Urhobos: A global influential and political world stakeholder should work hard to restructure Nigeria.
(Text of Address at the Urhobo Progress Union Chicagoland Fest and launch of Urhobo Political Forum, North America, Hyatt Regency Hotel, McCormick Place, Martin Luther King Drive, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America, August 6, 2010)
Prof G.G. Darah
The hosting of the Urhobo cultural festival in Chicago in early August this year marked a milestone in the progressive work being done by the Diaspora community in the Americas.
It is even more salutary that the festival was combined with the launch of the North American chapter of the Urhobo Political Forum (UPF).
The group played an important role in the campaigns that ensured the victory of the Peoples Democratic Party and Governor Emmanuel Eweta Uduaghan in the 2007 elections in Delta State. Uduaghan’s Deputy is Professor Amos Agbe Utuama, the first Urhobo academic and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) to occupy that office.
The UPF has been an ally of the Uduaghan-Utuama administration. The work of the Urhobo overseas is in line with the project of Uduagha known as Delta Diaspora Direct (D3) which is coordinated by the State Commissioner for Information, Mr. Oma Djebah, another Urhobo media professional of repute.
I was the keynote speaker at the launch of the UPF chapter of the United Kingdom and Ireland in April 2010.
I recall the burning enthusiasm that animated that gregarious gathering to stretch the frontiers of Urhobo national politics beyond the local confines of Delta State and Nigeria.
I observed at that event that the Urhobo Progress Union (UPU) had done a similar thing in the 1940s when it established branches in Ghana (Gold Coast) and the United Kingdom.
The UPF effort abroad is a continuation of the 70-year-old heritage started by the UPU under the presidency of Chief Mukoro Mowoe, the veritable Nelson Mandela of the then western Niger Delta. Mowoe’s Urhobo surname was “Oghenemohwo” but the British had difficulty spelling the name and mutilated it as “Mowoe” as we know it today.
The choice of Chicago as host of the launch events is both apt and prophetic.
Chicago is the home town of President Barack Hussein Obama, the first African American to be elected into that halcyon post in the United States in over 200 years.
The Chicago gathering was heralded by another poignant gesture by the Urhobo Political Forum. On August 5, a day before the launch, President Obama held a fund-raising dinner in Chicago for the Senatorial candidate of the Democratic Party and only a few dozen eminent were able to attend.
Yet the only Nigerian and perhaps African from the continent that was in that five-star dinner was Chief Ighoyota Amori, the national chairman of the UPF. His handshake with President Obama was described by witnesses to have lasted several minutes.
This auspicious signature of trans-Atlantic solidarity is indicative of the political correctness of the programme of spreading the network of UPF to the global community.
The significance of the episodes alluded to above should be gauged against the history of Africa-America relations in past 500 years.
Following the discovery of the Americas in 1492 by the Spanish sailor-adventurer, Christopher Columbus, European migrants and boon-seekers set up what is now the United States of America, Canada and other nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean.
This geographical accident led to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, a horrendous holocaust that lasted for 400 years (1450-1850). Urhobo people were among the victims captured, kidnapped and ferried to work in the plantations and mines, the riches from which formed the foundation of the capitalist prosperity of North America and Western Europe.
Gov Uduaghan
Relics of Urhobo civilization have survived in the Americas to this day. A good example is the picturesque and ostentatious masquerade of Ekine of the people of Suriname in Central America.
The Suriname masquerade idiom is a replica of the Ekine in Agbarha-Otor kingdom of Urhobo.
Just as residues of Yoruba culture and religion are found in Cuba and Brazil, so do Urhobo cultural elements feature in the folklore and popular culture of nations of the Americas.
In my scholarly probe of Urhobo oral literature performance arts, I have identified quintessential ingredients of Urhobo aesthetics in dance-music traditions such as calypso, jazz, soul, soca, reggae, break dance, rap, and hip hop.
The dexterous gymnastics and corporal auto-dynamics of the dance movements of the late Michael Jackson are African-American variants of Urhobo dances such as udje, ema, ikpeba, igoru, and opiri.
It, therefore, stands to reason that President Obama’s ascendancy to the pinnacle and sublimity of political power in the United States is a tribute to the common roots Africa shares with the Americas.
The Urhobo people of Nigeria are part and parcel of this universal heritage of struggle and triumph that originated from Africa from the cradle of civilization in Egypt about 7,000 years ago.
In homage to the cherished Urhobo cultural protocol of integrating Diaspora energies and accomplishments, the Urhobo, Nigeria, and Africa have a legitimate claim to that heritage and its premium torch-bearer, President Obama.
