For Niger Delta people, life still remains that of sordidness and wretchedness, Emma Obe reports
I never knew that five years into office as governor, I will still find someone living in a thatched house in Cross River.” That was Ben Ayade, the Governor of Cross River State lamenting the crushing poverty in Cross River State, one of the oil rich states in the Niger Delta.

However, the story of thatch houses, poverty, want and squalor is not limited to Cross River State. It runs across the entire states of the Niger Delta, which incidentally produces the wealth that has made Nigeria the largest economy in Africa and the 26th largest economy in the world. Figures recently released by the National Bureau of Employment stated that some states in the Niger Delta had the highest levels of unemployment in the country. Akwa Ibom State had the highest in the region with 37.7 per cent, Rivers State, 36.4 per cent, and Bayelsa State, 32.6 per cent.

A first time visitor to Bundu Waterside, one of the backwater settlements of Port Harcourt, would be assaulted by the choking acrid smell of crude oil mixed with waste water. Topless men could be seen making repairs in dugout boats, which were used the previous night to ferry illicitly refined petrol, diesel and kerosene from far off artisanal refineries to Bundu waterside for onward sale to retailers.

But the booming illicit trade in crudely refined petroleum products is not the main story of Bundu Waterside, which has existed side-by-side with the more Garden City of Port Harcourt since the city was founded a little over a 100 years ago by the British colonial authorities as a port to export the coal mined in commercial quantities in Enugu, some 250 kilometres inland. Bundu lacks all the basic amenities of modern life like primary health centre, water and sanitation facilities and schools. The only public school in the settlement is one-wagon school, whose capacity is not large enough to take all the school age children. A lot of the children attend school outside the settlement.

How the people find their way through the narrow alleys of a road in the maze of houses made of plywood, zinc sheets and mix of block houses remains a wonder. Most of the houses are poorly ventilated with small dark rooms. Residents in the afternoon could be seen sitting and fanning themselves just outside their rooms. The smell oozing out of the shallow gutters, which also serves as bypasses thoroughfares between compounds, is sickening. But that is not the worry of the residents. Mr. John Deekor, who has a provision shop attached to his apartment, says their major worry is power supply. He says though the place is connected to public power supply, they hardly enjoy it. And true to his claim, the entire neighbourhood is troubled by a cacophony of noise coming from small generators that provide them with illumination at night and to ventilate their rooms.

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Deekor, who hails from Ogoni, says he has been living in the place for the past 23 years. According to him, there is no public water supply. But they buy water from a few of the residents who operate private commercial boreholes. He says he had to settle at Bundu because the rent, which is N2,000 a month is far less than what is obtainable in the town where a room goes for as much as N6,000 to N10,000 a room.

Mr. Peter Okon, from Akwa Ibom, who operates a small patent medicine store, says the houses are not built with toilets. “We go to waterside to defecate,” he adds. The public toilet at Bundu is erected on stilts and has separate compartments for male and female users. Users, however, pay N20 to a man whose duty is to keep the toilet. Users could be seen approaching the toilet with water in plastic bottles to clean up after use.
However, Okon says there has not been any case of epidemic since he came to Bundu five years ago. He also notes fire disasters which are a frequent occurrence in other similar settlements in Port Harcourt are rare at Bundu. He equally says security is no longer a problem since the end of cult clashes that usually unsettled the area. “We have a vigilance service here. And there is no problem,” he says.

Corollaries of the Bundu story can be found in Henshaw Town and Anatigha in Calabar, Cross River State, Ovom and the various shanty towns in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, Okrika Waterside, Enugu waterside, Marine Base, Elechi Beach and Nembe Waterside in Port Harcourt; Hausa Quarters and Jakpa in Warri in Delta State and the fringe settlements in Aba, Abia State.

Virtually all the rural settlements in the Niger Delta are poor, with their settlers living from hand to mouth. Driving down from the Port Harcourt refinery towards Okrika Island, one is confronted by a race of over a dozen pipelines running parallel to the main road. Despite the volatile nature of the pipelines, the people virtually lead their lives on them. They dry their clothes, sleep and generally relax on them. Children could be seen running on the pipelines in spite of the signposts warning of the danger getting exposed to them. John Ikhala, who lives in a shanty house a few metres from the pipelines, says he and his neighbours have no option in the choice of their accommodation. “We don’t have anywhere else to stay. This is where our money can afford. We pay N4,000 a month for a room in one of those shacks”.

