Global Awakening of the Ijaw Struggle for Justice and Sovereignty, by Prof. Benjamin O. Okaba, President, Ijaw National Congress

GLOBAL AWAKENING OF THE IJAW STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE AND SOVEREIGNTY,
Being Text of International Press Conference, held at Houston TX, United States of America, on Global Awakening of the Ijaw Struggle for Justice and Sovereignty, on the 6th July, 2025 by Prof. Benjamin O. Okaba, President, Ijaw National Congress (INC) Worldwide.
Gentlemen of the Press, 
1. We, the people of Ijaw ethnic nationality of the oil and gas rich Niger Delta region, wish to reaffirm our commitment to justice, dignity, and self-determination. The Ijaw National Congress, INC, the umbrella social cultural organization of the Ijaw race worldwide, stands resolute in our mission to advocate for and restore the rights of the Ijaw people as enshrined in international laws, ancestral treaties, and natural justice.
We are resolved in championing the quest for autonomy and dignity for the Ijaw people through peaceful, strategic, and diplomatic means, and seek the solidarity of our allies worldwide.
2. We envision a future where traditional governance harmonizes seamlessly with modern statecraft, while ensuring that the resources, dignity, and voice of the Ijaw people are no longer subjugated to exploitative forces. This vision is not merely aspirational.  It is our collective destiny, guided by the wisdom of our ancestors and fueled by the prevailing circumstances and dehumanizing experiences of our people, and galvanized by global solidarity. 
3. Gentlemen of the press, we assemble at this historic press conference not merely to recount our wounds, but to illuminate a truth long buried beneath the sediment of silence. The Ijaw nation, ancient and dignified, stands today at a decisive threshold of being completely erased or emancipated. Our right to self-determination is not a matter of sentiment or protest. It is anchored in solemn treaties with the British Crown, validated by the sacred norms of international laws, and preserved in the living memory of a people who have refused to forget who they are.  
4. We do not come here to seek pity. We come bearing documented truth, historical legitimacy, and a solemn moral summons to justice. In addition, we affirm today that the Ijaw nation’s sovereignty, one of the four largest ethnic nationalities in Nigeria is neither a relic nor a wish, it is a right rooted in law, in history, and in justice. The Nigerian state has woven an intricate web of laws and decrees designed to disinherit and displace us. The Nigerian state feeds fat on the marrow of our natural resources, while leaving our people in hunger and disease. Yet, through it all, we have not lost our voice. Today, we raise that voice before the international community to say: ‘enough is enough’. We call for justice rooted in truth, for peace grounded in equity, and for a future shaped by our own will. We invite the international community to stand with us, not as observers of our pain, but as partners in the restoration of our dignity, our environment, and our right to self-determine and sovereignty. 

5. Our quest for self-determination is rooted in rigorous, multidisciplinary scholarship evidenced in compact and diplomatic exchanges between the Ijaw nation and the British Crown. These documents demonstrate that before 1914, prior to British amalgamation of Nigeria, Ijaw communities entered into mutual agreement with the Crown, affirming local governance, resource rights, and autonomy (we shall publish these archives widely and submit them to the United Nations and international legal bodies to underscore their enduring validity under international law). 
6. From Nigeria’s independence in 1960 to the present day, there has been a calculated and sustained legal trajectory, whereby successive regimes have constructed a juridical architecture designed to transfer control of oil and gas from Ijaw territory into centralized federal custody. From the 1969 Petroleum Decree to the 2021 Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), these instruments, engineered largely by oppressive hegemonic regimes and later embedded in a post-military constitution, have institutionalized the expropriation of the natural resources in Ijaw land, waterways, and mineral wealth. What masquerades as national interest is, in truth, a profound betrayal: a systematic disenfranchisement of a people whose ancestral domain once engaged the British Crown in treaty-based diplomacy. These laws do not merely dispossess the Ijaws of economic value; they severe their sovereignty, dignity, and cultural inheritance. They represent a seamless evolution of colonial extractive logic into postcolonial statecraft, internal colonialism veiled in the robes of legality and legislative order. 

