It would have been enough to dismiss the statement as the ranting of an overzealous and misguided sycophant. But against the background of Nigeria’s precarious security situation, due to the Boko Haram insurgency, and the embarrassing spectacle of scums stumping around the national stage as potentates, it is risky to ignore, or take lightly, the recent threat by Mujahid Asari-Dokubo, leader of the Niger Delta People Salvation Front (NDPSF). In a divisive message that should have no place in Nigeria, Asari-Dakubo threatened to return to the creeks with his followers and start another guerilla war if the Niger Delta is not allowed total control of its resources. The language is indecorous and inappropriate and it is one alarmist correspondence that will do nothing, other than widen existing cleavages and fan the embers of disunity. It must be stated directly to Asari-Dokubo and such like-minded anarchists pursuing a sectional and self-seeking agenda, that fire-spitting, intimidation or threats of brimstone on other citizens can only harm the very cause they seek to advance.
Signed by the group’s spokesman, Rex Emojite Anighoro, the missive is replete with fallacies and false comparisons, seethes with disdain against the northern part of the country and drips with invectives. Reprehensible, divisive and disruptive, Nigerians must see Asari-Dokubo’s threat clearly for what it is: cheap blackmail intended to coerce other parts of the federation to acquiesce to a pre-determined desired end. Granted that it may have been written partly out of frustration with the way the ongoing national conference is handling the vexing issue of resource allocation; nevertheless, in content and in form, the statement was improper.
Hear Asari-Dokubo: “While it has always been the incontrovertibly held ideological belief of Alhaji Mujahid Abubakr Dokubo Asari and the Niger Delta People Salvation Front ( NDPSF ) that the Nigerian State is a false and forced union, a luciferian contraception of convenience dubiously crafted to criminally sustain the parasitic and predatory expansionist and supremacist Gambari North, preposterous events of the past weeks at the National Conference, Abuja seem to have evidenced beyond reasonable doubts that this Lugardian edifice is indeed a mistake of 1914 that is beyond redemption and ought now to be deconstructed.
Indeed, the lie of an illusional and nonexistent unity of Nigeria has been glued and nourished at the monumental expense of the South with specific mention of the Niger Delta. This is an hypocritical reality that must be dismantled, while we have continually shown an unneedful accommodation, bending our backs to a breaking point in the sustenance of a barren and impotent Gambari North, the petrifying odour of their arrogance in ignorance in their dementia thought patterns as the owners of our God-given common wealth calls for the immediate revocation of the further show of our charity… We also wish to warn and call to order the delegates of the now near stalemated and concluding National Conference and members of the National Assembly who are from the South especially the Niger Delta Region that it is no longer business as usual to confetti with our pride and commonwealth, as our resources does not belong to Nigeria.”
The rambling syntax and halting grammar aside, Asari-Dokubo’s ignorance is as tantalizing as his claim that the resources of the Niger Delta belonged only to the people of Niger Delta. With frightening words like “parasitic” “predatory” “barren and impotent” “expansionist and supremacist Gambari North”, it is a statement that, even as it pretends to address an important national issue, is severely diminished in appeal and concern. It is further rendered unacceptable by targeting “the barren states of Nigeria” which are being sustained “with the resources of the Niger Delta in the name of monthly allocations.”
Coming from the leader of a group that has vandalized and disrupted oil installations, no one would treat these with levity and the Federal Government should call Asari-Dokubo to order.
The statement is divisive, rabble-rousing and because it seeks to pit a section of Nigeria against another, the implication of its content is dangerous to the polity. How can anyone reasonably think like Asari-Dokubo? Does he even understand that Nigeria is a democracy and a country of federating units? What could be more dishonest and self-serving than the argument that the resources of the Niger Delta belonged only to the Niger Delta people? Did it ever occur to Asari-Dokubo that such a view could also offend other sensibilities such as ethnic and geopolitical balancing? This is not the kind of divisive position any ethnic group should want to identify with particularly at this time when the nation is trying to rise above tribal and political cleavages accentuated in particular by bigotry and fundamentalism.
This is not the first time Asari-Dokubo has made such inflammatory utterances. Earlier this year, he threatened that the current peace in the Niger Delta cannot be guaranteed unless President Goodluck Jonathan gets a second term come 2015. “There will be no peace, not only in the Niger Delta, but everywhere if Goodluck Jonathan is not president again by 2015 … (because) Jonathan has an uninterrupted eight years of two terms to be president according to the Nigerian Constitution” he said, obviously ignorant of Section 135(2) of the constitution which allows a presidential term of only four years and does not guarantee an incumbent an automatic second term.
If Asari-Dokubo’s statement was rife with xenophobia couched in intemperate language, the presidency has out-done him in villainy. The response form the presidency to Asari-Dokubo’s irresponsible threats, has been a deafening silence that is deplorable. The public is being made to assume that Asari-Dokubo is speaking the mind of the president, because if Jonathan is in any way uncomfortable with, and finds Asari-Dokubo’s statement unacceptable, it is taking too long to make this known. It is said that the essence of an objection is its timing and whatever objection emanates now from Aso Rock can only be an afterthought. It is regrettable that the President continues to allow himself, wittingly or unwittingly, to be advertised by a section of the country for its narrow interest. This is not what Nigerians voted for. The president must at all times aspire to statesmanship, and protect the federation from cant and chicanery in pursuance of sectional interests. Jonathan has a duty to rein in Asari-Dokubo and others like him from heating the polity and holding him out as anything other than the President of Nigeria.
Asari-Dokubo must be told in whatever language he understands that Nigeria is bigger than any of its parts and any individual. So, let no one or group say, or even think that the country will implode unless a particular course of action suitable only to it or him is adopted. That Nigeria, in the estimation of many, has reverted to tragic levels of political kleptocracy and fraud, feeding political polarization, ethnic resentment, citizen alienation, and an increasingly virulent Islamic terrorist movement in the North, is hardly contestable. But the fact is that, there is nothing wrong with Nigeria that cannot be corrected by what is right with Nigeria. All Nigerians must therefore identify those things that are right, emphasize them and use them as tools for nation-building. This is a most auspicious time to identify those values that define our Nigerianness, hence there is no better time than now to rediscover those binding ethos of the nation and why it profits all of us to be Nigerians.
