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Gov Sylva to Ijaws: armed struggle won’t take us to the Promised
Land
Newsdiaryonline Sun June 26,2011
 Governor Timipre
Sylva of Bayelsa State has urged people of his native Ijaw
ethnic nationality to
make optimal use of the production possibilities around
them to improve their stake in Nigeria and guarantee happiness
for the greatest number of the Ijaw. Sylva said this on Saturday
in Newark, New Jersey, United States, in his keynote address to
the 2011 Boro Day Summit and 14th Annual Service and Devotion
Award Ceremony, organised by the Ijaw National Alliance of the
Americas (INAA), according to a press release by the Chief Press
Secretary to the
Governor, Mr. Doifie Ola. Present at the occasion were President
Goodluck Jonathan who was
represented by one of his aides, Hon. Braiye Ekiye ; King
Alfred Diete-Spiff, former military administrator of the old
Rivers State and Dr. Atuboyedia Obianime, President of the Ijaw
National Congress
(INC). Also in attendance were : Presidential aide, Hon. Oronto
Douglas; retired university
teacher, Professor Ayebaemi Spiff; traditional rulers;
activists; politicians and Ijaws from home and in the Diaspora.
The two-day event, with the theme, “A New Era, a New
Perspective,” was held in memory of Major Jasper Isaac Adaka
Boro, an Ijaw, who in 1966 waged a resistance to free the Niger
Delta from perceived oppressive tendencies of the newly
independent Nigerian state.
Sylva said even though Boro was forced by the circumstances of
his day to take up arms, “Today, we
live in a new era different from that in which Boro
lived. We grapple with different challenges. The tools of
yesterday are not good enough to fix the problems of today. So I
daresay that armed struggle will not take us to the Promised
Land! The ‘war’ we have to wage now is how to ensure quality
education, improved healthcare and better life for all Ijaw
people.”
He said to achieve the “Ijawland of our dream, this Ijawland
that Boro and many of our heroes died for, the clichés of
yesteryears will not do, and neither will the cheap sloganeering
of the past be sufficient.We must be ready to roll up our
sleeves and work, and not merely be
contented by the fact that we have ‘oil money.’”
The governor said to remain relevant and competitive within the
current scheme of things in the country and the world, every
Ijaw must constantly strive to improve themselves by acquiring
the capacities that would enable them make optimal use of their
environment for the good of all and sundry.
“For the Ijaw people at home and in the Diaspora, the greatest
challenge of our age is not access to political power or fear of
domination by other ethnic groups. The principal challenge of
our time is how to get our people to
acquire the right knowledge and ideas to make them
productive and competitive in the global economy. The key words
here are knowledge, ideas, productivity and competitiveness,”
Sylva said.
“The world today and tomorrow belongs to those who have brain
power, and not to those who have crude oil! By brain power, I
mean the knowledge, the know-how, the expertise and skills to
translate ideas from the realm of intellectual conjecture or
theory into tangible
products and services for the use and betterment of mankind.”
Sylva said though Ijaws are abundantly blessed with oil and gas,
there are clear limits to their control of it due to lack of
technology.“The man who has the knowledge and technology will
always be in control,” he said.
Sylva emphasised, “If the Ijaw nation is to survive and make its
mark in the 21st century, we must begin to move away from
dependence on natural resources. We must begin to pursue and
acquire knowledge, skills and technology to produce things. This
is because the man with physical might will always be at the
mercy of the man with intellectual might. Were our
grandfathers not physically strong? Yet they were colonised by
white people – people of ideas – over a hundred years ago.
Today, we should not make the mistakes our forefathers made by
relying only in physical strength or even our natural
resources…“Just imagine for once that the technology for
drilling crude oil was developed by an Ijaw man, you can be sure
that he would include in it a fail-safe measure to ensure that
crude oil does not spill into the
water in the creeks around which his daily life is woven!”
The governor noted that there is a sense in which it can be said
that the struggle that Boro waged had come to a historic end
with President Goodluck Jonathan, a Niger
Delta indigene, as the Nigerian leader.
“With a Nigerian president of Niger Delta extraction, a clear
roadmap can emerge through which we can begin to determine a
feasible, realistic and just solution to our problems as a
people,” he said. Sylva said his administration has since its
inception in 2007 taken conscious steps to establish peace and
stability in Bayelsa State, the once restive Ijaw heartland, and
set the state on the path of productivity and industrialisation.
He said his government had
prioritised key sectors of the economy like roads, power,
health, education, and agriculture.
He said his government had built over 52 internal roads in
Yenagoa, the state capital, and helped to stabilise power,
promising that soon power failure would be a thing of the past
in Yenagoa. The government has also constructed two
major regional water projects in Nembe and Oloibiri, and
normalised water supply in Yenagoa, while
constructing 14 other water schemes across the state,
Sylva said.
With completion of the first phase of the Okaka Housing Estate
and Ekeki Estate in Yenagoa, commencement of the 500-unit Okaka
Phase II Housing Estate, and plans for
about 550 other units of houses in the state capital,
Sylva said Bayelsa would soon achieve the Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs), as regards housing development.
In the health sector, the governor said his administration had
“constructed 24 new health centres across the state; redesigned
the Melford Okilo Memorial Hospital into a quaternary centre of
medical excellence; increased the number of doctors in the state
by about 70
per cent and received full accreditation for the Niger Delta
University (NDU) Medical School and College of Pharmacy.
The Diete Koki Memorial Hospital, Opolo, which was commissioned
by President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in October 2010, is
currently rated as one of the most modern in Nigeria.”
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