In Nigeria, impunity walks on all fours. Miscreants are the lords of the Manor. They carve out empires and fiefdoms for themselves.
In the creeks of the Niger Delta and in the forests of the North East, armed men run the show and law abiding citizens are at their mercy. Worse still: the musclemen and toughies, unelected, allocate our patrimony, our common values.
They are so powerful they are above the law. Governments, even at the federal level, fawn over them. Their words are law. Not even the president of the federal republic dare cross their red lines.
If you think this is an exaggeration, take a second look at the botched ground breaking ceremony of the $16 billion Gas Revolution Industrial City, Ogidigben, Delta State.
President Goodluck Jonathan was expected to perform the ceremony on Friday, November 14. But he didn’t turn up, and despite all the hype and money spent, everything was put on hold. Indefinitely.
Why? Because Government Ekpemupolo, alias Tompolo, the liberator of the Ijaw nation, the man who rules the creeks and dines at the presidential palace in Abuja, vowed that the ceremony would not hold.
I will come back to this shortly. But let me briefly paint a picture of how important this project is not only to Delta State but Nigeria.
When Delta State Governor, Emmanuel Uduaghan, visited the riverside community of Ogidigben, Warri South-West Local Government in April to inspect the project site, he was beside himself with joy.
“The gas city is a very huge project,” he told Vanguard. “It is an integral part of the Nigeria Gas Master Plan, and will serve as a model for future development elsewhere in the country.”
Uduaghan said he was ululating because the project driven by the Ministry of Petroleum Resources through a consortium headed by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), oil giants, Shell and Chevron, and indigenous Sahara Energy Resource Nigeria Limited, will build a gas processing facility with initial gas processing capacity of 500-800 MM scf/d.
At its peak, the plant is expected to process 2Bscf/d of natural gas and supply ethane to a world class petroleum plant to be built by Saudi Arabia’s Xenel Industries.
Uduaghan disclosed that besides harnessing the country’s abundant gas resources for power generation, the plant would supply gas to an industrial complex within the Gas Revolution Industrial City that would include world-scale fertiliser and petrochemical plants.
Coming at a time our leaders are talking about the diversification of the economy, with agriculture as the main focus, this is a project Nigerians should be proud of.
In a country where the scale of unemployment is scandalous, such a project should be embraced by all. In a country where there is little or no manufacturing, what we should be praying for is that the usual government lethargy should not set in until the project is completed.
But the project has been put on hold because Tompolo and his gang are not happy with its location. But the project is not located in the North, South West or South East. It is in the South South. It is in Delta State, an oil producing state.
Tompolo is from Delta State. So, what is the issue? Ogidigben, where the project is sited, is an Itsekiri enclave. Tompolo is Ijaw. I don’t know if anybody appreciates the absurdity of the argument.
The project was to be located in Koko, the community that became popular because of the dumping of toxic waste there in the 1990s, but was later taken to Ogidigben because, according to experts, the water in Koko is not deep enough to take in big ships.
So, Ogidigben became the natural choice because of its deep waters and bigger channel. Uduaghan also explained that the project site would provide easy access for shipping and export to coastal and other international markets.
He said it would create room for inland transportation via the Escravos River to inland markets such as nearby Warri and Sapele, and farther afield via Forcados and River Niger.
Yet, Tompolo and his kinsmen stopped this important project because they frown at the prospect of it being named after Ogidigben, rather than Gbaramatu, an Ijaw settlement.
As if that was not enough impunity, Tompolo organised the abduction of 14 journalists – including South South regional editors of Vanguard, Emma Amaize and Nation, Shola O’Neil – who went to the creeks to cover protests by the Itsekiri against the cancellation of the ground breaking ceremony.
Ironically, the same Tompolo had taken journalists to the same venue a day before the ceremony was scheduled to hold to cover a protest by Ijaw of Gbaramatu warning Jonathan not to perform the event.
So, journalists on legitimate assignment were not only abducted and detained against their wish but also threatened with death.
Channels Television’s energy correspondent, Olu Philips, one of the abductees, gave a graphic account of what happened at about 11am when they were on the high sea on their way back from the assignment.
“We saw other speed boats coming behind us. They were about six. They caught up with us, asked us to stop and surrounded us. They had guns with them and they asked us where we were coming from and we told them we went to cover an event.
“They said we were spies and they collected our camera and put it in another boat, after hitting the camera man.
“They made some calls and decided to take us to Gbaramatu. They took us to a high chief popularly known as Tompolo. They beat up some other persons that were not journalists.
“After beating them, they handed them a rifle with three magazines and asked us to stand behind them that we were criminals and that they saw the rifle and pistols with us. They took photographs of us and were posting it on the internet that we were all criminals.”
This ordeal lasted from 11am until 7pm when naval officers came to rescue them. Before then, the journalists had been subjected to psychological trauma.
Since this story broke, I have waited patiently to hear Tompolo deny the allegation. He has not, which means he committed the crime.
I also expected the same powers-that-be who cordoned off the National Assembly on Thursday, November 20 in a desperate bid to stop the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, from entering the Green Chamber to invite Tompolo for questioning. There has been nothing like that.
Agreed, Uduaghan, who has condemned the kidnap, said Jonathan was worried and has charged security operatives to unravel what happened. That is funny.
What happened was that Tompolo kidnapped 14 journalists because they covered a protest rally staged by the Itsekiri. He has neither denied the allegation nor gone into hiding.
And he knows nothing will happen to him, because as philosopher Anacharsis once said, laws are like cobwebs; strong enough to detain only the weak, and too weak to hold the strong. It is more so in Nigeria.
Tompolo has become too strong that the country’s laws are now too weak to tame him. If anything, he is waiting to be appeased – and he will.