From the cradle darkness walked upon the surface of the Niger Delta killing any splutter of fluorescence like sunrise extinguishing lamps in Soyinka’s ‘Death in the Dawn’. From 1957 and beyond the consumed fluorescence turned into a vast void, only the crude oil flowing forcibly to illuminate demarcated territories.
So some criminals emerged and militarily engaged the mastermind of the darkness and the vast void as graphically captured in the language of the ordinary people in the book Dewdrops From Nigeria’s Starved Tree: ‘The Niger Delta enjoys recognition as one of the most developmentally impoverished regions in the whole world. The only transgression of Niger Delta against Nigeria is being the reservoir of the black gold.’
With a dexterity unbeatable the Federal Government of Nigeria and the oil companies had created the darkness and the vast void for years, bringing in its trail combatant Niger Delta bees resentful of the developmental VAST VOID.
The criminals merged into major Isaac Boro born 10 September 1938, declared Niger Delta Republic in 1966 and for twelve days he took up arms against the enemies and died in 20 April 1968 under questionable mysterious circumstances outside the liberation struggle after witnessing the birth of Rivers State in 1968. Boro thus became the first JESUS CHRIST of the Niger Delta.
Before Boro’s death he was recklessly maligned, derogated and differently appellated but worked devotedly for the Federal Government of Nigeria when engaged as a dependable material in the execution of the ill-fated condemnable civil war of 1967-70 after he had meaningfully and heroically wound up his liberation struggle in the Niger Delta – a meaningless civil war in which the Ibos were, regrettably, starved and massacred mindlessly with sadism by veterans of exploitation and hegemony in Nigeria.
However, for authoritative clarity and meaningful progression on the issue of marginalization, exploitation, massacre and provocation of the Ibos in connection with the Biafra Republic before and during the Nigerian civil war of 29 May 1967, it is the Odenigbos, Ugwus, Kainenes and Olannas of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun who could tell the story so the remaining half of the Half of a Yellow Sun could be completed by me.
Depriving people of a healthy space to experiment their ideals, intuitions, theories and talents towards meaningful existence in a nation as it was in the Biafran days replicated in the Niger Delta, would always breed a whirlpool.
This is the fulcrum of Odenigbo’s thesis in Half of a Yellow Sun when he contends that: ‘The real tragedy of our post colonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world’. Deprivation and exclusion were the inspirational forces behind Boro’s Delta Volunteer Service of forty able-bodied men formed alongside with Samuel Owonaru and Nothinghan Dick in 23 February 1966 (the day the Holy Communion of war was showered on all in a circle in the forest), and High Chief Government Ekpemupolo’s MEND now dead.
Upon the retirement of Boro from the earth and his subsequent canonization as the first Jesus Christ of the Niger Delta, the darkness and the vast void came back with a bizarre virulent newness. Niger Deltans were turned into either Israelites in the hands of the Philistines at war or like the Israelites in the comfort of king Pharaoh of Egypt. Groaning under the spiky enslavement of the veterans of exploitation, balkanization and systematic pulverization, Niger Deltans were too cowered to come out canoeing confrontationally on an alternative canal against the surging surfs of annihilation.
The tears of major Jasper Isaac Boro still stood as a tree freshly cut, dripping with sap. The veterans of annihilation were emboldened and so grew luxuriantly jubilant like palm fronds in the affectionate grip of a gentle breeze in Gbaramatu forest. A malevolent new storm of exploitation was thus yielded inalienable right of walk over the Niger Delta by the veterans of annihilation. Mysteriously, rather mysteriously, Niger Deltans lived like anaestheticized souls side by side with the destroyers of light camouflaged as light-bearers.
Living complacently as anaestheticized souls, a dangerous lull invaded the Niger Delta struggle in the wake of Boro’s retirement. The path walked on by Boro was overgrown with thick weeds turned a virgin forest, terrifying the Chinua Achebe’s UNOKAS of Umuofia in Things Fall Apart. As a man characterized by possession of the required ‘vital linkage with the poor and dispossessed of the land’ comparable to Nkem Osodi of Kangan in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, poised to leave indelible imprint for people to follow, High Chief Government Oweizide Ekpemupolo transparently led a manumission war against the veterans of exploitation in the late 1990’s and salvaged the people.
With a commitment, consistency, transparency, sophistication and mysticism that amaze Nigerians up till now, Tompolo methodically cleared the thick forest of Boro and began his manumission struggle in the Niger Delta because his convictions were fired by Ralph Waldo Emerson who teaches thus: ‘Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail’. And indeed the trail left by Tompolo in the Niger Delta manumission struggle would perpetually resist effacement no matter the twisted verbal gymnastics manufactured by the Ministry of Propaganda, Instigation and Lie-programming Affairs in Nigeria.
Independently Tompolo pursues progressive ideals by which the path he had cleared for man would be invariably denuded of suffocating weeds. Niger Delta must be developed and Nigeria must remain one indivisible entity.
