Wole Soyinka makes a public statement on the Niger Delta. Particularly pertinent is his emphasis on making a distinction between genuine militants seeking justice and opportunistic mercenaries s seeking to destroy.
“The attempt in some quarters to confuse issues by refusing to separate the principled militants, such as members of MEND and its affiliates, from the opportunistic mercenaries and criminals, has always struck me as dishonest and diversionary…….
Extortionists? Hostage takers? Thrill killers? Since when was any liberation movement throughout history exempt from its quota of deviants! Was the Nigerian Federal Army itself even free of such human dregs when it was launched to prosecute a war dedicated, with all due sanctimoniousness, to ‘keeping the nation one’. We shall bypass for now, the question of what, and whose nation it has proved – an imperial delusion, or the genuine product of a people’s will?”
Soyinka goes on to remind the Nigerian leadership and those in the country who are only able to think in terms of the present and insist on continuing to find solutions by trying to fix square pegs in round holes…and in this case results in death and injury to it’s own citizens…
It is not for nothing that MEND, in a number of its dispatches, has stressed not just the flawed antecedents of the Nigerian project in general, but the incorrigible cabalism of governance that makes a mockery of the democratic process, and thus robs the citizens of dignity and voice. MEND has interjected its communiques with reminders that the Delta contestation is a product of the desperate sustenance of the very immorality of the Nigerian state – and the continuing, corrupt desperation of power. That MEND took pains to state this in such stark terms is superfluous; even without this denunciation, the insolence of the democratic exercise of 2007 cannot be discounted as a crucial factor in the stiffening of militant intransigence in the Delta.
Finally Soyinka calls for an investigation into the “indiscriminate bombings and saturation bombardment of villages ‘suspected’ to harbour sought militants” – not another commission but a real investigation! I would also add to this that the leadership in the Niger Delta itself, Governors and members of the house – be called to account as to why they stood by, either in silence or by voicing their support of the massacres and extra-judicial murder of young men by members of the JTF. The Vice President, Jonanthon Goodluck, the Governors of Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers state to name a few. These men have shown themselves to be spineless and have betrayed their own people. They speak not for the people of the Niger Delta but for the status quo and what Soyinka rightly describes as the “Obasanjo-Yar’Adua diarchy“.
The struggle for justice is finally being debated in the public space and the movement is gaining increased legitimacy and progress. It is imperative that those people who are seeking justice remain principled. Remaining principled means not standing outside the Nigerian High Commission with placards one day and sitting drinking with Vice-Presidents and Governors who are admittedly part of the “diarchy” the next. This is wholly unacceptable and the Niger Delta Solidarity Group in no way supports such actions under it’s name.
