National Issues
Okuama: The Creek Murders -By Rotimi Fasan
The military no longer mean much to the people of the Niger Delta who are probably used to seeing them at their worst and so see nothing wrong in running them down and out of town. This crass belittlement of the military is not limited to the Niger Delta. It’s becoming widespread across the country. No less than 34 soldiers were ambushed and murdered in a single episode in Niger State in July 2023.
Only the so-called youths or militants of the Okuama community in the Ughelli South local government area of Delta State knew what they thought they were doing when they chose to take on a contingent of military operatives that ventured into their enclave. They ambushed and put them through the most gruesome kind of death.
The troops of 16 men, a lieutenant-colonel, two majors and 13 soldiers were not only killed but their bodies were dismembered and cast in what seemed like a macabre ritual on the flowing waters of the creeks in a manner that has become typical of such murders in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. The military expedition from the 81 Amphibious Brigade of the Nigerian Army were reportedly on a peaceful mission to arbitrate in a land dispute between the Okuama community, an Urhobo-speaking people, and their next-door neighbour in the Ijaw-speaking Okoloba community.
What was supposedly a communal dispute between two agelong neighbours has now effectively pitched one of them, a sleepy community of just about two thousand people, against the Nigerian military high command in an unequal battle that has all but left the Okuama community in complete ruins. In a repeat of what happened in Odi and Zaki Biam, respectively in Bayelsa and Benue states, in the first few years of Nigeria’s return to civil governance, the outraged soldiers of the Nigerian Army are reported to have destroyed the community, burnt their properties and sacked the population that had abandoned their homes in the immediate aftermath of the thoughtless behaviour of the youths of the town. What did they think they were doing? Engaged in a knife and machete battle with people of neighbouring farmsteads?
At the best of times, a community the size of Okuama in population would be no match for a military contingent of 16 armed men. Forget the talk about the visitors not prepared for a battle and were thus caught flatfooted. They couldn’t have gone on such a mission without weapons, heavy or light. But it stands to reason to believe that the least they could have approached the offending community with would be AK-47 rifles, now reportedly in the hands of the miscreants who ambushed them.
But many of these Niger Delta communities are highly-militarised war zones. Being themselves locations of fierce battles that were under the control of diverse militias for many years before they allegedly surrendered their heavy weaponry under an amnesty programme that seemed to have succeeded after initial doubts, they have become fortresses, swarming with illegal weapons that the military would be too happy to possess.
This was, perhaps, what gave those who attacked the military expedition the courage to act. Most of the former militants obviously never handed over the weapons they first acquired as hirelings of politicians who fought for the souls of the states of the Niger Delta in the years just after military rule. This was part of the requirement of the amnesty programme of the Umaru Yar’Adua administration under which the militants were reprieved. After the political battles, they simply turned their weapons to other uses, namely, to rape, rob and kill other law-abiding citizens of the Niger Delta.
With their illegal armouries, it may not be surprising to see some youths in these communities challenging the military to a duel. They have observed the military authorities for a long time and had probably come to the conclusion that they not only possessed superior weaponry but were better fighters. The wide and indiscriminate deployment of troops for police duties across the country and mostly in the Niger Delta has no doubt whittled down the respect that members of the belligerent communities that are often at each other’s throats have for them.
Reports that rogue elements in the military engage in the illegal trade of oil bunkering has not helped matters. Top military officers have been accused of taking part in this illegal trade. If these reports are true there can be no better witnesses of these criminal acts than the armed militias. Rather than see the military as a disciplined force, they probably now see them as business rivals if not partners in crime. Standing up to them to the extent of murdering them on a mass scale may, therefore, just be a tragic consequence of familiarity breeding contempt or what in colloquial pidgin is called see-finish.
The military no longer mean much to the people of the Niger Delta who are probably used to seeing them at their worst and so see nothing wrong in running them down and out of town. This crass belittlement of the military is not limited to the Niger Delta. It’s becoming widespread across the country. No less than 34 soldiers were ambushed and murdered in a single episode in Niger State in July 2023. But in the Niger Delta, such murders are assuming the level of an epidemic. Security operatives are simply treated with scorn and randomly taken out. Their lives appear to mean very little to members of some of these criminal militias and cult groups that populate the area.
In Rivers State earlier this year, the DPO of Ahoada Local Government Area, Bako Agbashim, was brutally decapitated and his body dismembered as has happened again with the 16 military personnel. Just as Nigerians are still trying to come to terms with these murders of the soldiers, the police were subjected to another ambush that took the lives of six officers in the same Niger Delta while the whereabouts of six other officers are unknown. Ambush has without doubt become the favourite mode of attack of militant and cult groups of the Niger Delta and this is done like some form of macabre ritual in which their victims are not only murdered but are dismembered as in a cannibal feast.
This kind of lawless and brigand disregard of authority, especially symbols of our collective sovereignty and security as our military and paramilitary personnel, cannot and should not be acceptable. The authorities should go after persons and groups found culpable in such acts with relentless resolve while taking care not to lump the innocent with the guilty. Yet, it has to be admitted that it’s here (separating the guilty from the innocent) that our security operatives often fall short of expectation. They go overboard in seeking revenge which should not be their goal in this instance as a disciplined force that must be distinguished from the criminal youth-led militias and cult groups that are holding the Niger Delta in thraldom.
We are all as Nigerians equally outraged as we are diminished by the gross disrespect of our military as played out in Okuama. But we must not on account of this destroy the community or any other community of the Niger Delta. The innocent majority should not pay for the misdeeds of outlaws.