A trip from Benin City to Gelegele, one of the major oil producing communities in Edo State, is a tortuous one like an adventure to Robert Stevenson’s Treasure Island. From Benin City, a visitor to Gelegele travels with his car or a chartered taxi to some point several kilometres after Ekenwan Barracks, where the car from Benin City is parked, and the visitor is transferred to an old rugged Land Rover jeep suited to the rough road that takes him to Ughoton, where the Land Rover is parked and the visitor takes a motorcycle ride through sinewy overgrown path leading to Gelegele. At some point both the motorcyclist and the passenger alight and push the motorcycle through waterlogged sections before the final journey to Gelegele.

Kevbe Emogabor, a resident of Gelegele, who hails from Delta State, says he farms in the area and transports his produce to Benin for sale. He laments that there is no power supply, despite the presence of an oil location near the community. “We get water for domestic use from a private borehole provided by a resident. The health centre built by the Niger Delta Development Commission in a community a few kilometres away is not functional and has been overgrown by weed. After they finished the hospital, doctors and nurses were not posted to the place and that is how the place became abandoned.”

Odual, a community in Abua/Odual Local Government Area, is not accessible by road from the local government headquarters at Abua Central. The Chairman of the Local Government, Opelia Daniel, who hails from Odual, laments that people have to go through Yenagoa in the neighbouring Bayelsa State to access the community by road.

The two bridges that connected the communities in Odual to the local government headquarters, he says, collapsed during the 2012 flood disaster and they have not been rebuilt. Though crossing the river to Odual from Abua takes a much shorter time, Daniel advises against it because of the risk of falling into the hands of kidnappers and miscreants who rule the waters. “Without a gunboat, I will not advise any person to take the riverine side,” he says. He says the council had to acquire two engine boats to ferry students of the schools in Odual accompanied by gunboats.

The situation in Warri, the hub of the oil industry in Delta State is well told by Comrade Amechi Ogbona, a local activist. “The place is sinking every day. At the Warri General Hospital, they still fetch water from the colonial well dug years ago,” Ogbona laments. “Warri suffers flood because there is no drainage, the town reeks. The Nigeria Ports Authority (NPA) used to be a busy place. But it is also gone. Nothing is happening there. The economy of the town has dropped largely. If there is downpour, there will be no road around Angle Park, Federal Government College, Ekurede–Urhobo. All these areas are impassable whenever it rains.”

Akwa Ibom is the leading oil producing state in the country. But despite huge investment in infrastructure by the state government in the last 12 years, particularly in the urban areas, most of the rural communities are still in a state of neglect.

Very recently, the Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly had to commission a special committee to visit rural communities across the state, where old Bailey bridges that had served them since the colonial times had collapsed, cutting off the communities from other parts of the state after the people cried out to the legislature to come to their aid. The affected bridges Ikono Local Government Area were Nkwot Ikot Nseyen–Nung Ukim and Iton Ikot Ito–Iton Mmong bridges, while that in Onna Local Government Area is Ikot Akpan Mkpe–Ikot Akpa Ekop Bridge. An indigene of Obot Akara Local Government, Michael Umoh, says the collapse of the Mbiaso–Ikot Ukpong bridge has thrown the community into difficulties. Umoh notes that after waiting in vain for government to rebuild the bridge, the villagers levied themselves to construct an improvised bridge to aid easy movement of their farm produce to markets in other parts of Akwa Ibom and Abia states.

The irony of it all is that it is from these areas that billions of petro-dollars and gas are exploited, exported and its proceeds shared in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital to all the 36 states, 774 local and the Federal Government every month. The most telling of the story of the people of the Niger Delta is that not only is the wealth that makes Nigeria the biggest economy in Africa and the 26th largest economy in the world from the Niger Delta, none of that wealth comes back to affect the lives of the people in a positive way. The people who live off their farmlands and water now suffer worse condition than when oil was not mined in their neighbourhood. Virtually every other day, the newspapers report of oil spills which pollute and destroy farmlands and fishing waters.

According to Morris Alagoa, who has been fighting for the eights of Niger Delta communities, clean-ups never really restore the land and waters and compensations when they come are hardly adequate to pay for the losses. “In many instances, the compensations are handled in such a manner that divides the communities and throw them into unending strife.”

Chief Nengi James, who has spent an entire life fighting for the people to have control over the resources that come from their lands, says the poverty of the Niger Delta can eliminated if they control the resources.

The Nigerian government has tried in a number of ways to mitigate the poverty in the Niger Delta through various policies, some of which are the increase in the derivation formula to 13 per cent for oil producing states, the setting up of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and the creation of the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs. But none of those efforts have made meaningful impact on the communities and people.

The 15-storey headquarters building of the NDDC in Port Harcourt overlooks the squalor called the Marine Base in Port Harcourt. And that picture very well epitomizes the contradiction that exists between the huge wealth mined out of the Niger Delta and the condition of the millions of people that inhabit the region, in spite of the billions of petrodollars that ooze out of the region every year. While the new NDDC building has all the modern and automated facilities that could compare it with any structure of its kind in the world, Marine Base is a collection of shanty towns stripped of all modern amenities that people in the 20th century need to lead a normal life.