The goals, the dreams of Niger Delta must be systematically pursued and achieved within Nigeria, measurably distant away from thoughts of dismemberment but based on new codes of togetherness however the virulence, the pangs, the anguish and the agonies of provocation from the veterans of exploitation. He will never dismantle his progressive ideals to satisfy propagandists but always unwaveringly cocooned within his tested carapace of philosophical, moral, mystical intuitions and projections, calmly patriotically in tune with the theory of a united, indivisible and prosperous nation because the cosmically decreed length of time for man is not long enough to be frittered away walking on the thorny path of propaganda czars who vindictively paint Tompolo in the colour of a freedom activist dangerous to nation-building.
Before the cosmic tide is full, the whole gamut of Tompolo’s progressive ideals would be tenaciously lived to the fullest in the consolidation of a united, indivisible and prosperous Nigeria because he is daily nurtured and empowered ideationally by Steve Jobs (1955-2011) thus: ‘Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary’.
Because the thick-forest was cleared by him for habitation, Tompolo has thus become the SECOND JESUS CHRIST of the Niger Delta. Though famed to be connected to the poor, the dispossessed, the gods, the Angels, the rich and the cosmic, he is yet to be found invoking these links to suffocate people.
Jesus was feared and suspected before the crucifixion but after it he became the love of the world, so much so that even for a falling man who trips over a stone, it was the invocation of ‘Jesus!’ which naturally calms the mind. Life without Jesus appears jinxed, careering down the abyss.
Somebody sacrificially emancipated the Niger Delta in the second phase after the death of Boro in the book of Genesis. The Niger Delta was liberated in the book of Exodus by Tompolo. He was killed, death celebrated with a panache but disproved; he was declared wanted and later died when the HEROSHIMA-LIKE Amnesty bomb was thrown on Camp Five in 2009. From the death he rose, seated at the right hand of EGBESU.
From that noble seat he descended upon the Niger Delta as a dove of peace, development, agent of positive change. For years this dove had flown without dung let loose upon anyone, not even pedestrians and foresters. Even the oil companies, dinosaurs, behemoths, leviathans, lions, tigers, elephants, crocodiles, iguanas, pythons, gorillas and chimpanzees see him as the Prince of Peace: unambitious, self-effacing and self-deprecatory who uses horses and donkeys as vehicles for travelling rather than use jeeps and chartered flights; a man who chooses chastity over and above chronic womanizing, teetotalism over drunkenness, only interested in activities bound to nourish the spirit and awaken the psychic faculties.
For such a man he must not be feared, suspected but seen as an Angel of peace. When a freedom activist he was dedicated and did not give it a camouflage. Now that Tompolo is on the path of peace, progress and development, why should some idle minds impute to him plans, ideals and shibboleths he had sacrificially parted way with through immersion in purification waters in the EGBESU GROVE? The obsession of Tompolo is to walk methodically on the paths ploughed by his valued ideals and be attuned to the yearnings and demands of the inner spirit because from there emerges a potent directional wisdom steering one away from missteps and macabre caves. It would be preposterous therefore to argue that upon the mind of Tompolo these lines of the Rosicrucion poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox in the poem ‘The law’ dwell every day:
You are your own devil, you are your own God,
You fashioned the paths that your footsteps have trod
And no one can save you from error or sin
Until you shall hark to the spirit within.
Some people are strangely born with the virus of idleness and imputation of malevolence to others. And for those evil idle minds whose obsession revolves around concoctions targeted to paint Tompolo as a shark on the prowl to devour marine creatures as part of a convoluted mechanism RESERVOIRED and nourished by individualized envy, sheer gravitation towards morbid excitement, it would only produce the positive polarity like the traditional arsenal of blandishments amassed against Abiku in Soyinka’s ‘Abiku’:
‘In vain your bangles cast
Charmed circles at my feet;
I am Abiku calling for the first
And the repeated time’
The demand of AMNESTY cannot be whimsically shelved under any guise. Tompolo is a principled consistent man ready to make sacrifice for his deep inner convictions as he had once done fearlessly as a freedom activist using wood, moulded clay stones and sticks; he is not wishy-washy and fickle-minded. Heaped on him are epithets borne of shark-like potentials. To rain on him negative non-existent epithets so as to get him systematically quarantined is the most ridiculous and imbecilic adventure because the man has never fought a personal war; only a dedicated champion of the general cause to liberate Niger Deltans developmentally incarcerated. Much as some benighted idlers labour to paint him as a ravenous shark, or as a man that descriptively fits into every prediction and therefore beyond the satanic predictions of vindictive idlers, the principled and consistent Tompolo, whose brow is flooded by the 2009 amnesty, is not different from the speaker in Soyinka’s poem ‘Night’ whose pronouncement betrays his resentment of whimsicality, and his admission of powerlessness over night: .
‘Your hand is heavy, Night, upon my brow,
I bear no heart mercuric like the clouds to dare
Exacerbation from your subtle plough’.