In my keynote address at the London launch of the UPF in April 2010, I adumbrated the synopsis of an agenda for Urhobo development in the 21st century.
In the address, I described the Urhobo nation as the centre of political gravity in Delta State and the Niger Delta because they are the most populous, the most educated, enlightened and the most democratic in temper and praxis in the region.
No political party can rule successfully in Delta State without the backing of Urhobo people.
In the light of this political geometry, I called on the Urhobo at home and the Diaspora to remain irrevocably committed to the cause of resource control and the political restructuring of Nigeria to restore a just federal system which was the fundamental agenda of the government of Chief James Onanefe Ibori, Governor Delta State 1999-2007).
Chief Ibori’s political travails today have more to do with this pro-federalism fight than with so-trumped-up charges of abuse of office fabricated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
That was why Ibori’s birthday of August 4, 2010, was marked with exuberant celebrations by admirers and associates all over the world. Ibori shares that date of nativity with President Obama.
Furthermore, in that London address, I challenged the Urhobo political and technocratic elite to get more tenaciously involved in the Niger Delta struggle for the liberation of natural resources of oil and gas from the avaricious grip of the omnipotent Federal Government and its foreign oil partners in exploitation and oppression.
This imperative urgency is justified by the fact that Urhobo territory hosts the purest oil in the world, the “Bonny Light” brand that is the premium in the world market.
This sulfur-free oil that can be used to power automobiles without refining it is mined by Shell in the Kokori-Orogun oil field domiciled in Erhoike near Kokori town in Ethiope East local government council. In addition, Urhobo has the largest reservoir of natural gas in the Niger Delta.
That is why the most strategic gas plant of Utorogu in Ughelli South local council area is in Urhobo land.
Its gas fires the electricity turbines in the Delta Power station, near Ekakpamre in Ughievwen district of Urhobo.
James Ibori
The Utorogu facility, the biggest gas plant in sub-Saharan Africa, is the main supplier of gas for the Escravos-Lagos pipeline which now extends to Benin Republic, Togo and Ghana.
In address under reference, I also urged the Urhobo to intensify their campaign for an independent and autonomous state of their own within or outside the Nigerian nation.
The Urhobo have the resource endowments to support an independent statehood. I have mentioned the oil and gas ones above.
The Urhobo territory of 5,000 square km (almost twice the size of Lagos State) also hosts 10 major rivers and waterways, two sea ports, sites suitable for 10 inland ports, two airports, three universities, four polytechnics, 500 primary and secondary schools, and the highest density of educated elite in the Niger Delta.
In Urhobo area of Delta State there are numerous banks and financial institutions, a refinery and petrochemical plant, timber saw mills, large deposits of clay and kaolin, sharp sand, and Africa’s first direct reduction steel plant at Ovwian-Aladja. The 23 kingdoms of Urhobo have over 30 urban centres, 50 large markets, over 200 hotels and hospitality facilities, and thriving transport and communication enterprises.
The Ibru Organisation of the Ibru family dynasty of Urhobo once had 25 companies of global rank including shipping yards, oil palm and vegetable factories, an airline, the Federal Palace Hotel (Lagos) the Sheraton Hotels and Towers (Lagos and Abuja), and The Guardian newspapers, one of Africa’s leading private media houses. Above all, the Urhobo population of over 1.5 million (2006) is larger than that of seven states in Nigeria and 75 countries in the United Nations system.
The Urhobo formed the core of the movement that resulted in the creation by plebiscite of the Midwestern Region of Nigeria in 1963.
The Urhobo and their Isoko, Itsekiri, Ijaw, and Ukwuani craved for their own state from the 1970s to the 1990s. When the present Delta State was created in 1991, General Ibrahim Babangida exhibited nepotistic witchcraft by locating the capital in Asaba in the old Benin Province.
The political ulcer of that vengeful act is yet to heal completely. Happily, the Anioma section of Delta State now demands a state of its own and we should support them unequivocally.
This will result in the true Delta State of our dream to be made up of the lands and waters of the Urhobo, Isoko, Ijaw and Itsekiri. My clarion call to all Urhobo and patriotic Deltans worldwide is to deploy their political, socio-economic, media, and diplomatic networks to achieve this supreme objective.
In the Urhobo economic master plan I proposed in the London address, I identified key sectors that have to be modernised to transform Urhobo into one of the key players in the emerging globalization of economic democracy and prosperity.
I put first emphasis on education such that within 10 years from now, that is by 2020, every Urhobo person should have access to university or cognate education. About 30 universities and tertiary institutions are needed to drive this trajectory. To support the enrolment for universal tertiary education, a programme of free lunch for primary and secondary school students is to be implemented.
