Earth returned to earth yet again on 2 May 2009, a Saturday. Dust returned to dust in Bayelsa State, and it was all ash for ash when the remains of the famous fisherman, Melford Obiene Okilo, were laid to rest six feet beneath the solid face of the earth. He was buried in the same soil that swallowed his umbilical cord in Emakalakala, Ogbia Local Government Area.
There was wailing in the open air when news broke that Okilo was dead. Only a few days before his demise, he had made what turned out to be his last public utterance. He expressed heartfelt gratitude to Chief Timipre Sylva-Sam, Governor of Bayelsa State at the time, for naming the oldest road in Yenagoa after him.
There was sobbing in private corners. There was aching in the heart. There was great weeping in the land, great gnashing of teeth when Okilo passed away. Even the sky was damp with mist, and the rain that poured down on the Niger Delta, in the week preceding Okilo’s burial, was heavy. There was thunder, and there was lightning. It rained cats and cattle when Okilo died and was buried like Old Roger gone to the grave.
A noble chief of the Ogbia Kingdom, an ace politician, a master strategist, a spontaneous orator, a leader of men, and a proven manager of materials, Okilo was born on 30 November 1933. Before he died on Friday, 4 June 2008, at the Government House Clinic, Yenagoa, Okilo knew himself too well. He was confident of the gift God deposited in him, a talent for survival. And he gave a good account of his life and times in the things he did, the words he left us with, and the words he took time to write down for posterity to judge him by.
Okilo’s simplicity belied his awesome credentials. He was comfortable to describe himself in ordinary terms. He readily tagged himself as a fisherman and became known, called and addressed by one and all, as a fisherman. He equally had the good sense to realise that he was our fellow country man; so he advertised the fact that he was our own country man, our friend and next door neighbour, just like Boma Erekosima.
In more ways than one, Okilo had so much good humour that you couldn’t but laugh from time to time if you happened to be in his presence. He was that personable, that loveable. He was blessed with a natural ability to excite the next man, if he came close enough. His human sympathy was that magnetic.
He could pull you to himself, if you made yourself available. He could stand on a podium and make a short speech, and you would be compelled to clap for him, even if for the heck of it. No wonder, he was a politician to remember, perhaps the finest from the Niger Delta, standing side by side Harold Dappa-Biriye.
Okilo could mermesmerise you with words, and still take the credit for having taught you something worthwhile. He could reason with you, without meaning to do so. In short, Okilo dispensed wisdom wherever he went. It was as though he carried with him an invisible pouch of knowledgeable proverbs, tit-bits, arguments and viewpoints which were all saleable. And he did not hesitate to put his ideas on show at the market place. He did not hide his light under a bushel.
Like a typical fisherman, he fished for souls wherever he went. He sought to win you over to his side, and if he found you worthy of friendship, if his encounter with you was remarkable, your name or that incident involving you might jolly well come up for mention in his next analogy. In other words, he was always out to befriend exemplary people, and that was because he was an exemplary Ijaw man.
Okilo was a country man sympathetic to the feelings of his fellow country men, willing to give so that he might receive in the spirit, ready to support so that he might be supported. He was a typical farmer in the open fields of Ogbia land, reaping only where he sowed. He was indeed a fisherman, familiar with the weather, at home with the rivers and creeks of the Niger Delta.
That was how he began life, paddling his canoe from Emakalakala to Otuokpoti, from Otuasega to Otuogidi, and from Otuabula to Otuoke, right down to Idema. Okilo knew Anyamasa like the back of his hand. Okilo’s mother was Nembe, so he spoke Nembe like a blue-blooded prince of the prickly pen.
As for Oloibiri, the parcel of land where oil was first mined in Nigeria for export and for hard currency, Okilo could not stop weeping for that land. His spirit wept disconsolately for Oloibiri, on account of its age-long rejection, and it is probably still weeping before the heavenly Throne of Grace. Okilo’s heart, even in death, could jolly well go before God with a solemn plea for the Maker of Heaven and Earth to redress the plight of the Niger Delta.
Only then would his soul truly rest in peace. In point of fact, Okilo was perhaps the happiest man in the Niger Delta when his political son, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, was sworn in as the first Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to have emerged from the South-South since Nigeria gained political independence from the British in 1960.
Like every patriotic son of Ijaw land, Okilo looked forward to the day when the fourth largest ethnic group in Nigeria would produce the President, even if in an acting capacity. For, he strongly believed that Nigeria will change for the better the day a minority leader emerged to be at the helm of the nation, prepared to reconcile every disparate interest on the platform of justice, knowing too well where the shoe pinches. As with Harrison Ford, Okilo believed that ‘real peace is not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice’.
