Viewpoint: The Right Time to Call Dr Dennis Otuaro to Order, By Enewaridideke Ekanpou

By: Enewaridideke Ekanpou

Everything has a season on earth. There is a season to appoint people into political offices. There is a season to recall such people when there is an earthquake-like infraction. There is also a season to call people to order for corresponding step-retracing and reconnection just as there is equally a season to commend good performance. To some this is the season Dr Dennis Otuaro should be called to order by President Ahmed Bola Tinubu because his policy thrust in the PAP office necessitates a special presidential communication and re-orientation.Wouldn’t one demand presidential intervention where the yesterday self-acclaimed emperors of the PAP office, ethnic jingoists and their accomplices feel unjustifiably choked administratively by Dr Dennis Otuaro’s prized policy of borderlessness that eliminates rising border tensions and divisions among people cosmically bound together for peaceful co-existence

The Amnesty office is the home of all Niger Deltans however the political affiliations. In the Amnesty office division into political borders does not exist because identity-construction, identity-negotiation and social belonging channelled through the binaries of demarcated political borders always create unnecessary tensions. This is one area over which praises should showered on Dr Otuaro for the simple reason that he has been able to move the office from the binaries of religious, ethnic and political borders in his developmental interactions with the people. By attitude and deliberate policy thrust, Otuaro has made the Amnesty office a borderless entity accessible to everybody without the encumbrances of border demarcation. It is for this reason some thinkers market the perspective that Otuaro should be called to order by President Tinubu because perspective is what matters however the wrong situatedness – as Papa Davina in Soyinka’s CHRONICLES OF THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE ON EARTH would say glibly: ‘Perspective is all’.

Otuaro knows that tensions arise when symbolic borders are manipulated by the rulers and the privileged few.As a manager of borders, he works hard to see how border tensions can be held at bay. He knows that poor border management leads to the Israel-Palestine, Us-Mexico, Russia-Ukraine border crises,, Nigeria-Biafra civil war and many others. Past PAP Administrators lacked this knowledge and so they ran the office along borders that create dichotomies of oppressors and oppressed as evident in the cries of Amnesty beneficiaries whose monthly entitlements were fingered by some notorious self-acclaimed emperors without justification.

Right from the dawn the PAP office had been routinely run on a lane that bred borders. On these different borders are people conditioned to appropriate the resources for their own self-aggrandizement and self-exhibitionism at the expense of the real beneficiaries of the programme.These people strut everywhere like pigeons and flaunt their acquired wealth and power. At such time salaries of beneficiaries were tampered with and real beneficiaries displaced in skills acquisition and empowerment programmes.

These privileged individuals became emperors in the PAP office that any new administrator was structurally compelled to worship them contractually and otherwise or be prepared to leave the PAP office on the strength of a systematically built blackmail, browbeating and propaganda. Particularly for PAP Administrators with no roots in the Niger Delta struggle, they became puppets to these self-acclaimed emperors who often journey to the media at the slightest provocation to batter the image of the PAP Administrator using any narrative that gives their story apparent believability.

Awakened to the reconceptualization and reconfiguration of borders necessitated by the reshaping of borders in the 1980s, borders as social constructs, they are sites for exchanges, interactions and self-actualization as the authentic PAP beneficiaries strive to realise their self-actualization in the face of self-acclaimed emperors who have wreathed themselves around them like killer pythons. Contrarily, borders become sites of tension and crisis when the rulers and the so-called emperors manipulate the symbolic borders to create dichotomies that antagonise and alienate the authentic beneficiaries and plant non-beneficiaries on empowerment platforms genuinely designed for the people. With the oppressive posturing of the emperors, the real beneficiaries strive to achieve their self-actualization and social belonging.