7. The legal instruments in question do not merely marginalize; they orchestrate a calibrated economic asphyxiation of the Ijaw nation. By stripping regional control of hydrocarbon wealth, suppressing derivation entitlements, and shielding corporate polluters through federal impunity, the Nigerian state has institutionalized a regime of repressive governance where Ijaw communities remain the locus of production but wallow in the periphery of benefit. Gas flaring, oil spills, and aquatic toxification persist not as unintended consequences but as inevitable by-products of a profit-centric legal order. This constitutes a form of structural violence, slow, invisible, yet devastating, where the Ijaw people are not only impoverished but imperiled in their own environment. 

8. Perhaps most pernicious is the constitutional petrification of these decrees under Section 315(5) of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution (as amended), which renders their repeal virtually impossible through ordinary democratic processes. This legal ossification transforms historical injustice into an irreversible jurisprudential orthodoxy, foreclosing the avenues of redress within Nigeria’s own legal system. It is a tragic irony: a democratic constitution has become the chief custodian of autocratic plunder. In this light, the Ijaw case transcends domestic grievance, it demands international intervention, for where national law calcifies oppression, transnational justice must respond. 

9. The fiscal trajectory of Nigeria’s derivation formula unveils a paradigm of institutionalized expropriation, whereby the Ijaw Nation, custodians of the oil wealth that undergirds the Nigerian state, has been condemned to economic peripheralization. Before 1960, non-oil (groundnut, cocoa, palm oil) producing regions were rightfully allocated 50 percent derivation share, an arrangement anchored in the spirit of equity and genuine federalism. Yet, as successive regimes entrenched central control, that share was ruthlessly eroded to a paltry 1.5 percent by 1984. Though the post-military era saw a token restoration to 13 percent, the Ijaw people remain trapped in a fiscal straitjacket. Bureaucratic sabotage and selective disbursement have converted constitutional entitlements into tools of political patronage, disbursed not as rightful claims but as discretionary favors. The result is a cruel paradox: oil-bearing communities, rich in resources, languish in penury. The image is haunting, a vineyard owner exiled from his own estate, watching others dine lavishly on his harvest, while he and his children beg for crumbs beyond the gate. 

10. This betrayal deepens when one examines the misallocation of funds meant to redress these very inequities. Between 1992 and 1995, commissions linked to Ijaw development, legally entitled to ₦72 billion, received barely ₦11 billion. In stark contrast, an astounding ₦346 billion in so-called “special funds” was diverted to non-oil-producing states. This is not mere mismanagement; it is fiscal parasitism masquerading as federalism. Even more egregiously, from 1960 to 1999, an estimated $300–$400 billion in oil revenue was siphoned into private coffers, implicating successive political elites in a kleptocratic machinery that bled the Ijaw heartlands dry.  
11. The environmental devastation consuming the Ijaw homeland is not a tragic byproduct of industrial progress, nor is it a failure of oversight, it is a deliberate, prolonged assault, meticulously veiled in the rhetoric of national interest. From 1976 to 1991 alone, more than 2,976 oil spills hemorrhaged nearly two million barrels of crude into Ijaw rivers, wetlands, and sacred soils. By 2001, this figure ballooned to 6,817 incidents, unleashing an additional three million barrels, most of which remain unrecovered, saturating the land with toxic permanence. And the crisis has not waned, with 535 new spill incidents reported in 2023, the state’s abdication of environmental responsibility becomes irrefutable. Although gas flaring was officially outlawed in 1984, more than one hundred active flaring points continue to burn defiantly across Ijaw territories, releasing invisible poisons into the atmosphere. It is on record that nearly 70 million cubic meters of gas is flared daily, an alarming figure that accounts for 41 percent of Africa’s total. These flames, though silent, speak volumes. They smother entire towns in noxious fumes, choke the once-breathing mangrove forests, and extinguish life from sacred wetlands that for centuries nourished generations. 

