Guardian

IT’S the 14th Democracy Day and I’m looking at the Niger Delta basin, site of all of Nigeria’s crude oil production since 1958. I am looking at the basin from the point of view of possibilities.

On the Benin River one afternoon in late 2009, I sighted three men on a canoe, rowing gently, chatting excitedly. They could have been on a break from work in a nearby oilrig, seismic boat, or production platform, just taking a “stroll” on the waterway.

Watching these men, you could get envious if you were one of those imports from elsewhere, who go to work seven days on and seven days off, on any of the thousands of hydrocarbon installations that explore for and extract oil from the depths of the Niger Delta basin.

Assume you are a workstation bound geophysicist, who have lived all your life in the concrete jungle of one city or the other; noisy, overpopulated, with snarling traffic your experience every day to and from work.

And then you suddenly get assigned to a few weeks of supervision of a seismic acquisition project on the Benin River, a large, independent stream formed by a junction of the Ethiope and the Jameson Rivers and linked to the Niger system by a network of creeks.

In the course of the fieldwork, you wake up one morning in your room, to a view of the river’s broad expanse and, out in the distance, on the edge of the mangrove, you see a woman in her canoe, smoking tobacco.

With a child playing on the floor of the river craft and cooking utensils and food arranged in the centre of the canoe, she might just have wheeled out the vehicle from one of the nearby villages, for a mid morning picnic.

“The Niger Delta basin is a tranquil haven,” you tell yourself. Why can’t you own property here? Why can’t you buy yourself a slice of heaven?

You are reminded of a passage in Kaine Agari’s novel, Yellow Yellow:

“I was paddling the canoe to one of my favourite spots — a small, uninhabited island about five hundred metres away from our side of the village. My friends and I called the Wokiri, our land, because it was the only place where we could do whatever we wanted to do without the adults disturbing us…”

Yes, that’s awesome, isn’t it?

If that’s the life, how come that the predominant story out of this beautiful place is one of impoverishment, or incapacity to excel in the modern age?

How come people look like they are trapped in hell and “landowners” in this place have an aura around them that remind you of mendicants in the country’s large cities?

Why will so much anger and helplessness emanate from such a splendid segment of paradise?

The Niger Delta may be a pretty patch of real estate; but without the country having an interconnecting system of modern transportation, from road network and bridges over broad waterways to a proper river transportation system, it lies in the middle of nowhere.

And even while the hard work of infrastructure building is going on, the capabilities of the people to take charge of their lives is where the real work lies.

Does it make sense talking about “loss of fish population as a result of oil exploration” when, at the best of times, your “best” fishermen are mere subsistence fishermen?

What does declining population of fish mean when there’s no local expertise or capacity for large-scale seafood processing?

If and when the Delta basin is opened up to tourism through a series of modern canals, cleaned-up rivers, fascinating suspension bridges, high-speed railroad linking Lagos to Bonny and Kano to Koko, Ibadan to Warri, Eket to Enugu; and when there are hovercrafts sailing up river from Epe to Ethiope, what will the people look like? Wallpapers?

I am reminded of the following passage from Shiva Naipaul’s North Of South, which is a view of tourism in East Africa

“The obsessive concern with wildlife leads insidiously to the degradation of human population. In the eyes of the beholder, the more backward tribes become mere adjuncts to the animals. (“If you ever go to Ngorongoro,” I had been advised, “make sure you don’t miss the Masai in the crater. They really are value for money.”)

One German environmentalist shares his thought on the local population, in the same book.

“The African, except where he remains primitive enough to fit without disturbance into the ‘eco-system’ — and, hence, lends colour to it while dying at a conveniently premature age — is a pest and a threat to other people’s enjoyment.

“The new environmentalism is part of the privileged consumption pattern of the affluent and industrialised, those who can afford the air fares, the hotels, the Land Rovers and the guides, those whose children don’t draw water from wells and rarely get savaged by marauding hyenas.”

The Niger Delta basin is not about wildlife, and if it turns to a tourist haven, it will be more about the scenic environment; the cavernous creeks, the plant diversity, than sightings of rare animals. But the tendency is the same; visitors enjoy what the Africans, lacking the productive capacity to truly engage the modern economy, merely inhabit.

It’s only a massive programme of conversion of the population into true human capital that can make this charming place truly habitable. It has to be a huge programme, of schools and learning environment; far more challenging than tokenist skill acquisition centre syndrome, currently at play. It is more about a few young men being converted to welders.

It is about deploying vast sums of money from Excess Crude Accounts to comprehensive “education for life” programmes.

It’s about understanding why people would want to stand in front of a raging fire, unafraid of being burnt, converting stolen crude oil to gasoline in backyard refineries, just to earn N3,000.

It about how to truly hone those skills with mentorship programmes.

The Labour in the Niger Delta basin can be converted from militancy into true peace, but the mindset must be how to make the human being the centre of development.

Happy Democracy Day!

• Mr. Akinosho is publisher of Africa Oil+Gas Report.