OF AVENGERS, SCAVENGERS AND HARBINGERS (1)

Times have changed. Human beings, understanding the regularly renewed time-induced imperative for civilisation, have always developed, with ingenuity, coping cum adaptive strategies for survival while concurrently adopting sophisticated methods and technologies to surpass the environment. We erect structures wherein we put our kids and call them schools, we put some adults on our payroll and name them teachers, we even create various platforms for unbounded networking and socialisation and we pigeonhole them social media. In essence, we have over the years and more particularly in this information age, Century the 21st, built systems and institutions that regularly acquaint us with appropriate rules of engagement together with standardised and acceptable socio-behavioural scripts and patterns.
However, and understandably so, there are people who deviate from and even fight this social order. Their actions and demands hinge them on a long, crowded and motley continuum whose both extremes are occupied by rebels/terrorists and revolutionaries. And in all of these, whether consciously or unconsciously, advertently or otherwise, the Niger Delta Avengers, with their idiosyncrasies, become contextual.
The dreaded group has launched and executed a flurry of ferocious and well coordinated attacks on critical oil installations and infrastructures, undoubtedly, to shut down the nation’s oil production and concomitantly cripple the economy. Other concurrent effects are the colossal drop in national power generation and discouragement of foreign investors from the country and more particularly from the region. Some of their demands like the clean up of Niger Delta are seemingly altruistic just as some like the release of Dasuki and defreezing of Tompolo's assets are outrightly ridiculous. One wonders how the release of Dasuki, for instance, leads to infrastructural development and life fulfilment for the people of Niger Delta. That’s why no matter how hard one tries to repress the thoughts that the group, with their demands, are ethnocentric and political from the subconscious mind, they pop up into consciousness.
Regardless of the validity of their demands and the veracity of their claims, one is forced to wonder if it gels with reason, even an inkling of it, to blow up pipelines in order to ‘force' the government to, for example, clean up the already messed up lands by spilling more oil in addition to releasing cancerous gasses in the process? How in earth do you harm the people you’re supposedly fighting for? You wonder too?!
If not anything, the resurgence of armed agitations in the Niger Delta should teach us that the politics of perfunctoriness branded as Amnesty is never the permanent way forward. It’s been a cesspool of corruption that has only succeeded in making, bluntly put, erstwhile economic terrorists overnight billionaires while the real indigenes (masses) wallow in abject poverty. It’s like applying powder on the face of an ulcer patient just to make him look fine. Definitely, that ‘fine' can never be fine in the same way ‘German’ cannot be German! It’s put in place a system that feeds the extravagant lifestyles of a few who revel in undue opulence. The cut of the redundant funds from the programme’s annual allocation is their unimaginable nightmare. Little wonder it’s believed in some quarters that those behind the attacks are the ex-warlords plus other beneficiaries of the status quo from whose deep and unending purses the free flow of our treasury has been cut. These and other valid reasons bring to the fore, questions about the effectiveness of the extant Amnesty arrangements.
With the billions of dollars it has gulped over the years, it’s evident that the whole of Niger Delta now has excellent road networks, extensive water projects, state of the art infrastructures, 21st century compliant schools and an unequalled pool of refined intelligentsia. Praise God, what a programme!
LAWAL Temitayo (S.A.L.T.)
dhonoureible@yahoo.com@Lawatem