Lost history · 11 December 1998
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In a small creek town, thousands of young Ijaw people wrote down who they believed owned the oil under their feet, and gave the companies a deadline.
Kaiama is a small town in Bayelsa State, about half an hour's drive from Yenagoa. You could pass through it without thinking twice. But Ijaw people know it as the birthplace of Isaac Adaka Boro, the young man who in 1966 declared a "Niger Delta People's Republic" and took up arms for it before he was arrested. So when young Ijaw people wanted a place to say something big, Kaiama carried that weight.
Think about where they were in December 1998. General Sani Abacha had died that June. His successor, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, had promised a return to civilian rule, and news was pouring out about how much Abacha had stolen. Meanwhile the creeks were living with oil spills, gas flares burning day and night, forests opened to loggers, and coastal erosion. Oloibiri, where Nigeria's first commercial oil was found in 1956, had already been drained and abandoned. People in the delta saw it as a warning of what was coming for everyone else.
So young people came to Kaiama from right across the Ijaw world. The declaration says they came from more than five hundred communities and over forty clans, representing twenty-five organisations. Reports put the gathering at about five thousand people. On 11 December 1998, at the end of what they called the All Ijaw Youths Conference, they issued a communiqué. It went down in history as the Kaiama Declaration.
The declaration is worth reading in full, because it is angrier and more detailed than people remember. It starts with history. It says the Ijaw nation was forced under the Nigerian state by British colonialism, and that the 1939 split of the south into East and West began breaking a single Ijaw people apart. By 1998 they were spread across six states, Ondo, Edo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers and Akwa Ibom, and were a minority in most of them.
Then come the numbers. The delegates said oil made up over 80 per cent of Nigeria's GDP, 95 per cent of the national budget and 90 per cent of foreign exchange, and that most of it came from Ijaw land. They also tracked how the share sent back to oil-producing areas, the derivation principle, had fallen: 100 per cent in 1953, 50 in 1960, and then down step by step to just 3 per cent by 1992.
Then came the resolutions. The first was the heart of it: all land and natural resources in Ijaw territory belong to Ijaw communities. The second said they would no longer recognise decrees made without their consent, naming the Land Use Decree and the Petroleum Decree. The third demanded that the military leave Ijawland, and warned that any oil company using soldiers to guard its work would be treated as an enemy. The fourth set a date. Oil companies were told to stop work and pull their staff out of Ijaw areas by 30 December 1998, until the question of who owned the resources was settled.
It wasn't only defiance, though. One resolution offered friendship by name to the Itsekiri, Urhobo, Isoko, Ogoni, Ibibio and other neighbours. Another said clearly that the Ijaw would stay inside Nigeria, but wanted self-government and resource control in a federation of ethnic nationalities. The last line created the Ijaw Youth Council to carry on the struggle. Felix Tuodolo and Timi Kaiser-Wilhelm Ogoriba signed it on behalf of everyone there.
The paper also named the laws it blamed. It listed the Land Use Decree of 1978, the Petroleum Decrees of 1969 and 1991, the Lands (Title Vesting etc.) Decree No. 52 of 1993, which it called the Osborne Land Decree, and the National Inland Waterways Authority Decree No. 13 of 1997. In its eyes, these were the tools that had taken land and water away from the people living on them. And it did not see the Ijaw as alone. It saluted other movements by name: the Oodua Peoples Congress, MOSOP in Ogoniland and the Egi Women's Movement.
The 30 December deadline came, and the young men and women who had been to Kaiama went home and marched. Soldiers were waiting for them. Across Bayelsa, in Yenagoa and the towns around it, troops met the protests at the turn of the year, and people died. That is a story for its own page. Within a year came something worse, at Odi, not far away.
The declaration outlived the crackdown. The phrase "resource control", which it pushed into national politics, became a fixture of Nigerian debate in the years that followed. In November 2000 Bayelsa's governor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, publicly backed the declaration and said he would try to convince the governors of the South-South and the wider south to adopt its position on resource control. The Ijaw Youth Council it founded still exists today.
The young people did their homework, too. The declaration set out how the share of oil money returned to the producing areas, the derivation principle, had shrunk over the years: 100 per cent in 1953, 50 per cent in 1960, 45 in 1970, 20 in 1975, 2 in 1982, 1.5 in 1984 and 3 per cent from 1992. It named the laws it would no longer accept, from the Land Use Decree of 1978 to the Petroleum Decrees of 1969 and 1991. And it spoke straight to soldiers' families, asking them to appeal to their sons and husbands stationed in Ijawland to leave the Ijaw area alone. "We are tired of gas flaring; oil spillages, blowouts and being labelled saboteurs and terrorists," it said. "It is a case of preparing the noose for our hanging."
Was it a manifesto, a legal argument or a protest letter? Honestly, a bit of all three. What makes it unusual is that it wasn't written by politicians or professors at a conference hotel. It was written by young people from hundreds of small creek communities, gathered in the hometown of a man who had tried the same fight with guns thirty years earlier. This time they tried it with a document, and they put their names on it.
