The Revered Martin Luther King Jr. once emphatically stated that “we would have to repent in this generation, not so much for the wickedness of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people”.

In my last series, it was a cursory look at an infinitesimal aspect of how the corruption syndrome was entrenched into the Nigerian polity by the past government of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. Suffice it to say that, I believe it would take sometime for us to finish the analysis, especially now I have understood that I stared the honest nest by the last piece, with the quantity and quality of e-mails I received as rejoinders. More and more Nigerians are becoming sensitized and courageous enough to speak out on these ills, for which they passed through during the 8 year administration of the retired General and Ota farmer.
No doubt, few Nigerians are of the view that Mr. Ex-President should be spared for the sins he committed, therefore asking him to go and sin no more, but as we daily face all the debilitating challenges his administration had caused us and the betrayal of so much trust reposed on him; we are left with only one alternative, which is justice. No more, no less.

In one of my usual, after-dinner discussions with my political aides, and visitors, I recalled telling them how Olusegun Obasanjo was touted by many, based on his military background, as best suited to tame a military that had been supposedly become used to exercising political power and who, many feared, would snatch power yet again on any pretext. On taking office, Olusegun Obasanjo began with what many thought were the right moves. He promised to crack down on corruption, seen by many as a cancer that had been undermining the country’s development goals. He equally, went further to endear himself to public opinion, when he “weeded” out from the armed forces hundreds of officers who had held “political office” and were thus thought to be more susceptible to its “temptations”.

However, few months after inauguration of the President Olusegun Obasanjo’s led administration, even as Nigerians waited patiently to reap the fruits of the democracy, (precisely in November 1999, exactly four years after the Ogoni leader and environmental campaigner Ken Saro- Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian military junta),invaded Odi. Restive youths, protesting the neglect of the community, after four decades of oil exploitation in the area by western multinational oil companies in collaboration with the government, had murdered twelve policemen sent to restore order in the town the previous week.

President Olusegun Obasanjo rather than send special forces to arrest the youths, dispatched troops commanded by an army Colonel, who with a full complement of artillery, bombarded, burnt and destroyed every building save a bank and a church, but several hundreds of people, including women and children were massacred on the streets of Odi, as they tried to escape from their burning houses by soldiers on the orders of the country’s newly elected President, Olusegun Obasanjo.

Scholars, especially historians, may argue that this was not the first, having had the Umuechem oil producing community incident in 1989 when several people were killed by the anti-riot police, though in the military regime. However the destruction of Odi by Nigeria’s democratic government as led by the obstinate Chief and farmer from Ota, Ogun State, is unthinkable, barbaric, wicked and tantamount to a war crime against the innocent people of Odi.
It is also a clear indication that the brutality and heavy-handedness, for which the likes of Charles Taylor are facing trials today, were equally, perpetrated in Nigeria by the heartless and vindictive Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.

The present crisis in the Niger Delta can be better understood as a long drawn out historical process, itself propelled and animated by complex international economic and political forces and which the local inhabitants have been trying to comprehend, resist or turn to their own advantage these past hundred years with varying degrees of success and failure. In other words, it is a story of power and resistance to it; of alien and imposed authority and attempts to indigenize it and make it accountable to the people it purports to rule; an epic tale of ordinary men and women battling against vastly more superior forces threatening to take the bread from their mouth and destroy their way of life into the bargain.

The people who had hitherto been known farmers and fishermen and therefore eked out a living from their farms and sea foods but had lost virtually everything especially their farmlands, water etc after the advent and exploitation of the oil, with little or no compensation from the multinational companies and the successive military governments.

The people have bestowed so much hopes and confidence with the return of democracy, believing that respite would come to their communities, after so many years of neglect but it also points to the degrading and dehumanizing position which the Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration placed the Niger Delta, notwithstanding the strategic importance of the zone in the economy and politics of Nigeria, thereby giving the jobless youths who had already been armed by same administration for political thuggery and rigging of elections, an opportunity to use the guns for whatever they deem right.

In as much as nobody would encourage violence in whatever guise, however Nigerians especially the present government of the day should take into cognizance that no administration from Nigeria’s history have had the spate of recorded high powered thuggery, and unresolved political assassinations like that of the wicked and arrogant Olusegun Obasanjo.

The running battled between the youths and the government and their oil company allies is the resumption of the struggle of the ordinary people to have a say in the way they are governed and in the way which the wealth they help generate is allocated.

The Niger Delta is in a serious state right now, can you just picture yourself in that kind of state, where you don’t think you are going to see another day, where you would go about your normal duties without the fear of being molested and abducted by militant youths for an unknown millions of naira.
Psychologists would agree with me, that it’s not only demeaning but inciting for these youths to read on the pages of Newspapers that the same ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo whom was reported to have had abut N25,000, only when he was released in 1998, had suddenly turned a multi-trillionaire at the expiration of his two term tenure, having been in charge of the Oil and Gas Ministry all through his administration.

When I called the Ota farmer, an “emperor”, most Nigerians felt I was being too vocal, and antagonistic, forgetting the very fact that few of us who believed so much he would have learnt from his incarceration and abject poverty therefore invested millions of dollars on the ingrate but today are bewildered and disappointed by the revelations from the true self acclaimed “messiah” of modern democracy.

How will you not expect the sincere freedom fighter, ( not the criminals among them) not feel downtrodden and frustrated when a serving civilian President militarized his polity ignoring the provisions of the constitution, and used his position to curry over 7 billion naira in building his personal Library but had organized several “talk shows” with the usual “paper blue prints” with nothing concrete to the amelioration of the plight of the people of Niger Delta.
How will these helpless, unemployed and hungry youths not take up arms, to defend themselves in a bloody but heroic resistance of a government which is the father of militarization of the Delta?

If Olusegun Obasanjo was not pig-headed and arrogant and had learnt from history, or listened to my words and that of the few professionals who could muster the courage to tell him the truth, he could have known that a people convinced that they are in their right and that they are fighting a war of survival would be able to face the biggest of armies and acquit themselves creditably.
It’s true that the present President Umar Yar’Adua’s administration had taken the zone into consideration, in his seven point agenda. It is also true that most of the present Governors in the zone are standing up in unison for peace but it’s also true that the man (Olusegun Obasanjo) who so much so enriched himself, family and cronies still freely walk around his farm without being arrested and prosecuted for the order of the annihilation of innocent women and youths of Odi and Zakibiam in Benue State.

What a regrettable situation for the man whom God so much destined for greatness but he threw his opportunity into the bin and sacrificed his greatness on the altar of arrogance, greed and avarice. Justice on the Otta farmer is the beginning of proffering lasting solution in the Niger Delta.
Furthermore the community based programmes of the United States and her agencies with support from the European Union is an excellent development, consequently should take more far reaching steps not only the case of distributing the artifacts (boreholes, sewing machines, milling machines and cash etc) of development to the communities.

Having followed with keen interest the different compiled reports, of the Niger Delta people in the last eight years problem I think President Umar Yar’Adua administration still need to personally tour the region and the way to peace should be asking the simple but the two all-important questions; why are these people angry? What will assuage this anger?

Anything more or less is just half measures, politics and shadows chasing; say I Orji Uzor Kalu said so.