12. The skies above the Ijaw nation are now saturated with carcinogens and acid rain, steadily corroding both nature and human vitality. The consequences are harrowing. In areas near spill sites, neonatal mortality has doubled, and children face developmental harm before they can even speak. This is eco-imperialism, a cold, predatory order that weaponizes misery, suffocates the environment, and ruins the people’s means of livelihood. These are not random misfortunes of nature; they are the brutal consequences of a system that has traded human dignity for crude oil. If the prosperity of nations is built upon the ruins of silenced and suffering peoples, then justice must rise with urgency and not apathy. The international community must no longer look away.  
13. Yet, this devastation is not abstract. It is visceral, generational, and ruinous, etched into the daily rhythm of a people whose traditional food systems have collapsed. 

14. We have proclaimed it in solemn assemblies, across diverse platforms, and to all who are willing to listen. I declare again with indomitable conviction that we do not come to beg for sympathy, we come to awaken global responsibility. We stand not as victims, but as people determined to reclaim their destiny that was unjustly delayed. For too long, the Ijaw people who are one of the major custodians of Nigeria’s oil and gas wealth have been victims of national injustice. Let it now be understood with absolute clarity that we are not merely dwellers on resource-rich soil. We are an ancient nation, deliberately dispossessed through manipulative decrees, deprived through coercive force, and continuously degraded through institutionalized greed. This is not the chaos of failed leadership. It is a calculated strategy of legalized oppression, designed to silence our people and erase our heritage.

15. The Ijaw call for justice is rooted not in emotion but in international law. We invoke the universal principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. These are not decorative texts for ceremonial reference, they are the moral scaffolding of the global order, forged after humanity’s darkest hours to prevent the continued subjugation of the marginalized. To ignore their application to the Ijaw question, is to render them hollow, and to betray their very spirit. 

16. We therefore assert, unequivocally, the Ijaw people’s right to self-determination, to decide our political future, own and manage our resources, preserve our ecosystem, and protect our cultural life without interference.

17. Without prejudice to the above, we call upon the United Nations to immediately establish an independent international commission of inquiry into the decades-long pattern of environmental destruction, economic disenfranchisement, and treaty violations inflicted upon Ijaw Nation. 

18. We further urge the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to spearhead a transparent and science-driven remediation process, underwritten by a Niger Delta Restoration Fund financed by oil multinationals that connived with the oppressive hegemonic Nigerian regimes to expropriate our oil and gas wealth, profited from our suffering. 

19. We welcome the international media to walk our creeks, witness our wounds, and document our exploitation, deprivations and neglect. Our prevailing realities and circumstances is a challenge to the conscience of the world. Global silence is no longer neutrality, but implies complicity. The season of reckoning has dawned, heralding an unyielding call for justice, restoration, and the rightful self-determination of the Ijaw people. Let history remember not only that we cried out, but that the world finally listened. 

20. Let it be etched in the hearts of nations and echoed across oceans: the Ijaw Nation will not vanish into the footnotes of forgotten histories. We rise not in bitterness, but in boldness, armed not with arms but with ancestral truth, sacred treaties, and the enduring torch of global solidarity. We rise to reclaim what was never surrendered: our voice, our land, our future. We are not begging at the gates of the global order, we are standing at its altar, invoking the highest ideals of humanity.

21. What was stolen was not merely our resources, it was the deferral of hope, the extinguishing of opportunities, the erosion of human dignity, and the systematic dismantling of an intergenerational promise once rooted in the dream of a dignified future. 

22. As we stand united at home and in the diaspora, let the bravery of our ancestors ignite a new dawn for the Ijaw people, and by extension, for all oppressed nations yearning for light. May justice flow through our creeks like a mighty tide. May truth rise like the mangrove after flood and fire. And may our cry today be the seed of tomorrow’s emancipation.

Signed: 
Professor Benjamin O. Okaba 
President, Ijaw National Congress
For and On Behalf of Congress