Alphonsus Agborh reports the 2010 Niger Delta Colloquium held recently in Asaba, Delta State, during which professors and other intellectuals probed into the region, with a question mark on the report of the Presidential Technical Committee on the Niger Delta, otherwise known as the Ledum Mitee report.

Where is the report of the Niger Delta Technical Committee led by Mr Ledum Mitee, a human right activist, social crusader and the arrowhead of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP)?

The comprehensive report was submitted to the Federal Government in November 2008 after two months of tireless work. The vice-president then and now the president, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, while inaugurating the committee in September, 2008, had assured that it would be taken very seriously as a way to finding a lasting solution to the deepening crises in the Niger Delta region.

Mitee, while submitting the report to the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, urged the government not to behave like its predecessors, but to take the recommendations seriously, implement them and avert further crises in the region. The former president then promised to look into the prescription and implement them. The rest is history.

The report was submitted to the government before the Justice Mohammed Uwais report on electoral reform, yet, no White Paper has been issued to date. Its recommendations have been largely ignored and even though the amnesty programme came from that report, Nigerians are witnesses to what happened to the programme.

These observations on the report were made by a renowned international scholar, human right cum pro-democracy activist and politician, Professor Julius Ihonvbere, at the 2010 Niger Delta Colloquium held recently in Asaba, Delta state. The colloquium was put in place by the Edwin K. Clark Foundation and the National Orientation Agency (NOA), Delta State Directorate, and powered by the Office of the Governor of Delta State.

The discourse, though not intended to regurgitate the content of the report, delved into how past government policies on the region were subverted by the leadership, thus failing to bring about the desired development of the region.

The report of the technical committee reviewed all previous reports on the Niger Delta, including the Willinks Reports (1958), Belgore (1992), Etiebet (1994), Vision 2020 (1996), United Nations (1997), Popoola (1998) Ogomudia (2001), Presidential Panel on National Security (2003), Niki Tobi (2005) and that of the Coastal States of the Niger Delta .

The Mitee committee held the same view on all the previous reports and showed glaringly that no government had ever bothered to implement the recommendations.

It is interesting to note that the committee prescribed a project monitoring committee to ensure the relevance and compliance of projects with the overall goal of holistic, people-centred, people- focused and people-driven growth and development in the region.

The true situation, according to Ihonvbere in his paper at the colloquium entitled ‘Millennium Development Goals and their relevance to Niger Delta Oil and Gas Communities,’ is that,  today, no one knows what happened to that report submitted with great fanfare.

According to him, this is why there is a continuing disconnection between the Federal Government and the Niger Delta.

“The people of the area did not cry for a ministry. They wanted a well-funded, monitored, effective NDDC. Now, a ministry was hurriedly created, even before the committee had submitted its report. The people of the region accepted the ministry in the hope that it would become a fully integrated part of their dreams. The challenge is to fund and empower it to carry out the prescriptions of the committee.

“If the Federal Government was serious, it would have published a White Paper, popularised the report, build discourses around it and used it as a roadmap for major donors’ conference to complement special resources to end militancy and promote integrated growth and development in the region,” he said.

Ihonvbere offered suggestions on how to move the region forward, insisting that the political will of the federal, state and local government administrators should be vigorous. This is because it was the absence of such political will which led to the neglect of the various reports on the Niger Delta.

According to him, the violence in the region, which degenerated into an all comers’ affairs in kidnapping, started as a reaction to the neglect, insecurity, poverty, oppression and desperation of the region.

In his paper, ”the Need for Niger Delta Literacy Brigade”, Professor Tunde Fatunde, lecturer in Sociology of Francophone Literature at the University of Lagos, said there was sufficient resources in the states of the Niger Delta to finance the literacy brigade, saying “one of the steps is to allocate to education about 26 per cent of the annual budget as recommended by UNESCO.

“We must encourage the ruling class to understand that the eradication of illiteracy is very possible at the shortest time. Iliteracy is an impediment to the growth and development in Niger Delta. The resources are available to transform Niger Delta into the most developed region of Nigeria. It can be done, and it will be done,” he said.

Lending his voice to the warnings of the Managing Director of the World Bank and Nigeria’s former Minister of Finance, Okonjo Iweala, that Nigeria faces political instability if it does not create 24 million jobs within the next 10 years, Professor Fatunde prayed that the youths be taken away from the streets by creating jobs for them.

Another speaker, Profesor Omfurhomu Okobiah, a foremost educationist, concluded in his paper, “The Challenges of the Amnesty and Post-Amnesty for Peace and Development of the Age-long  Neglected Niger Delta region” that the colloquium was not another forum for entertainment, but a clarion call for all Nigerians to profer solutions to the problems of the region.

According to him, the region had been criminally oppressed, exploited and neglected for over 50 years. Turning his searchlight on President Jonathan,  Okobiah appealed to him to do something concrete for the region, not necessarily as a son of the region, but because the area accounts for over 80 per cent of the federal revenue.

For the ‘freedom fighters,’ otherwise called militants, Okobiah reminded them that they should restore the humanity of both the oppressed and their oppressors as well in their struggle, saying “our freedom fighters should give peace a chance,” as the amnesty and post amnesty processes were being restrategised and vigorously refocused.

On “Fiscal Federalism and the 1999 constitution,” a legal icon, Dr Akpo Odje, observed that the ongoing call for true federalism in the country started about 50 years ago. He said the country was intended to be a truly federal system and not an amalgam  of centrifugal and centripetal forces, which it is today.

To achieve this dream, it is the view of the lawyer that there must be substantial devolution of powers and functions from the Federal Government to the states.

Citing several legal and constitutional authorities, Odje said the 1960 Constitution provided for resource control, just as the establishment of Niger Delta Development Board was well specified in the document.  Sadly enough, he noted, this constitutional provision and the Act establishing the development board were killed by successive administrations.

However, he said there was a light at the end of the tunnel, as there are some significant innovations on true federalism in the 1999 constitution, in spite of the highly centralised or unitary nature of that document, with the states  empowered to create their own local governments.

For the participants, this year’s colloquium on the Niger Delta region has, indeed, come and gone, but it should not be seen as another drama. The time has come when holistic and proactive measures should be taken to frontally tackle the myriads of problems facing the region.