Vincent Egbuson is another writer on the Niger Delta crisis. His vision is slightly akin to Ojaide‟s. His creative works include Moniseks Country (2001), A Poet
99
is a Man (2001), Love is not Dead (2002), Womandela (2006), and Love My Planet (2008). In spite of these works, one of which (Womandela 2006) earned him the ANA/NDDC prize in 2006, surprisingly, Egbuson‟s name is yet to be resonant beyond his immediate Niger Delta milieu – though a work like Womandela (a robust novel) has a national canvas.
Egbuson, like Ojaide, explores the same environmental challenges of the Niger Delta and their implications for the peace of the area and the Nigerian nation at large. His belief as espoused by myriad of events in the novel is that life on earth revolves on cause and effect. He argues that the violent acts such as robbery with or without violence and restiveness that excise peace from the environment are caused by a dereliction of duty on the part of government and the multinational oil companies operating in the Niger Delta. This is the crux of his environmentally conscious novel Love My Planet. Unlike Ojaide‟s environmentalism, Egbuson‟s demand for a change is far less eloquent and forceful.
Egbuson‟s ecoconscious novel, even by its title, captures his concern for the environment, especially the Niger Delta milieu and its ecological challenges. His love and respect for all the bounties of nature are couched in his statement that the world is constitutive of network of relations. Drawing from his credo that human actions and inaction are governed by the natural law of cause and effect, Egbuson says human beings will continue to reap the consequence of the degradation of the environment.
For instance the flourish of lawlessness, violent crimes that have come to define the Niger Delta environment, in his perception, are strident indictments of the government, the political elites and the oil companies that in turn reap from their negligence. One of the robbers visiting the government‟s housing estate in the novel echoes Egbuson‟s denunciation of the indiscretion of government as he rhetorically asks some his victims:
„You think we don‟t know how much you people were paid today as arrears of salary increase?‟
„You think we don‟t watch TV?‟„Anytime the Federal Government pays people and they put it on TV and praise themselves, they are telling us to visit the people for our own share‟ (13).
Vices such as robbery and violence that the society is awash with, as a result of the alienation of the ruled by the rulers, robs the environment of peace.
Particularly, in the Niger Delta, militancy, with the concomitant crime of hostage taking of oil companies‟ workers has become a prevalent vocation among the youths.
100
This act of apparent criminality is a consequence of feelings of isolation from the mainstream Nigerian ethnic politics that is played to their disadvantage. Ibaba S.
Ibaba (2008) validates this identifying alienation as the cause of the imbroglio:
The point is that oil based environmental degradation and ethnic based political domination have combined to alienate the people from the use of their natural resources for their own development. Oil exploration and production is associated with a number of activities that devastate the environment, and impact negatively on the economy and society…Because the State is ethnicised, power is used to promote sectional interests as against the common interests. The State in Nigeria is controlled by members of the dominant ethnic groups, who direct oil resources produced in the ethnic minority homelands of the Niger Delta to their benefit (p.15, p.16).
This ethnicised politics with the consequence of aloofness felt by the ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta is what Egbuson explores in Love My Planet. This estranged feeling reflects through the designation of the setting of the novel – Daglobe delta. Nigeria exists in the novel as an exploitative foreign country with its nationals consequently considered as foreigners in the Daglobe delta. In contrast with the low standard of living of the people of Daglobe delta, the Nigerians employees, like other foreign employees of the multinational oil companies operating in Daglobe delta, live a life of affluence:
Oil city, the city of light, where there was electricity 24/7, sprang up from where wet land was cleared and sand filled – Oil city tickled the young women of Ogazza also with its paradosical (sic) grid of paved ways, mini football pitch, concrete court for lawn tennis, many comfortable portakabins, one shiny prefabricated bungalow, a swimming pool and a borehole that supplied running water. The bulk of its residents are Filipinos, Britons and Chinese. There were a handful of Nigerians and Venezuelans and Daglobans, no one from Ogazza, no one from Daglobe delta (160).
In the statements above, the writer underscores the isolation suffered by the people of the Niger Delta by distinguishing between the Nigerians employees of the multinational oil companies and the Daglobe deltans that are denied employment by the oil companies. By the exposition of such dichotomised living, Egbuson captures the psychological exclusion felt by the people of Niger Delta – a feeling of bitterness occasioned by the promotion of binary existence of Self and Other. Consequently, his
101
novel, like Ojaide‟s The Activist, is also an exploration of the psychology of the oppressed and the consequential activism.
The setting of the novel is Daglobe – symbolically representing Nigeria, with a focus on the Niger Delta. Its prominent characters are Araba and Toundi. The name Araba in Yoruba means a big tree. The name therefore, is emblematic of the environmental activism that the character engages in. Araba has once been an undergraduate student, who has had his university education abridged by his blazing desire for justice. As a result of a students‟ unrest that he had championed to fight against arbitrary, astronomical increase in school fees, he is sought for by police. The hunt finally compels him to leave for the forests to fight against what he considers the injustice done by the Daglobe nation and the multinational oil companies to his people in Daglobe delta. Part of Araba‟s anger against the Daglobe is informed by its denial of a scholarship to him to study abroad even though he is excellently qualified.
This denial is a symbolic injustice suffered by his people because of their minority status. His militant group, S.J (Simple Justice) engages in kidnapping and hostage taking of expatriate workers of the multinational oil companies who they see as accomplices in the exploitation of the people of Daglobe delta.
Araba‟s SJ and other militant group are also associated with self-destructive activities – disrupting the lives of fellow Daglobe deltans by engaging in killing and raping even as they fight against the oil companies and the government of Daglobe.
Their activities, though inimical to the promotion of peace in the region, force the attention of the government to the area occasionally. After being hounded by the security operatives for some time, Araba surrenders himself for a trial by the state.
Although he is eventually found guilty and jailed, he gets a pardon. However, he is shot dead through assassins sent by a new Vice President of Daglobe who fears the dredging up of his ugly past by Araba. The latter had collaborated with him in corrupt practices in their former place of work.
The violent actions of Araba and his militant gangs against the Daglobe and the multinational oil companies in the Daglobe delta are inimical to the society.
However, in Egbuson‟s reasoning, the aggressive acts of Araba‟s group are prompted by the activities of the national government of Daglobe and the multinational oil companies that exploit the resources of the people without paying corresponding attention to the development of the area and the people. Egbuson interprets act such as this perpetrated by the state and the multinational oil companies as violence
102
necessitating a corresponding hostility from its victims. Eloquent in this contention is a re-echoing of Fanon‟s advocacy on the need for counter-aggression on the part of the oppressed. Fanon‟s advocacy is derived from Sigmund Freud, who, according to Fanon (1963), links individual characters to the traumatic experience that provoked them; and says that the behaviour of an individual is not stirred up by a single event, but by multiple traumatic experiences. The various torments of exploitation suffered by the black man through the violence of colonialism informed Fanon‟s agitation for corresponding bellicosity. Freud‟s interpretation of the actions of the traumatised therefore, is valid for the understanding of the actions and reactions of the people of the Niger Delta represented by Daglobe Delta in Eguson‟s novel. It is the anguish of injustice from the oil companies, Egbuson explains, that hurls the youths into robbery with hostility as the robbers who visit Araba and his neighbours in their estate.
According to the robbers:
„You want to know whether our own people are armed robbers too. Have you been to our villages?‟ When last were you there to see how our people are suffering? Is that life? Despite all the oil from our land. What job do you have for me in Dabaka? No job, no money to continue school, you expect me to choose death? To accept injustice? I demand justice – simple justice‟ (12).