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| Man does not live by bread alone |
As a child who grew up in the village, I saw chickens cry to their chicks to take cover every time the kite shows up. It is the same way the tug boat is feared by farmers who called out to their farm partners to paddle close to the river bank to avoid sinking by the high waves of the tug boat.
The tug boat is designed specially to move and carry heavy duty oil company equipment and barges around the creeks of Niger Delta. These boats have tremendous engine capacity so powerful that they are used to help turn around large vessels in the harbor. On top speed, the tug boat can create waves of over four feet high and enough to instantly sink any canoe on its path.
Farmers returning from their farms and whose canoes were loaded to the brim with farm produce and firewood, are often the victims. When the time approaches 4:00 O’clock in the evening time, families and especially children, start gathering in the water front, waiting to welcome their parents from the farm and to assist them in off-loading their farm produce.
On one sad and unforgettable day, my mother, like most other women, set off in the morning to the farm to harvest her yam farm in readiness for the feasting and fishing festival just a few days away, and was paddling upstream back home with her boat loaded to the brim with firewood and yam. The practice usually is for farmers to paddle very close to the bank when returning from the farm, so that if the waves become too violent, they can berth and wait until the waves subsides. And they continue this way until they get right opposite their family quarters in the town before making a quick final dash across.
And on this day, as my mother makes this final dash and was approaching the middle to the river, the thunderous zoom of the tug boat covered the air and behold the boat was approaching on high speed, and as was customary with them, they will never slow down. And there was my mother, looking confused and scared. You can see women at the water from in the town raising their hands over their heads, while the young active men jumped into any available canoe, losing and trying to hurry to provide any form of help.
You can see the giant waves as the tug boat approached, and instantaneously without thinking, I dived into the river, as if trying to loose a canoe will be too much waste of time, and started swimming towards her. I have barely made three strokes when the humming boat sped past, and as if the boat swallowed my mother and her canoe, she disappeared with the waves into the river.
Stick in hand, one step to the right and then another frightened step backward; as if the first was a bad move, fumbling and groping with both hands and feet like a blind man without a helper. I woke up from a dream, in the dead of the night, in a room so dark I had to reach out with my hands to find the lantern. The lantern went off as there was no oil in it. I reached out to the window, exactly as it was in the dream. My eyes wide open, and sleep nowhere near my eyes.
So many things ran through my mind, I am really worried, more for my people than for myself. When will this oppression stop? I stood by the window, looking out to the riverside and beyond the mangrove palms across the Nule River not too far away was the glow from somewhere not too far away.
I kept staring at what appears to be a horizon from flaring gas. I stood there holding back my tears from my eyes. How can I be so richly endowed, yet be so poor? Oil is called the black gold, and eyes shot away from the thatch hut grandfather left behind, which provide shelter for me and members of my family I could see the wicked exploit of our resources.
I will be graduating from the University with a Bachelor of Sciences in Mathematics. I planned to work in the oil sector. It won’t be too difficult to get a job there provided I come out with good grade, I wished.
Its 1:30 a.m., eyes still ajar, I have to read for at least two hours before dawn. Exams are at 9:00 a.m., and I have to try and catch some sleep before dawn as well. Where am I going to get oil to keep my lantern burning? It’s too late in the night to even find a candle to buy. I raised my head and the flame from the flare in the nearby oil field depresses me. I can’t even oil my lantern despite the abundance being flared to waste, not even to talk about providing electric power for the indigent communities.
History has it that when the slave masters came to our land, our leaders gave out the strongest of our men and the most beautiful of our women in exchange for gun powder and mirror. That was then, but now our leaders trade oil for bride money, fat foreign accounts and visas for their families to sojourn abroad to experience the good life and dine in the same table with the slave masters. There has not been much change since the time of our great grandfather.
I hate travelling by boat. Four hours of rocking and splashing through the waves shivering from the cold breeze from the early morning dew. Sitting five in a row in a tightly packed wooden bench, that hurts your butt as though there is sore from the extreme long hours of sitting still.
I will be lucky to catch the first bus to Lagos. Thank God the buses don’t get filled up early in the Lagos Park. I will be staying with my uncle in Lagos during my service, and I will be hoping to secure a place in one of the oil companies. I heard that oil companies are a very closely nested environment where senior management staff secures every available vacant spaces for their wards and relations.
For five years now uncle Joe has been hoping that he would be converted to a staff having read geology with a 2, 1 from the university of Port Harcourt. The oil companies have their offices in Abuja and Lagos with operational bases in secluded communities and offshore. These companies are dominated by people outside the oil communities. Success comes painstakingly in a hostile environment.
They say indigenes often do not have the pre-requisite qualification and skills, but I know uncle Joe has. I have heard him say that it is difficult for him to be absorbed into full staff because there are very few junior level and a couple mid-level staff from the oil producing states in oil companies, most of which has little on influence and are often intimidated by the share number and more influential superiors who are from non-oil producing regions.
What is happening now is economic slavery. It is a case of government trading our resources in connivance with foreign trading partners, who would only invest in no other sector than the oil industry, and that is because of the substantial returns they make from the sector.
One day when I become the president of this country, all these issues would be addressed. For now, I just want my uncle to be given a respectable job so that he can earn a decent living. As for me, I have nobody to look up to for assistance in securing a place for me in my service year. But I am confident that if I am given a fair chance and allowed to compete with others, I certain that I will come out successful.
If wishes where horses, I would not have been in this abandoned oil producing community thinking about oil for my lantern, while gas is been flared across the river.
Why do I have to grope in the dark when electricity is on 24/7 on right across the river? Why do I have to travel for five hours by boat when oil companies in my community fly workers in by choppers? Why do I have to be unemployed because I do not have my tribe’s men in the oil companies? Why must I suffer from the effects of spill and yet not be considered a place to earn a decent living from oil production? Why are our leaders not recognizing that they are making the same mistake our fore-fathers made during the slave trade era? Why, why and why are the oil companies hostile to the people from whose land they benefit so much?
When I become the president, will seek answers to these and many other questions.
By March Oyinki
