OPINION: The Famished Paths in PAP, Soyinka and Otuaro, By Enewaridideke Ekanpou

By: Enewaridideke Ekanpou

Border tensions and misgovernance in post-independent African countries constantly provoke thoughts of transnational migration in this present generation as a single-minded survivalist move towards self-actualisation and social belonging. Similarly, vindictively twisted thoughts and perspectives muscularly marketed as a strategy to disfigure the Presidential Amnesty Programme always provoke and compel one to embark on correctional journeys with a corresponding counter narrative.

Therefore in vain the authors of negative narratives bark and journey everywhere because I am here for the third and repeated time to spit out a navigable course like dolphins.

Looking at the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) office and the Niger Delta struggle historiographically over the years, thoughts of Ben Okri in THE FAMISHED ROAD invade the mind in varied outlines, bringing into radiance the commendable effortful engagements and sacrifices of certain Niger Delta freedom agitators who had foresight in their ‘NOSTRADAMIC’ reflections on the Niger Delta Niger struggle. For Okri whose thoughts ignite other thoughts here, including the cautionary thoughts of Wole Soyinka, thanks would fly to him if they were winged like eagles, though thanks could still take a borderless route to him because written thoughts habitually travel many kilometres without barricades.

Understandably, many paths in the PAP wore a famished look when Chief Dr Dennis Otuaro took over as the boss in 2024; not only the famished look did the paths wear, they were virtually ‘kwashiorkord’. It became his duty to plough the famished paths to be fertilised after planting some crops so they could grow luxuriantly in a manner healthfully distinguished from their famished physique threatening productivity.

Famished the paths were, as met by Dr Otuaro in the Presidential Amnesty Programme, administrative reform and staff welfare disgustingly carried in the air the cologne of a taboo. Upgrading of office, reinforced security, payment of staff bonuses as an entitlement during periods of festivities in the year, timely granting and payment of leave bonuses, supportive enhancement of medical and academic health of staff, provision of office equipment and office renovation were ignored by past administrators in PAP. Otuaro did not only activate these office essentials and staff entitlements in pragmatic terms, using his famed borderless policy of administration. Besides many reform-based steps in the PAP, 2,539 official documents were provided by Otuaro without disgusting rigmarole and performative besottedness.

Towards a pragmatic pursuit of his borderless policy which has many strands in the PAP, Otuaro activated the process for provision of health and social welfare services programmes. Convinced that the practicability of his envisioned approaches depended on building of functional partnerships with various institutions, he quickly built partnership with the Bayelsa State Medical University. The target of this partnership is to tackle head-on the challenges of the insufficiency of medical professionals in the Niger Delta. These strategic approaches to the Niger Delta challenges can only be adopted by a PAP Administrator in whose DNA one can locate transparency, inclusivity and pragmatic developmental spirit geared towards effortless actualisation of paradigm shift in the PAP.

Otuaro is always at ease in his administrative style as he is enabled by his academic exposure that borders create problems everywhere when not well managed on the symbolic plane. He avoids border exclusivity and aligns himself with border inclusivity because border inclusivity gives him the window to interact meaningfully with every component of the PAP without division and isolation of some persons based on whimsical postulations built around human and material resources. His understanding of the changing meanings of borders and how these borders function differently under different environments has contributed immensely to the success of his administration right from the dawn without being embarrassingly thrown off balance by emerging challenges.

Professional, meticulous, dedicated, strategic, surgically accurate and productive like a celebrated surgeon, the famished paths in PAP have been fertilised and fed devotedly to a height equivalent to the peak of Mountain Everest. The possible ulcerous growth from the famished paths of the Presidential Amnesty Programme has been addressed with clinical accuracy, devoid of the likelihood of resurgence. It is only natural famished paths disappear when the human and material resources have been given a coating of the needed enablement to function meaningfully in their varied spaces of occupation. It takes only Dr Otuaro, the administrative surgeon grounded in border studies to walk on this plane with ease, insensible to the meaningless missiles of confounded individuals plagued by the rampaging virus of schizophrenia. Could this be better cast as a predisposition to a reputational iconoclasm fully settled in their tainted geography and geometry of a ‘single-storyed’ existence?

In the perspective of Dr Otuaro and Niger Deltans in a country where perspectives matter, Wole Soyinka must no longer be listened to in his poetic exhortation in ‘Death in the Dawn’ when he says thus: ‘ The right foot for joy, the left, dread And the mother prayed, Child

May you never walk

When the road waits , famished’ because the once famished paths in the PAP are no longer famished. Nigerians, particularly Niger Deltans, can now walk without being guided by Soyinka’s poetic caution and exhortation because the famished paths in the PAP have been strategically ploughed and fertilised by Dr Dennis Otuaro, the PAP boss.

The attestations to the viability and functionality of Dr Dennis Brutu Otuaro’s borderless policy of administration in PAP are signposted by his administrative reforms and staff welfare strides highlighted in the brief journey to his performance chronicles identified here as a corresponding padlock on Soyinka’s poetically parroted caution that the child must refrain from walking when the road is famished. Contrarily, the child must now walk as many kilometres as possible because the hitherto famished paths have been ploughed, paved and fertilised by Chief Dr Dennis Otuaro.

Ekanpou writes from Akparemogbene, Delta State.