LIFE ON THE HARSH LANE

By Ibaba Don Pedro, The Guardian, Regional Winner - Africa Anglophone,
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award - 2000

International Women's Day was commemorated not long ago. While some women had cause to celebrate, millions of them in the Niger Delta have had to contend with a plethora of handicaps.

It is farming season in Ogoniland. All over the oil rich area, men, women children, everyone is in feverish preparation for the beginning of the rains, which will bring sustenance to the land. Bush clearing and burning are on, while yam and other root vegetables like cocoyams have been planted awaiting the sprouting that will spring forth with the first rains.

In Wiyakara, Khana Local Government area, Promise Yihari Maapie, a 46-year-old woman spoke to The Guardian on Sunday about her distress in the midst of all this activity.

Until six years ago, she was a fairly well-off farmer and produce trader at least by Wiyakara standards.

Hardworking and determined to make something out of the hard life that is the lot of most in the community, she worked her farms with her children and husband growing yams, cocoyams, plantains, cassava, pineapples, all sorts of fruits and leafy green vegetables. Much of these were sold, the rest kept for food.

She was able to send her children to school, lived a fairly comfortable life and had a little savings.

Life went on at a fairly settled pace without any major upheaval until June 8, 1994. That day, soldiers of the Rivers State Task Force on Internal Security under then Major Paul Okuntimo invaded Wiyakara, bringing with them sorrow, tears and blood to Promise Maapie, her family and other Ogoni families in Wiyakara. This was at the height of military rule and crackdown on the Ogonis following the May 21, 1994 killing of four prominent Ogoni sons, Chief Edward Kobani, Albert Badey, Chief Samuel Orage and Chief Theophilus Orage during a meeting at Giokoo in Gokana Local Government area.

Following this, the wounding and plundering of the Ogonis began over an agitation in the early 1990s for an end to the environmental degradation wrought on them since the discovery of oil in the area in the late 1950s.

No Ogoni man, woman or child was safe, as the military authorities had decided that every Ogoni was guilty.

According to Okuntimo, "Every Ogoni person whether man, woman or child is guilty of the killing since they all belong to MOSOP and believe in the ideals of MOSOP".

Ken Saro-Wiwa, president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), had been detained in connection with his alleged role in the killing.

The Ogonis, terror clothed in battle fatigue, had stomped its way into their homes, farmland and lives.

"The soldiers brought pain, sorrow and hunger into my life in the evening of June 8, 1994," recounted Maapie, her bartered right arm hanging lifeless against her body, useless to this once hardworking and comfortable farmer.

"I was at the farm in the late afternoon of that day with my daughter working. Other people were on their farms too, working. Farming is all our life, if you don't farm what else will you do? You will starve to death.

"Suddenly, we heard horrifying sounds of explosion, like gunshot, coming from the village, " she continued. "The farms are close to the village. In fear, we kept asking, what was happening? Soon, a group of people ran past us, tearing away in great fright. They were from our village and we joined them running into the bush. Then I turned and saw that my daughter had been shot and was bleeding profusely. Shocked, I stopped and tried to carry her. I couldn't. At this point, shots were coming from all angles towards us. Some of the people who ran past said the soldiers had come into the village and were killing people. Those who could, ran. Those who could not were gunned down".

Maapie said as she bent down to pick up her daughter, she discovered that "something happened to my right arm. It went numb and I saw I was bleeding too. My daughter had been shot on the right leg and I, on the right arm".

They managed to pull themselves far enough into the forest where the leaves and trees provided them shelter from the bullets whistling past them. Many others had been shot and a boy, Mee-eee Bari Minageh, killed.

They had remained in the forest until late in the evening, their blood draining away from their bodies into the Ogoni soil.

After signals came that the soldiers had left the village, they managed to crawl out after which villagers took them to hospitals in Bori for treatment.

They were unable to get treatment as the hospitals and clinics were deserted. The terror stalking them had spread its claws all over Ogoni land.

Vital hours during which they could have had necessary first aid treatment were lost and in the process their injuries festered.

The injured mother and daughter Joy, were later taken to a hospital in Port Harcourt, about 30 minutes away by road, where they finally got medical attention. They remained there for 14 months during which time the family sold all it had to pay for their treatment, including blood to replace what was left to the soil.