God created the Heaven and the Earth only once. Upon the face of Heaven and Earth iniquities of man are cast carelessly but God has neither recreated Heaven and Earth nor destroyed them despite daily provocations of man. Tompolo in his transmogrified state would always remain Tompolo, only excited by thoughts geared towards salvaging endangered creatures because he is the only Ebozo fish opposed to blood-spilling and OCEAN defilement.
The criminals are not those who fought the liberation war and had amnesty thrust upon as a well-thought mutual tension-diffusion mechanism but those who did not fight but have honed their talents for stoking of fire relying on the potency of verbal logs and embers hewn from forests in the throes of death from deforestation: they are the careerist ministers in the Ministry of propaganda, instigation and Lie-programming Affairs. Having progressed to professorial seats in the Ministry with their avalanche of journal articles, there is always job for them in every government.
Nigeria would move forward if President Muhammadu Buhari could build partnership with these directors, statisticians, permanent secretaries and clerks in the Ministry but the partnership should be a punitively chastening one so that these sophisticated VERBAL SCIENTISTS could be perpetually caged.
This done, the suffocating endless turbulence always created with a genius by these verbal DISTORTION-CZARS would have sailed into the river bed beyond trace. This would pave the way for engagement of individuals with positive ideals to move the country forwards.
Profanation of Jesus Christ would always be an encroachment replete with danger. Tompolo is the Jesus Christ of the Niger Delta and so no account must he be profaned and whimsically given non-existent vindictive connotations borne out of battery-hearted, charcoal-soaked, diseased and amnesia-stricken minds, excited more by self-serving theoretical postulations of UNKNOWABLE GESTATION PERIODICITY rather than visibly verifiable pragmatic postulations which the current life of Tompolo exemplifies in its entire complexity.
Fanaticism roves, confined to no specific space or season. This I know. Therefore, for those pseudo-ecclesiastical intellectuals and theologians poised to pulverize me over the use of Jesus Christ, even in clearly allegorical terms, all in shameless dramatization of fanaticism towards ultimate consolidation of their uninhibited PRIVATIZATION OF JESUS, as if graceless, gratuitous, base and arrogant advertisement of fundamentalism in its crudest elevation without a refined inner rhythm, would automatically give them the coupon to merit or secure admittance into Heaven or the Holy of Holies unquestioned, they should gladly claim a calm river or read this noiselessly and channel energies into other result-oriented religious engagement because Jesus is not the sole property of anyone. Mere caviling at the appropriation and beatification of Tompolo as the Jesus Christ of the Niger Delta would not give you the key to Heaven, neither would it blockade my reintegration as a prevaricated being in the Divine Immensity. Only negative forces, elements fear and disfigure the Jesus Christ (Tompolo) in their self-destruct dance of regression, not the positive forces and elements.
A canoeist is like a clam whose content nobody could divine however the level of psychic penetration and depth. Where would be his harbour as he journeys or paddles away is locked away in the inner recesses of the canoeist’s mind. Tompolo is a canoeist positively inclined. Therefore the canoeist over whom idlers have heaped negative epithets, bordering on what he would do today or tomorrow, be henceforth left alone to canoe away at sea searching for the best for man. The idlers obsessed with negative predictions of Tompolo’s next steps would have fared better, closer to accuracy than fantasy, if they were as psychically equipped as the enigmatic character Azaro in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Or have the idlers suddenly turned the famished road, feeding on the negative predictions of Tompolo’s next moves as the daily blandishments for the famished road?
Let us not disingenuously attribute negative thoughts to the canoeist who has open mission because there would be no purgatory for the cursed deep-rooted Liars, instigators, propagandists and verbal manipulators. For self-appointed ministers of lies in the lucrative Ministry of Propaganda, Instigation and Lie-programming Affairs, their appointments turn a brief candle and ash the day the principal is awakened to the true pictures in his moment of epiphany.
Malevolent man-made propaganda, inversions, distortions, manipulations and obfuscations dexterously moulded with a beautiful blend of verbal flexibility, fluidity and sophistication make Jesus Christ of Nazareth look like a common criminal, a common sinner, but much later he became the king of the world, venerated even more by his most despicable sharp-edged traducers. However the vindictive idlers labour to disfigure Tompolo, his achievements and directional ideals have a radiance, incandescence, fluorescence, glow, radiation beyond wicked man-made ‘TARPAULINATION’. With every geographically programmed quenching of ‘lamps’ by Wole Soyinka’s ‘sunrise’ in ‘Death in the Dawn’ Tompolo sits calm, intelligently shaping his philosophy from words of Ella Wheeler Wilcox in his timeless poem ‘The Law’:
‘The sun may be clouded, yet ever the sun
Will sweep on its course till the cycle is run’.
And when into chaos, the systems are hurled,
Again shall the Builder reshape the world.
Mr. Ekanpou Enewaridideke, a public affairs analyst, wrote from Akparemogbene, Delta State.
This article was originally published on Vanguard.