Governor of Delta State, Dr Emmanuel Uduaghan, Preaches the Catchy Gospel of “Delta Beyond Oil”.

Gov. Uduaghan

(LOUD NEWS TODAY-LONDON) In a furtive search for an alternative economy that can flourish the state beyond the allocations from oil rent, the governor of Delta State, Dr Emmanuel Uduaghan, has been preaching the catchy gospel of “Delta Beyond Oil”. That crusade had taken him to several parts of the globe, baiting foreign investors with all the lures and prospects offerable by the Delta economy. Not many such investors have been converted by his preachments, perhaps because of other variables outside the control of the Delta State government.

But undeterred, Gov Uduaghan was in London last week, to address a session of British parliamentarians on the imperatives and benefits of investing in the Delta economy.

He spoke on “Nigerian Environment: Beyond Politics and Amalgamation”.
In his detailed address, delivered eclectically, Uduaghan displayed a deep knowledge of both the Nigerian history and the dialectics of Nigerian politics. He argued that most of the challenges facing the country were caused by three factors which are: Ethnic distrust, Religious distrust and Political distrust.

The failure to spare a thought for the people who owned the land from which oil was being explored, according to Uduaghan,  is the root cause of the unrest in the Niger Delta. He argued that with the continuous exploration of oil, the ecosystem of the surrounding communities was irretrievably destroyed, noting that this led to the failure of the natural resource of the people like land and river to yield their increase. He told stories of how literally people could be boiling palmnut (banga) on fire and dash down to the river and kill some fishes with which the  “banga meal” soup would be prepared; lamenting that over the years, the effects of oil exploration had completely despoiled the natural resources of the people.

According to him, the consequence is that the people could no longer feed themselves, resulting in hunger, with the correlative consequence of anger. “When there is hunger, there will be anger. When there is anger there will be violence, and when there is violence there will be unrest”, Uduaghan said.

He noted that the shortcomings of managing the oil wealth in Nigeria has inadvertently triggered the growth of criminality.
He said it is in a bid to have a proper developed economic environment that the Delta State government had long launched the crusade for Delta Beyond Oil, knowing that oil is a wasting asset.

In pursuit of the new economic template, the governor said his administration has thus focused attention on the agricultural and tourist potentials of the state. He told the investors that even the business of creating and boosting the fashion quest in Delta State held a lot of fortune and prospect.

While running through the narrative of his three point agenda: peace and security, infrastructure development, and human capital development, the governor narrated

the ugly experiences he had as a governor at inception, given the level of insecurity at the time.
Hear him, “Taking the oath of governor, at the time was like going on a suicide mission. You cannot be afraid in dealing with anything, no matter how dangerous it looked, in dealing with the security situation”.

Although he said the state had overcome that level of insecurity that circumscribed peace in the state, there were yet the malaise of kidnapping, crude oil theft and armed robbery still plaguing the Nigerian nation.
But he enthused that, “the future of Nigeria is very bright”.

He argued that the resources endowed on all parts of Nigeria are enough to grow the nation, and so the lamentation about the 1914 amalgamation should stop forthwith.

He had barely finished that sentence when a voice shouted from the back of the hall, “that is your own opinion”. The governor affirmed that it was his own opinion, but the intruding voice did not relent. The pitch of his voice rose even higher. He declared that the amalgamation was grave injustice and that “the people of Biafra should be allowed to renegotiate their membership of a skewed nation”. The intruding voice soon got some measly support from his ilk, many of them voicing seditious verbiages, in some ill-established British accent. One of them, spotting a Biafran emblem and badge on his shirt, refused to be introduced as a “young Nigerian”, preferring to be addressed as a “Biafran”.

The same fellow had challenged the organisers on why the short presentation of the Sokoto State governor, Aliyu Wamakko was not followed with a question-and-answer session. The explanation that Wamakko had a flight to catch little assuaged his anger.
On several other occasions, a number of the “Biafran speakers”, questioned the continued existence of the Nigerian entity claiming  that the Igbos have been made serial victims of the Nigerian enterprise.

It soon became a matter of tact and wisdom in managing the angry fellows, one of them an old man, who all seemed kitted to cause some chaos. The creases on the forehead of Tunde Alabi, the Executive Director of African Partnership Development, the  organiser of the British–African conference, had increased with the confusion brewing from the “Biafran patriots”.  He had to repeatedly appeal for calm.

Earlier, the Chair of All Party Parliamentary groups in Nigeria, Mrs Meg Hillier, a British MP,  had commended Nigeria for improving on the areas  of human right, women right and environmental right, regretting however that  “Nigeria is still seen as the greatest source of trafficked children to the UK”.

A UK-born Nigerian, Chi Onwurah, who had been serving in the British Parliament since 2010, regretted that most news on Nigeria in the UK media centred on insecurity, fraud and scam, implying, without saying it expressly, that these were hindrances to attracting foreign investors.

But Dr Joe Okemena, a Special UN envoy and Chair of Nigerians in the UK Labour Party, blamed the Nigerian leaders for not doing enough to develop the country. He informed that there was $200 trillion fund in the UN dedicated for the development of Africa, and that various countries and even states within the continent can benefit from the fund by placing their regular annual budgets as counterpart funding to qualify them to draw from the fund.

Even when the session ended, the young bearded spokesman of the “Biafrans” continued his agitation in high-pitched voice attracting the attention of the Metropolitan Police, who promptly seized him and whisked him away to a far corner for questioning. The harsh freezing autumn breeze did not allow yours sincerely to know what eventually happened to the Biafran crew, many of whom had abandoned the one that was nabbed.