As things stand, there is still great wailing in the land, overwhelming neglect in virtually every sector of life in the Niger Delta. That was why Okilo wept, in the first place. That’s why Okilo fought the good fight. What would happen to the beleaguered land and to the mass of long-suffering minority if the global economic meltdown were to go beyond this, as it were, occasioned by acute tectonic shifts in the underbelly of the earth?
What would happen to the law-abiding people of the swamp, if and when oil and gas were to dry up, as indeed they would some day? These were some of the nagging questions that gave Okilo sleepless nights. He was desperate to make a change. He wanted to make a difference, and he did make a difference only because he was here, not necessarily because the power brokers let him.
On Saturday, 22 July 2006, at the Isaac Boro Memorial Lecture, in the deep hold of the Lambeth Town Hall, Brixton, London, Okilo gave one of his most rousing speeches. He called on the leadership of the Ijaw nation to take their prolonged disenchantment with the Federal Government over proceeds from oil and gas exploration to the International Court of Justice.
It was as though he was already at The Hague when he declared that the Nigerian government was yet to take sufficient steps to redress the pathetic conditions of the Niger Delta people. By the same token, he enjoined youths of the area to forsake violence and hostage-taking, learn the rudiments of dialogue and negotiation, and press home their grievances without shedding blood.
‘We live in a civilised world where order, stability and justice are believed to be sacrosanct, and the International Court of Justice is set up precisely to settle long-standing disputes of great magnitude between nations and within nations. Ijaw leaders will do well to seek justice before that world body’, he said.
And this same Melford was a fisherman. He knew how to make his net, cast it in the open sea, pull in the fish, careful to pull out their sticky heads from the netting, and repair the net when it got torn. This same Obiene was a boy once upon a time. He could climb a coconut tree to the top, and shake the harvest down. He could play football under the rain and score for his side. He could swing a hoe like every farmer at Ota. In fact, this same Okilo was a relentless farmer of ideas.
He was never shy to enter into a conversation on any subject under the sun. And the longer you stayed with him, the more the conversation became boisterous, more engaging, more involving, more reasonable. He was that flexible, that versatile. His intelligence was that eclectic. To be in the presence of Okilo was to be swamped suddenly by a flood of ideas. To enter into a discussion with him was to be overtaken by reason.
Okilo was in possession of what you might call native intelligence, the kind of intelligence that springs from a personal acquaintance with the world, a felt experience. He was powered by a daily application of the faculty of reason. He was a thinker in the best sense of the word.
He was a kingmaker who never became the king he ought to have been. Without his endorsement, without his goodwill blessings, no politician truly prospered. Yet his blessings came only on the heels of a widely acknowledged democratic choice. Little wonder that he was a friend to Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, as he was a mentor to Jonathan.
Come to that, Okilo was such a fine orator that even Abubakar Tafawa Balewa embraced him once upon a time. Obafemi Awolowo respected Okilo for his wit, and so did Nnamdi Azikiwe. He dined with kings and princes who were quite happy to host him. Okilo ate at the same table with Queen Elizabeth II of England inside Buckingham Palace, London.
He was that influential, that connected. He recognised the power of knowledge, and invested in research. That was why he established the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, converting it from its erstwhile station as a mere appendage to the University of Ibadan, into a degree-awarding institution in its own legitimate right.
What’s more, Okilo recognised the power of the Fourth Estate of the Realm and became a friend to the press early in his political career. If you sought Okilo’s opinion, for instance, as to whether or not to privatise the Bayelsa State Newspaper Corporation ahead of the next elections, he would say fund it first.
Yes, equip the corporation first, and if the reporters don’t give of their best, then give them more vehicles, get their machines working, give them tape recorders, place the paper on the worldwideweb, or be sorry for it. Don’t forget that the first Nigerian journalist of reckoning was from Bayelsa State. His name was Ernest Sisei Ikoli, a man whom even Awolowo acknowledged as his mentor.
That would be Okilo’s line of thinking. He was that analytical, that frank to a fault. He traded in words, for he loved the company of words, and won ideas for himself the more he traded in words. As the scriptures put it, by their fruits, we shall know them. Okilo was a good fruit. But that year, the lips of earth opened wide to swallow him, six feet deep. The presence of God departed from his body. Breath left the vessel that was Okilo. His body was without life. He was dead, gone the way of all flesh.
And that is why we wept our hearts out, all of us in the Niger Delta, when Okilo died. We still weep today. We miss his intervention at a critical time like this when Nigeria has failed so woefully to be guided by common sense, to say nothing of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999. He would not clap for leaders who despise the rule of law with impunity.
We mourn the passing of an everyday philosopher. We regret the loss of this great son of Bayelsa whose forthrightness never left him idle all the days of his life.