The people in Marine Base use the creeks around them as their public toilet; the same place where the kids bathe and collect water for domestic use. There are no public health facilities and the children have to trek out of the slum to town to attend school.

Curiously, several police and military checkpoints exist at Marine Base to check activities of small time criminal gangs. But the security personnel have found a lucrative business in monitoring women who evacuate kerosene and petrol refined by some illicit artisanal refineries deep in the creeks. With some hope, the NDDC might make Marine Base one of the first communities to intervene in after the Board has settled down to business.

Away from the confrontation between NDDC and Marine Base in Port Harcourt are thousands of similar settlements spread across the 70,000 square kilometres of the Niger Delta where millions of people live in abject poverty, unreached by modernity. The condition of these communities and their residents has continued to be of concern to scholars, development agencies, politicians and analysts. In fact, very recently the National Bureau of Statistics listed unemployment and poverty levels in some Niger Delta states were among the worst in the country. How could a people be so rich, yet so poor?

The region, which stretches along the coast of Nigeria comprises had a rich biodiversity with interlocking creeks, rivers and rivulets that had for centuries sustained the lives of the people before crude oil was discovered in commercial quantity in the 1950s. Most of its isolated communities are in difficult terrains, which require huge investment in roads and water transportation to reach. The result is that most of the communities are without amenities like electricity, health institutions, schools and modern markets. The people have to travel long distances over water and wetlands to access these facilities and services. There is only one major road that runs through the core Niger Delta – the East –West road. For some inexplicable reasons, work on the road had been unending, creating serious logistical and communication problem for the people of the region.

According to Prof, Stephen Azaiki, a member of the House of Representatives and an advocate for the development of the Niger Delta, it is from the region that about 90 per cent of Nigeria’s foreign exchange and 70 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product of the country comes from. It was in response to the cries of the people of the Niger Delta that the Nigerian government in the year 2000 created the NDDC and granted the 13 per cent oil derivation revenue to oil producing states.

The 13 per cent oil revenue derivation significantly boosted the revenue accruable to the oil states and put them among the states with the highest revenues in the country.
However, more than 20 years down the road after the creation of NDDC and 22 years after the granting of the 13 per cent oil derivation revenue, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics states in the Niger Delta rank among states with high poverty index, low human development index and high unemployment rates.

Many decades of oil exploitation in the region had progressively destroyed the ecosystem to the point where fishing and farming in most of the communities have been abandoned. Benjamin Mark, an indigene of Emakalaka in Ogbia Local Government Area of Bayelsa State, says a great deal of the fish the people consume is frozen fish brought in from outside. “Oil pollution has reduced the number of fish in our water. So, we even go to Yenagoa to buy fish,” he adds.

There are very few municipal facilities available to the people of the region as there are only two major urban centres in the core Niger Delta – Port Harcourt and Warri. While modern facilities in the vast poor rural communities are almost non-existent, facilities in Port Harcourt and Warri are overstretched. Public water supply in Port Harcourt no longer function and government is more concerned about ensuring that private borehole owners and table water processors at least keep to minimum standards. Interestingly, the difficult terrains and tough life in the Niger Delta environment have not encumbered oil exploration and exploitation activities. Oil companies and their workers live in modern comfort in their camps and houseboats complete with constant electricity, while members of their host communities wallow in want and disease.

The destruction of the environment in the Ogoni area of Rivers State caused the people under the leadership of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa to force oil producing companies to quit the area. Ledum Mitee, a former President of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), says, “It is when we thought that the devastation caused by oil exploitation was threatening the very existence of livelihoods of the people that led to the formation of MOSOP.” But the Nigerian authorities connived with the companies and caused a crisis in Ogoni which led to many deaths. Saro-Wiwa and some of his supporters were tried and killed on trumped up charges for the specific killing of four Ogoni leaders in 1994.

While the Ogoni fought, people in other parts of the Niger Delta seemed resigned themselves to fate until the late 1990s when there was an awakening among the people, especially after the killing of Saro-Wiwa. A group of young Ijaw activists met and declared the Kaiama Declaration at Kaiama, the home town of Isaac Boro, who led the 12-Day Revolution against the Nigerian government in 1966 in protest against the marginalisation of the Niger Delta Delta. The Kaiama declaration built a consciousness that eventually led to militancy in the Niger Delta, creating a situation of insecurity until the Nigerian government under the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua declared an amnesty for the militants, which allowed oil producing activities to resume.