Private investments in agriculture and manufacturing are a sine qua non of this modernization.
The manufacturing is to be based on available natural and human resources of oil palm (orie), raffia palm (ogoro/ubodje), cassava (imidaka), yam (one), coco yams (idu) sweet potato (eneneghen), aerial potato (erhoron), plantain (ode) bananas (odibo), rubber (iroba), timbers (igedu), clay/kaolin (ophie/ema) crayfish (ikun) shrimps (enya) and over 200 species of fish (iyerin). There is no space for me to elaborate on the economic uses of these natural resources. But we know that cassava alone has about 15 industrial uses, including the production of edible starch (usin), bread (ebrede) , biscuits (eraka oyibo) and confectionery, vehicle batteries, adhesives, coating for pharmaceutical drugs. Cassava is also used to produce snacks (ifoniyan), explosives (oghwurhu) and purgatives. The oil palm (orie) is legendary in industrial utility with about 50 products obtainable through petrochemical processing.
Among these are vegetable oils (evwri), bio-fuel and biodiesel, roofing and walling tiles, candles, soaps, grease, perfumed lotions and varieties of anti-inflammation rubs, marble slabs from the kernels, combustible fibres, and edible grubs (edon).
Nigerian experts, including Dr. Mark Otetoh of Okwagbe in Urhobo taught Malaysians how to grow rich from oil palm. Malaysia is today the world’s leading producer in oil palm.
The Urhobo oil palm climber and technologist (oberokpa) was the first among our people to ascend to giddy heights using the climbing rig (efi) constructed from oil palm fibre. Indeed, the Urhobo oberokpa is the local equivalent of an astronaut such as Neil Armstrong of America, the first human being to land on the moon in 1969 .
The time has come to convert and upgrade this indigenous skill to a modern technology just as the Americans and other nations have advanced in the invention of the aircraft by the Wright Brothers in 1909.
The most auspicious place to reinvent that dream is in the United States of America where we are gathered for this historic event.
Let me conclude by returning to the imperative need of a new political engineering and global networking signaled by our meeting in President Obama’s natal city of Chicago. Urhobo dialectical thought admonishes that when a situation is ripe it manifests in wondrous ways (Oke emu de te, k’orue).
This is Nigeria’s year of jubilee, 50 years of the attainment of independence from colonial Britain.
In the idiom of biblical forecasting, let me prophesy that magnificent things are going to happen to the Niger Delta and Urhobo people from this year.
With the intensification of autonomy and resource control /controls via the indefatigable effort of James Onanefe Ibori and his generation of patriots as well as freedom fighters of the region, Dr. Goodluck Ebele “Azikiwe” Jonathan metamorphosed from humble origins of Otueke in Bayelsa to become the first from the Niger Delta to hold the office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
He is the first Nigerian President or Head of State to have a doctorate degree. He now has a bright chance to be elected President next year under the auspices of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in which the Urhobo people are visible and formidable.
Once Jonathan declares his intention to run for office, we shall back him all the way till and after he returns to the Aso Rock presidential villa in Abuja.
We shall do more. Thanks to the ascendancy of President Jonathan from the oil-rich Niger Delta, the United States of America and her global allies now invest much trust and hope in Nigeria.
The United States is the paragon of modern democracy. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that we consolidate our friendly relations with the Obama administration as we construct an exit from decades of corrupt, oppressive, and exploitative military regimes that have dispossessed Urhobo and her neighbours for 50 years now.
Delta State of Nigeria
That programme of international engagement for democratic renewal should start from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the exotic, Lake Michigan-cooled city of Chicago.
Therefore, in memory of Mukoro Mowoe who died on August 10, 1948 in the fight for equity and justice and Oshue Ogibiyerin, leader of the 1927 anti-tax revolt against British imperialism in the former Warri Province, this gathering of Urhobo leading lights in the North American Diaspora and the homeland must resolve to form the Urhobo for Obama Coalition (UOC) to promote our new friendship and solidarity across the Atlantic Ocean.
As Marcus Garvey of Jamaica-United States said in the 1940s (he was probably of Urhobo ancestry given his courage and generous spirit), Africans must teach their children that we are the greatest and proudest humans that ever peopled the Earth.
So, let the trumpets of triumph over tribulations of the past sound loudly as inspired by the Urhobo national anthem: Kokoko o gbare (“Arise, the time for freedom has come!”
Darah, is Professor of Oral Literature and Folklore in Delta State University, Abraka, former chairman of Editorial Board of The Guardian newspaper in Nigeria, and currently the Director-General of the Uduaghan Campaign Organisation.
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