By Samuel B. Jumbo
Bonny Island, headquarters of Bonny Local Government
Area of Rivers State sits comfortably on the southern shoreline of Nigeria
along the Atlantic Ocean. I must say it’s a land blessed with milk and honey. The
island is surrounded by rivers, rivulets and seas which are themselves laced with
beautiful mangroves making it very pleasant sight to behold.
According to history, Bonny Town was founded by one of
the founding fathers of the Ibani (Bonny) nation, Alagbariya, after they
migrated from present day Bayelsa State and settled at Orupiri, a village about
a kilometre from the mainland which also serves as the ancestral headquarters
of the kingdom. Bonny was a creation of the colonial masters, who settled here
in the late 1900s and found the original name, Okolo-ama (translated in the
local dialect, Ibani, as “land of the curlew”, a white feathered, beautiful
bird found in large numbers around the shores of the island.). It has a population
of about a hundred thousand comprised mainly of the indigenes and a
non-indigenous segment made up of foreigners and other tribes in Nigeria.
The Bonny River serves as the gateway into Nigeria’s
South-Eastern economic hub namely, Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital,
with its myriad business enterprises, the Federal Ocean Terminal, Oil and gas
Free Zone and the National Institute of Oceanography, among others, all at
Onne, the Songhai Farm at Buni-Yadi, Gokana local government area, and several
others.
Bonny Island hosts several oil and gas facilities
belonging to multinational companies such as the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas
(NLNG) plant, the largest of its kind in Africa; the Shell Petroleum
Development Company (SPDC) Bonny Oil and Gas Terminal (BOGT), the largest in
West Africa; ExxonMobil Terminal, amongst others. It is estimated that economic
activities in Bonny contribute a significant percentage to the nation’s
economy.
The community is home to two hybrid technical education
facilities, the Bonny Vocational Centre, Akiama, and the Federal Polytechnic of
Oil and Gas, Abalamabie. Both functioning at optimal level are expected to
provide about 10 percent of the nation’s total requisite human capacity needs
for the oil and gas sector of the economy.
The community boasts of professionals in diverse
fields both university graduates and craftsmen, which represents a good
percentage of the required human resources that sustains Nigeria as a nation
and has bequeathed itself well in different leadership positions in the
country. Bonny community produced Nigeria’s first indigenous Air Force general
and Chief of Air Staff. It also produced the pioneer Director General of the
Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE). It has also produced academics, captains of
industry, politicians, and technocrats in diverse fields. The community is
relatively peaceful due to its unique style of traditional leadership that is
mainly hereditary which has made her outstanding amongst her neighbours.
It is saddening to note that inspite of the above; the
area remains seriously underdeveloped due mainly to poor leadership or the lack
of it. Poorly oriented or parochial leaders who overtime have resorted to
lining their pockets when availed the opportunity have contributed immensely to
ensuring that the area remains backward in terms of development. Concentrating
only on what they will benefit from the island with little or nothing to offer
in return to the place that has fed many of them and made them what they are today.
What a pathetic situation we find ourselves!
Sometimes in my solitude, I keep imagining if we had a
leader like Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, what would have become of us in terms of
development and even distribution of resources? Though Gaddafi had his foibles
as a leader, when it came to issues affecting his people, he always distinguished
himself as a true leader. History must surely bear him out on that.
It is common knowledge that whenever somebody from Rivers
State introduces himself anywhere outside his State, he is accorded due respect
by those around, and if he goes further to say he is from Bonny Island, people
tend to give him or her a second look thinking in their hearts that “this man
or woman must be comfortable”. In fact, our youths in various schools upon
mentioning they are from Bonny, are given special preferences and command a
high level of influence amongst their peers.
Despite all these, our homeland, Bonny, remains very
much unpopular and impoverished. Sometimes i think that instead of the title of
Walter Rodney’s book, “How Europe underdeveloped Africa”, the title should have
succinctly read “How Leaders underdeveloped Bonny Island”. It is indeed very
disheartening that basic amenities are still lacking on the island. Water is
yet to run in homes. We still depend on rickety tankers to supply us water.
Most roads in Bonny are either too narrow r riddled with potholes making them
dangerous death traps. The villages that constitute over 80 percent of the
Bonny community are without electricity and yet to be connected by road and
these include the waterwell residential areas. The environment is continuously
being polluted as a result of gas flaring posing a serious threat to the health
of residents and indigenes of the island. Tourists sites though abundant in the
area remain unharnessed for the economic benefit of the community.
It is against this background that we see a ray of
hope with the coming on board of Hon. Omuso Abbey as the 6th elected
Executive Chairman of Bonny local government area with the sincere hope that
his administration will usher in a new phase of leadership that will be
characterised by pragmatism, forthrightness and people-centred policies. Sometimes,
change requires some tinges of radicalism.
It is not surprising that Hon. Omuso Abbey has hit the
ground running even in the face of contending issues with the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP) led government at the State level which ahs made it its
one point agenda to find loopholes in the law to dissolve democratically
elected local government councils in the State. So far they have been rendered
helpless by extant laws and legal antecedents.
We would expect him to shore up his team with the
services of good men and women who are competent, passionate and dedicated to
the vision of seeing to the transformation of the area. His predecessor, Hon.
Edward Pepple, did his best by carrying out sustainable and human capital
development projects. We pray that trend continues. The Hon. Abbey
administration should take it a notch higher by reaching out to the people and
bringing them up the speed on the policies, programmes, and projects of the
government.
The Bonny of my dream can only be realised when the average
man and woman can provide for themselves three square meals daily without the
stress of thinking how the next meal will come. And businesses can thrive in a
very conducive environment. The Bonny of my dream is when strangers from every
part of the world can come around for sightseeing. Whe they can visit our heritage
sites, stroll along our shores, explore our environment and revel in our local
delicacies and take the message home of how beautiful Bonny is.
The Bonny of my dream is when the town will assume a
cosmopolitan hue with development spreading across the Bonny River thus
depopulating the already congested space in the mainland. And the various
villages around Bonny Kingdom are linked by roads and bridges while the
landscape is dotted with high-rise buildings just like we have them in Dubai.
Samuel Benedicy Jumbo, a graduate of International Relations from the Osun State University, Osogbo, is the Personal Assistant on Media and Publicity to the Executive Chairman, Bonny Local Government Area, Rivers State
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