by Adewale Adeoye
This Saturday, he will be on his final journey home. Comrade Oronto Natei Douglas fought cancer with valour, courage, hope and jokes. He knew he was going to die. In March, his doctors in California briefed him about the long-expected doom. He was informed death would inevitably pay a visit to him in few weeks, grab him with its chilly claws and then take him away without any armed guard anywhere in the world being able to stop the grim arrest. Death is vicious, even callous. Armed with this sordid information, Oronto departed the US for Nigeria, on a 13 to 14-hour flight, only to come home and die. A gracious man of many parts has left us. He will not return. Sadly. Unknown to many people, OND, as we used to call him was a silent pillar, and one of the most cherished in President Goodluck Jonathan’s government. He has an apartment in Abuja which allies refer to as “Control Tower”, a clear admission of his influence in the Jonathan’s administration. Oronto was the brain box, or one of them, behind the constitutional conference organised by the Federal Government. He was genuinely committed to the restructuring of Nigeria, he told me several times, beyond shoddy political gimmicks.
Days after, relations, friends and allies continue to gnash their teeth for the death of a lean, emaciated fighting spirit that on Thursday, left the world; never to return. He was arguably President Goodluck Jonathan’s most trusted aide. In the build up to the presidential election, his voice suddenly became pale and ghostly. He was nowhere to be seen, fueling speculations of a deteriorating health.
For us his close friends, Oronto was only waiting for his death, painfully but true. He had been struck by a terminal sickness for close to one decade. Oronto, the son of poor but humble parents, from a riverine community that has access to neither road nor drinkable water, a community where most people are the wretched of the earth, had a brutal fight with cancer. He lost the battle, inevitably.
I now do not know how history will place Oronto, having served a regime that recently collapsed like a heap of cards, but what is clear to me is that Comrade Oronto remains one of the strongest pillars in the fight for democracy and the sacking of the military in 1999. He was a fighting spirit whose alliance with liberty and freedom began in his days at Abeokuta where he had his secondary education. We met around 1993, in the heat of the June 12 struggle, when the military ruled the country with irons, knives and bullets. Apart from the late Ken Saro Wiwa, I do not know of any other Nigerian that stood so strongly for environmental justice and the rights of indigenous peoples like him.
By 1995, Oronto’s voice had become one of the most iconic on environmental issues across the world. By 1996, he was already meeting Head of States of many African and European countries. He became the most sought after on issues of environment and indigenous rights in Africa and beyond. He had to travel for engagements almost every month across the world. Though a hero in the global community and among his largely impoverished Ijaw nation, he was one of the ‘devils’ the late General Sani Abacha had to destroy.
Between 1994 and 1998, Oronto was a priced prisoner, wanted by the henchmen of the late General Sani Abacha. We were informed he was one of the top 10, a list that included Professor Wole Soyinka, Professor Adesegun Adebanjo and General Alani Akinrinade, being sought by the marksmen of the junta. Prof. Adesegun was the first on the hit list. He had brought in over 3,000 AK47 rifles into Nigeria. The idea was that he would start the rebellion in Abeokuta and then moved on to capture most of the South West after which he would declare the independence of the South West from the rest of the country. Prof Adebanjo, the immediate junior brother of the late Colonel Victor Banjo of the Biafra fame, was captured in Benin Republic and tried in the court for over one year before being later released, even though the late Abacha wanted him auctioned for 20million dollars, so that he would be repatriated to Nigeria. Prof. Banjo had used all his life savings in the fight for his motherland. Only last month, I established a link between Prof. Banjo and Oronto. Prof. Banjo is also down with cancer and has not been able to raise the 4 million naira needed for the treatment. He also has no job. Oronto promised to help. Now, he is gone. Under Abacha, Adebanjo and Oronto were marked to either be killed or to be made to disappear. Oronto had to live in his country and meet the obligations of his local campaign.
For more than 10 years, I had the delicate responsibility of hosting him in my Lagos flat. He had a room in the flat which we both nicknamed “Abayomi Room”. I had to keep visitors and friends away. I had to ensure relations who wanted to stay with me were politely or sometimes rudely told there was no space. My doors had to be locked every minute and every day. Sometimes I would lock him inside the flat, feigning the impression for visitors or foes, that the house was empty. I had to ignore all violent banging on the door by early morning or late night visitors. They could be the undercover agents, they could be the military. One day, robbers in daylight visited a journalist friend and neighbor, Chika Izuora, then of the News Agency of Nigeria, (NAN). Chika was a Lagos State House correspondent when Col. Buba Marwa was the military administrator. Chika then used his position to invite about 50 armed soldiers who stormed our compound. Oronto was locked indoor, sleeping at the time. The soldiers searched one flat after the other. Months earlier, I had packed all ‘subversive’ materials in my flat and kept them under the staircase in three huge bags. The soldiers ransacked the bags, but did not probe the content further. I had deviced a way of keeping dirt and putrid waste on top of the bags. They dragged the bags into the center of the compound but left them due to the offensive odour. If they had seen the content and had entered my flat, it would have been a ‘discovery’ for Abacha and his hatchet men. The soldiers did not come to my flat. Chika told them I could not have been a suspect.
One of the most embarrassing incidences was when Oronto met with the then President of the United States, (US) Mr Bill Clinton and I had to use the picture in The Punch as the Head of Investigation. The military invited me and asked several questions. My excuse was that the picture was given to me by the Environmental Rights Action, (ERA) where Oronto was the Deputy Director.
Oronto’s biography as a fighter, a human rights activist, a humanist and a dogged fighter for the rights of this people cannot be written in a short story. He was genuinely a man that gave his most productive years to the struggle for the emancipation of the people of the Niger-Delta. His research and work on environmental issues in the Niger-Delta are amazing. He is a giver. I was in Okoroba, his home town, for his father’s burial in December 2013. We had to be on speed boat for four hours. No road leads to his town, except through the river. Oronto is a mini god in his community. I was informed he buys the school uniforms and sandals for all the pupils in the town. The public library he built is the best public library in Nigeria that I know, with over 5 million books, including those online. Interestingly, Oronto, in appreciation of his closeness to his Yoruba friends had also built a public library in Abeokuta, where he had his secondary education and another one in Irele-Ekiti, my mother’s hometown, which he had never visited. The last time he invited me to Eko lo’Meridian, few years ago, he asked me: “What do you think President Goodluck Jonathan can do to appease the Yoruba?” My answer was simple: Let him restructure Nigeria, let him conduct a free and fair election; let him construct the Lagos-Ibadan express way and let him upgrade the Ibadan Airport to an International Airport. He told me, and I believed him, he would submit the memo to the President and that he would personally raise the issues with Mr President.