"We became beggars and borrowers even while in hospital, sliding down from a family which worked hard and provided all its needed before now to one which had to stoop to live", she said.

Her right hand and Joy's leg atrophied. Today, Joy walks with a limp while Promise's hand hangs by her side shriveled, sticking ugly against her once beautiful frame.

"Since this thing happened, no one has come to our aid," she said. "When Ken (Saro Wiwa) was alive in detention before he was killed, he sent us a note comforting us, telling us to persevere, that all will be well. Now they have killed him and our suffering is worse than even before".

Another planting season is on and Maapie cannot farm and sustain her family. Of what use is a farmer without a right arm? Even if her daughter wanted to help her mother, how would she bend down to handle the hoe or machete to till the soil, make the bed or ridges and plant the crops?

Maapie's family survived on handouts from benevolent community members whose ancestral ties to one another are strengthened further by shared pain and loss. B she says, "This is no life for any self respecting person. I want to help myself even by trading but how do I raise the funds to start? We sold all we had to keep alive when we were injured".

Several hundreds of kilometers away in Nembe, Bayelsa state lives Ayehaitani Tongha. Although her community has not experienced the horrors of a military occupation as did the Ogoni people, she and other Ijaw Women in the community are increasingly living up to the fact that they are being pushed to the brink of survival.

When The Guardian On Sunday met her during a recent visit to the community, she had just returned from a visit to the mangrove swamps where she and other women farm periwinkles, oysters, crabs and other mollusks. On that Saturday, she had spent the whole day in thigh-deep mud, looking for the mineral rich shellfish with which the Nembes enrich their tasty soups and stews.

After a whole day at sea, she had returned to the village with a tiny basket of periwinkles.

A relatively bigger basket of water snails lay in middle of the hand-paddled canoe.

"I do not know what is happening," she said. "In the past you did not have to paddle far to bring in baskets full of Isam (Periwinkles). Now we have to be very far to get a little. This is what we face. I am tired of this life".

Although Ayebaitani does not know how old she was - "I did not go to school" - she must be in her mid twenties. However, lines across her nose and coarse dark skin, badly tanned by the sun, made her look forty.

"If I had any other things to do or money to trade, I will stop pulling this canoe to fish. There is nothing left here. We know that it is Sell (Shell) that has destroyed our water with oil", she said.

The Guardian On Sunday also spoke with Madam Abiobara Joshua, a slightly built dark complexioned woman in her early forties, in Nembe.

She said that for many years, she was a fisherwoman roaming the sea and coming home with her canoe filled with fish. Life has changed and she now works at construction sites carrying sand. When she spoke, she had on a single piece of threadbare George wrapper, bought in the days she could proudly describe herself as a fisherwoman, and a faded beige top splashed with streaks of mud. Her hair was an untidy mess sprinkled with sand and sprigs. Her hair was flattened against her skull - testimony to the burden she has to bear to feed herself and her children.

"When I noticed many years ago that whenever I went to fish I was working for nothing, sometimes I would go to fish and come back empty handed, I decided to change to buying fish from other fishermen and selling there. It was not easy either, as fishing has become a problem to our people, even the men," she said.

"In the past, whenever we went fishing there will be so much fish that we used to dig the ground and bury them as they were usually too many for us to smoke. Now, people spend a whole day at sea and come back to village empty handed.

"I had to stop fish-selling, as fish became too costly and I did not have money to put there. And since I have to eat and my children too have to eat, I had to start doing odd jobs every day. I have become a 'dirty' woman so that I don't die of hunger".

Abiohara's tale is only one of millions of women pushed to their wit's end as they find themselves unable to fend for their families following the increasing damage to their environment by the devastating consequences of oil production in the Niger Delta. Madam Iwofurogha, a fishmonger and leader of the Nembe Women Progressive Union, described the effect of these developments on ordinary family life.

"These days in Nembe, women prepare their vegetable oil and pepper to cook soup, but have to wait endlessly for the fishermen and women to come in before they can cook. Some days, no fish comes in and people have to soak gari and go to sleep", she said.

During a recent visit, this reporter met many housewives sitting at home waiting to prepare the day's major meal. By 4.00 p.m on Sunday, many families had not had their first meal for the day. Children were given gari soaked in water to eat. Only the affluent could afford biscuits brought in from Port Harcourt for their children to eat, pending the preparation of the protein rich nourishing seafood dishes for which the peoples are noted.

