place of the Ijaw in Nigeria cannot be looked down upon at all. I think they should feel pleased that it pleased God to put a large chunk of Nigeria’s resources in their lands. There is no Nigerian who is enlightened who will not say that in one way or another he or she not being blessed by the blessings mined from Ijaw land. For someone like me, this knowledge should be gratifying. It is good to know that you are the benefactors of every Nigerian even if that fact is not acknowledged with immense gratitude by many Nigerians.
They should also be content with the fact that there is something they too have benefited from belonging to a country where they are many other compatriots other than them and from whim they too have benefitted..
