PENGlobal Discourse
PAP: The Merchants of Niger Delta and the Campaign Against Otuaro
By Abai Francis
For more than six decades, the Niger Delta region of Nigeria through its vast crude oil resources has generated wealth for the country. Unfortunately, while its resources have helped transformed other economies of the world and its wealth has made elites of other citizens, the region and its inhabitants have continued to grapple with poor infrastructures, stagnation, and worst of all, environmental degradation occasioned by pollution from oil exploration activities that worsened the people’s state of poverty.
These challenges, blamed on the supposed neglect of both the government and the multinational companies operating in her territories, resulted into conflicts over time. Popular among the unrest is the era of armed struggle in the oil-rich but poor region. The escalation of the crisis resulted in not only the reduction of oil output which affected the country’s revenue generating capacity in that sector but it also led to the destruction of properties worth a fortune and the death of citizens that were affected by the crisis.
In a bid to enthrone lasting peace in the fragile region, the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) and the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) were birthed, among other initiatives by the federal government to address concerns of neglect and infrastructural deficits. Sadly, the politicisation of these federal initiatives ladened with corrupt practices, to a large extent, derailed their objectives as the opportunities they offered Niger Deltans were hijacked by greedy merchants who continually turn these genuine solutions into another complex problem and an avenue for the exploitation of the people in another dimension.
However, for the first time in the history of the PAP, after years of wasted resources it now seemed the amnesty programme has found its footing in the appointment of High Chief Dennis Otuaro Ph.D, a grassroots leader who knows his onions and has an indepth knowledge of the objectives of the PAP. Within a short space in time (barely a year after his appointment in March 2024), the PAP Boss has demonstrated beyond expectations that he is a square peg in a square hole. Let’s take a brief look at some of the achievements.
Leveraging on the strategy of inclusive governance, Otuaro directly began engaging with critical stakeholders in the region across board, to hear from the horses’ mouth rather than from merchants posing as representatives of the people. It was not that the Administrator was wary of the region’s challenges, but one of the key strategies of these meetings was aimed at garnering confidence and trust in his leadership from Niger Deltans at the grassroots whose interests the PAP initiative was supposed to serve in the first instance, as against the few merchants pretending to represent the people. Moreover, these engagements also offered the Administrator the opportunity to intimate the people about his plans and the challenges that pose a threat to their collective benefits. Of course, this bypassing of the merchants did not go down well with them.
Matching his genuine words with action, Otuaro, who has continually canvassed for the inclusion of more beneficiaries into the PAP scheme, having noted that the population in the region is blooming, scored yet another achievement, when, in a single year, he successfully deployed, in both on-shore and off-shore, two thousand students on scholarship as part of the empowerment initiative of the scheme. These were not cooked up beneficiaries but verified students that emerged from a meticulous process that put an end to ghost beneficiaries, further boosting transparency in the scheme. In addition, the PAP Boss successfully deployed marine cadets, pilots and aviation engineers who were beneficiaries of the scheme but had been idly neglected.
Quite interestingly, the Administrator was able to achieve these in a short while with the meager resources at its disposal. In line with the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s mandate, his actions has brought a renewed Hope to the people, many of whom had begun losing faith in an initiative that seemed to pose encumbrances than solutions to their plights. But no sooner the accolades started pouring in for the transformative ideas of the Administrator that were yielding positive fruits, the merchants became vindictive as this new era did not augur well with them.
These merchants, comprised of politicians and their cohorts, who in time past have turned the PAP into a milking cow, on realising that the Administrator would not play ball with them as it is no longer business as usual, have resorted to campaigns of calumny all in a bid to water down his reputation and to hoodwink unsuspecting members of the public with their “fallatic” schemes. However, the Niger Delta people are no longer gullible as the times have indeed, changed!
The only thing that is constant in life is change. And for the Niger Delta people, this positive change in the PAP has come to stay. The recent attacks against the PAP Boss has also brought to light a truth the parable that “a man’s enemy is in his household”. For over the years that the people of the oil-rich region have been neglected and deprived from benefitting from their God-given resources, one would have thought that every stakeholder in the region would rise up in one voice to canvass for the good and benefit of all. But that has not been the case as some few elements, driven by selfishness and greed, are determined to amass to themselves the wealth of the general populace.
It is not too late for these merchants that pretend to be sheep physically but are ravenous wolves within to turn over a new leaf. Rather than exert their energies and resources in engaging in the ‘Pull Him Down Syndrome’ they should rather think more positively of how to join hands with the PAP Boss to take the initiative to the next level. By now, right thinking minds would have been campaigning for how to transit from the identity of the PAP (which wrongly infer a negative branding of a people who were only agitating for their rights) to a more subtle term that is fittingly and honourably based. That these merchants are not thinking in this light further exposes their ignoramus attitude and their low mental state of reasoning in a progressive world where change waits for no one.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mr. Abai Francis, the Brand Director of PENGlobal, writes from Warri, Delta State.