At Otuogidi and Otuabage, the communities which own the land on which oil was first discovered in commercial quantity in the late 1950s, (wrongly referred to as Oloibiri), the women carry on a precarious lifestyle of fishing and farming, living life in the same way as their forebears had lived.

The oil wells which brought fame to their communities and future to others have long gone dry. Apart from a sign indicating where the first oil well is situated, the people may very well belong to any other forgotten community in the Niger Delta.

A hard-winding, bumpy, dust-covered road leads to the community. There is nothing indeed to indicate that this was the centre of the beginning of the industrial activity whose proceeds have remained the "issue" in Nigeria to date.

At Otuogidi, the prevailing mood in the community was a palpable mix of anger and sadness. Dredging work to dig up sand for the construction of a road in the area had rendered the creek, a tributary of the Nun River, useless for fishing - a major occupation of community members.

At the same time, the creek which serves as the only source of drinking water had turned a muddy creamy brown, contemptuously referred to as "Brazilian Coffee" by one of the youths in the town.

The women were worried about fishponds which had been destroyed in the cause of the dredging work and no compensation paid for these.

"We have to sail out to other creeks far away to fish. Nobody cares what happens to us", they lamented.

In other communities, the construction of canals, other dredging works to create access routes for the heavy equipment used for exploration and drilling, have meant destruction of traditional fishing grounds. Meanwhile, the continued loss of farmland to oil exploration acquisition by the oil firms operating in the areas, like Shell, Mobil, Agips, Elf, Chevron and others, has meant an increasingly pauperised people with the women bearing the greater burden.

Children have had to drop out of schools and girls and women have found themselves unable to bear these burdens as their traditional occupations are no longer sustainable.

Adline Gilbert, women leader and head of the Nigeria Women Action Committee, Bassambiri, described the frustrations of the women in the oil producing areas.

"Our women are being driven to starvation and death," she said. "You have seen a whole town waiting for a whole day to get fish to cook with. Our people can no longer catch fish. Our rivers are dead. We are dying from oil spillage and gas flares."

Angrily, she continued.

"The other day I saw a supervisor of Wilbros, an oil service firm operating in the area. I went to him to ask why they were not giving any jobs to the women. They had just given some casual jobs to a few boys and I asked him if there were no jobs for the women. He looked at us and replied that there, indeed, were jobs for women. In elation, I asked him what jobs. He put his hand on his crotch and said: 'This is the job for the women'".

Indeed "that" appears to be the only job that seems left for the women of these communities. Yet under those soils lie the product that has created overnight cities and billionaires in other parts of the country.

In noting the degeneration of life in the oil production of communities and the eroded values among the people, Director of Environmental Rights Action (ERA) Mr. Nnimmo Bassey noted that "the Niger Delta has not always been what it is or is shown to be today. The land was once fertile, fishes thickly populated the rivers. The hard working people were rich, healthy and happy. A network of taboos, sacred grooves and beasts jealously guarded the ecosystem. They were prime examples of sustainable societies".

Today, in contrast, "the advent of oil exploration, exploitation and politics, the land, seas and air of the Niger Delta have been despoiled to unimaginable degrees. The people are now hungry, diseased, oppressed and marginalised. Their lands and water ways have become barren".

The oil companies regularly put oil adverts as well as glossy annual reports cataloguing their multi-million naira community assistance projects bringing succor to farmers through agricultural loans, improved seedlings and medium farming techniques. In other areas they showcase their skill acquisition programmes, which they claim have transformed lives in the communities in which they operate.

However, the face of poverty in the oil producing presented, in such stark detail during the visit, invalidate the claims of these oil companies. In reality, only a tiny fraction of the millions of ordinary fishermen, women and farmers have been touched by these token gestures. Million of ordinary community members lived deepening poverty enable to sustain life as before.

Mrs. Ebiteinye Alanumo, a Councillor in Bassambiri, advocates a change of attitude on the part of the oil companies and government to the plight of communities in the oil producing areas, noting that "they need assistance urgently. People are dying of hunger not because they do not want to farm or fish. The land and rivers can no longer provide sustenance for our people".

All eyes are on the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). Will it prove to be a firmly rotted branch or just a straw to a drowning people?