The militarization of the Niger Delta

THE total land area of Nigeria last measured in 2014, is 910,770 square kilometres, and the Niger Delta as now officially defined by the Nigerian Government , extends only about 70,000 km2 (27,000sq. m) of Nigeria’s land mass. It is sad that the Niger Delta alone, which consists of just 7.5% of the total land area of Nigeria, compulsively plays host a sizeable crop of the Nigerian Armed Forces by reason of the fact that the region is rich in mineral resources, particularly petroleum. Today, any Nigerian soldier who wants to make a decent living craves to be posted to the Niger Delta, where he can terrorize the people and extort money from them.

Every inch of the Niger Delta, from Edo to Delta States, from Rivers to Bayelsa States and from Cross River to Akwa Ibom States, is infested with heavily armed and dour-looking soldiers, who molest commuters and make road transportation not only hazardous but unpleasant. And this situation has been so from a remote period of antiquities, definable in terms of 1956, when oil was discovered at Oloibiri, and particularly since the 1960s, when oil was discovered in commercial quantity.

Concerned citizens of the region have cried havoc time and again against the unhealthy militarization of the Niger Delta much more than when we were in a state of war between 1967 and 1970. Such cries to successive Federal Governments have fallen on deaf ears.

Thus, the blessing of oil to that geo-political zone, called the Niger Delta, has since become a debilitating curse on the people of that region.

Meanwhile, a trip to the North of this country would reveal the clear difference between the South and the North, in terms of the studied militarization of the country: whereas there is a military-cum-police checkpoint in every two, three kilometres of the highways in the South, particularly in the South-South, a driver, driving in the Appian ways of the North, will not encounter any checkpoint, police or military, within three hundred kilometres of those roads! And Nigeria is the same country? Why is the South-South militarized and the North, notorious for its perennial bouts of insurrection, religious and political uprisings, which take several lives and destroy many chattels and landed properties every year, is free from military, or even police, harassment?

The heavypresence of military personnel in the South-South gives credence to the suspicionsand belief of the oil-rich South-Southerners that they are a colonized and enslaved people. These doubts and suspicions are fuelled by the fact the entire region of the Niger Delta is not only deliberately beleaguered but poor, ravaged,as it is, by oil exploration and consequent ecological degradation. All appeals to successive Federal Governments to adopt the affirmative action, such as was adopted for the reconstruction of Europe, after the World War II, for the Niger Delta have consistently fallen on stone-deaf ears.Yet, the absolute want of development coupled with the militarization of the Niger Delta is tantamount to rubbing insult into injury and represents a gross violation, a blatant trampling on, of the people’s fundamental human rights.

The provisions of sections 39 and 40 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended), enshrine freedom of association and movement, which the militarization of the Niger Delta forecloses. Once again, we want to appeal to the Federal Government to demilitarize the Niger Delta by removing all those military/police checkpoints that besmear the region so that the citizens of that region can breathe the air of freedom for once. Incidentally, this request is one of those contained in the charter of demands by the Niger Delta militants.