The Wealth That Enslaved Its Host: Nigeria and the Ijaw Question, By Benjamin Binebai

There is a bitter irony in Nigeria’s story: the very wealth that sustains the nation has become the chain that binds its oldest host. The Ijaw — Nigeria’s oldest ethnic nationality, and the largest single population in the Niger Delta — sit upon the land that has fed the Federation for decades. Oil flows from their creeks, gas flares light their skies, and yet their hands remain empty. Their wealth has made them slaves.

The architect of this condition was state policy, not accident. The balkanisation of the Ijaw was engineered through successive state creation exercises after independence. In 1967, Gen. Yakubu Gowon’s 12-State Structure broke up the old Eastern Region during the Civil War. Ijaw communities were placed in Rivers State and South-Eastern State/Cross River, scattering them across state lines.

In 1975-76, the Justice Mamman Nasir Boundary Adjustment Commission, under Gen. Murtala Mohammed and Olusegun Obasanjo, adjusted boundaries before creating 7 new states. It broke up the old Rivers State and split contiguous Ijaw communities across Rivers, Bendel/Delta, Ondo, Edo, and Western states. Officially, the logic was “administrative convenience” and preventing ethnic domination of oil wealth. In effect, geography was weaponised: divide the people, fracture their voice, and they cannot control what lies beneath their soil. This is the moment Ijaw groups most cite as locking in their fragmentation.

Later, in 1991 and 1996, Gen. Babangida and Gen. Abacha created Delta State and Bayelsa State. Bayelsa was carved mainly for Ijaw, yet large Ijaw populations remained in Delta, Rivers, Ondo, Edo, and Akwa Ibom. Even Bayelsa did not re-unite the nation.

The philosophy was stated as “preventing ethnic domination” and “bringing government closer to the people”. The lived reality, as many Ijaw scholars and activists argue, was deliberate: by splitting Ijaw across 6+ states, their voting strength and claim to resource control were diluted. This is how a fourth-largest ethnic nation in Nigeria became a “minority of minorities”.

The balkanisation theory which was aimed at preventing ethnic dominance in the oil rich Ijaw land became vividly and largely a theory of minority ethnic dominance. The hypocrisy sits at the very heart of the policy. It was sold as “administrative convenience” and “national unity” — a noble principle meant to stop any one group from monopolising power. Because of greed, the principle inverted. Division was no longer about preventing dominance; it became the tool for installing it. Ijaw land was sliced across Rivers, Delta, Bayelsa, Ondo, Edo and Akwa Ibom so that Ijaw votes, claims and revenues would never meet in one place. Meanwhile, states with little or no oil were kept whole, and dominant groups elsewhere were allowed to control both federal power and the revenues flowing from divided Ijaw territory. What was called a safeguard against ethnic hegemony turned into a mechanism for minority rule by design — a rule not of the small in number, but of the small in right, placed above the original owners of the land.

The consequences for Ijaw existence in Nigeria have been profound. Politically, balkanisation diluted Ijaw electoral weight and made resource control impossible to negotiate as a single people. An Ijaw man in Delta, another in Rivers, another in Ondo, all speak the same language and share the same creeks, yet they contest different governorships, different senatorial seats, different budgets. Their unity is administrative fiction. Geographically, it severed ancestral connections, broke kinship networks, and turned contiguous communities into “indigenes” and “settlers” in each other’s states. Economically, it legalised expropriation. Because the land was divided, the oil was declared to belong to the Federation first, and the Federation was controlled by those far from the creeks. Development followed the map of power, not the map of production.

Socially, it birthed the cruel label “minority of minorities”. A people numbering in the millions, older than the Nigerian state, were recast as marginal, voiceless, perpetually petitioning for what should be theirs by birth. It forced the Ijaw into a defensive posture that consumes generations: fighting census figures, fighting local government creation, fighting boundary adjustments, fighting to be recognised in their own homeland. Psychologically, it taught Ijaw children that wealth and punishment come from the same ground. The ground gives oil, the state gives neglect, and the world calls it normal.

So the theory failed on its own terms. It did not prevent ethnic dominance. It redistributed it, concentrated it, and protected it with law. For the Ijaw, balkanisation did not create balance. It created erasure.

Post-colonial, neo-colonial and post-modern forms of slavery, denial, minority status, settlerhood, endo-colonisation, subalternisation and second-class citizenship have become permanent identities forced upon the Ijaw people in Nigeria. Generations have passed. The history of oppression, marginalisation and deliberate neglect has grown grey hairs, yet no Nigerian leader has found it worthy to address these injustices with courage and honesty. If not for General Sani Abacha who created Bayelsa in 1996, the Ijaw would have remained completely unclothed in the town hall of the Federation — present everywhere oil is counted, yet absent from every table where decisions are made.

The consequence today is what you feel in the creeks. Peace is elusive and development is stalled. Ijaw days are spent not in building, but in defending — defending oil from decrees, defending names from laws that call them “settlers” in their father’s land, defending children from policies that treat the Niger Delta as a sacrifice zone. The Ijaw fight against political and geographical weaponisation. They resist laws written to exclude them, decrees, policies, ethnocentrism, sectionalism and antagonism stirred by those who benefit from their division.

Dominant ethnic nationalities in power seized the oil, declared the Ijaw strangers on their own soil, and denied them access to political power, infrastructure, and anything good. The dominant group prefers the Ijaw voiceless, underdeveloped, a people of perpetual followership — better appreciated as powerless than as partners.

Theorists provided the justification. Rulers executed the plan. Greedy capitalists, local and foreign, completed the plunder with legendary appetite.

The result is a people whose voice echoes, whose history is omitted from textbooks, and whose agency is swallowed by leaders who pretend to be asleep while awake. Everything good the Ijaw desire — clean water, schools that last, hospitals that heal, control over their resources — is opposed, delayed, or diluted.

Wealth should liberate. For the Ijaw, it has enslaved. Until Nigeria confronts this truth — that you cannot build a nation by impoverishing the very hands that feed it — the creeks will keep weeping.