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Author: Okah Ewah Edede
Posted to the web: 8/3/2007 9:36:39 AM

THE MENACE OF INTERNECINE FEUDS: A POOR MAN’S CURSE
 
Hunger incubates and hatches into violence because it is quite easy to give a poor, starving man a cause. The whirlwind of militancy and insurgency ravaging Nigeria today can be attributed to privation and a stagnant economy, this is so because poverty and negative economic growth are symptoms of a government inundated with malignant corruption and gross incompetence. And the prognoses are: an incubus of ‘perditionary’ rebellion and strife.
 
The monstrous transgression of kleptomania (ism) and profound mendacity by a successive government of spurious martinets – who fail to kowtow to rules themselves – has lead clownish ethnic romantics inebriated with grandeur visions of creating ethnically homogenous political entities into seizing this double standard as the gestalt for promoting insurrection and conflict in the Niger delta and other warring regions of Nigeria. This may just prove to be the augury of lamentation and perdition in this country.
 
The efflorescence of violence in the Niger delta can be said to have followed this chart: poverty fostering hunger; hunger sustaining anger; anger bubbling into ethnic wars; ethnic wars impoverishing the people and mutating into violence against the state. From my dialectical disputations with certain high-ranking Niger delta warlords, I came to realize that vicious violence sometimes soothe fray nerves.
 
It is sobering to note that rich countries, in contemporary times, almost never suffer civil wars; middle-income countries rarely engage in protracted civil conflicts; yet the poorest countries, making up one-sixth of humanity, endures four-fifth of the world’s civil wars and guerilla combats.
 
Research by the World Bank found that when income per person doubles, the risk of civil wars and internal uprisings halves, and that for each percentage point by which economic growth raises, the risk of internecine pugilisms fall by a point. This means that for peace to reign stably in Nigeria, the government must endeavour to keep corruption, inflation, infrastructural underdevelopment, trade barriers and trade deficit, and human right violations low. It is a proven fact that poorly governed countries are prone to civil conflagrations and wars.
 
If the truth must be stated, violence is profitable! Forget the asinine, hyperbolic religious and moral injunctions about the un-profitability of violence. Militancy pays, period! Though militants rarely pump oil because of the required capital, skills and technology needed to do so, and the firms that have these abilities usually prefer to deal with legitimate governments, militants still profit from oil by extorting money from oil companies. I have had the opportunity to engage certain top-echelon Niger delta militants in highly intimate and strictly confidential discussions and arguments, and I know how their mind works and how they operate.
 
Fear! Fear is one very wonderful technique for milking money from oil firms and the state. Via the modus operandi of hostage-taking and ransom demands, militants extort huge sums of money from those in the oil-sector. Hey, please do ignore all the ornamented mendacity about government not paying ransoms, hmm… the government at all levels pay ransoms handsomely to Niger delta militants. They even pay certain stipends as royalty and homage regularly to the creek warlords of Egbesu!
 
The threat to blowup oil pipelines is another horror that forces the government and oil firms to pay without squabbles. It is worthy to note that within a period of eight years, western companies alone are estimated to have handed over a bewildering $ 1.2 billion to militants in the Niger delta! This sum is guesstimated to be far greater than the official and unofficial European aid to the Nigerian government. Today, ‘extortionalism’ is a highly profitable and ebullient form of business for youths in the Niger delta.
 
If the Nigerian government is serious about saving the country from the agonies of Sudan, then the government – at all level – should device means of improving the Nigerian economy so as to stymie civil mayhem and anarchy.
 
Well, on a final note, after a one-month hiatus, it is back to killing, Byzantine violence, hostage-taking and ransom demands as usual in the Niger delta.
 
By Okah Ewah Edede
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