It is a known affirmation that for the real PAP beneficiaries, their identities as the right beneficiaries of PAP must be constructed and clearly defined. With the symbolic borders administratively manipulated in the PAP office, border tensions and crises proliferate among the contending forces whose self-actualization possibilities have been systematically blighted. Endless border tensions habitually became the heritage in the PAP office passed on from one head to another like a valued archaeological object. This was the state in which Dr Dennis Otuaro met the PAP office. Would Dr Otuaro also manipulate the symbolic borders, create tensions, divisions, new emperors and provoke incendiary self-actualization struggle between emperors and the actual beneficiaries?

Let me quickly proclaim that Dr Otuaro intellectually has roots in border studies as a political scientist. Both as a geographic construct and a social construct, he knows the dangers of symbolic borders administratively manipulated and mismanaged through self-serving policies ambitiously pursued. With his academic exposure, Dr Otuaro consciously laboured to ward off any form of border tensions resulting from the self-actualization drive of the PAP beneficiaries. In his policy formulation and policy implementation, he did not create borders in the PAP office as an enlightened administrator. For the conservative apostles of borders deliberately created in the PAP office, Dr Otuaro deserves expulsion from the office for working devotedly to end border tension through a refined touch to existing programmes such as beneficiary management, stakeholders engagement, scholarship scheme, vocational trainings and empowerment programmes.

Specifically, Dr Dennis Otuaro became the Administrator of PAP on 14 March 2024. As a man with deep roots in how tensions emanate from compromised and manipulated symbolic borders, he gave priority attention to some key issues as soon as he was appointed. Through a thorough verification of beneficiaries, 1,129 fake beneficiaries were identified and expunged from the bloated list of 12,467 beneficiaries. In the 2024 academic session, scholarship beneficiaries were increased from 1,700 to 2,500 with 53.3% allocated to women as a demonstration of gender sensitivity and balance in distribution of available opportunities of growth.

It is noteworthy that as a step towards continued demonstration of gender sensitivity, Dr Otuaro also created a space for over 1,300 women to be engaged vocationally; and at the end of the vocational training, 1,208 women were given empowerment support packages just as over 90 maritime cadets had refresher courses to enhance their capabilities as an enablement to attain the Officer of the Watch certification.Towards an ambitiously proper aviation and maritime training , 40 aircraft maintenance engineers and four cadet pilots have been sent to South Africa.

The overseas scholarship scheme for PAP beneficiaries had been either comatose or dead for years, but Dr Otuaro has revived it. Over 50 Niger Deltans have been despatched to UK, USA and Canada to study different courses of their choice.These achievements can only be credited to a PAP Administrator who is not only intellectually equipped but also prudent in resource management, developmentally ambitious and audacious. These are the positive things that characterise the reform-consolidated steps of Dr Otuaro.

Towards the eradication of any tension that may stem from compromised border management and to ward off individualised dichotomies in building broad functional relationships and synergies across the Niger Delta, 135 existing conflicts have been proactively identified , and out of this number, 100 conflicts have been resolved by Otuaro through the Alternative Dispute Resolution approach. Dr Otuaro has been able to achieve all these with amazing speed and ease through proactive grass roots engagement of all core stakeholders in the Niger Delta struggle for developmental manumission and breathing space.

Amazingly, there is an ease with which Dr Otuaro daily runs the PAP office. Otuaro knows that borders as social constructs can be meaningfully engaged to attain self-actualization and social belonging of the beneficiaries if the social borders are not manipulated by administrators. Because the social borders have been functionally and meaningfully engaged by Dr Otuaro, self-actualization opportunities have been opened up for the real beneficiaries of PAP. The so-called self-acclaimed emperors whose self-serving, narcissistic and exploitative tendencies have been caged through right policy thrust are the ones who constantly fill the social media with tendentiously cooked distracting stories about Dr Otuaro since the social, as Wole Soyinka would say in CHRONICLES OF THE HAPPIEST PEOPLE ON EARTH: ‘The social media is always hungry for scandal. The electorate can be swayed by the most trivial speculation’ (503).

Where Dr Otuaro strives to stop divisions and establish borders where all Niger Deltans can interact meaningfully and realise their dreams of self-actualization and social belonging as accredited PAP beneficiaries, the self-acclaimed emperors peopled by some ex-agitators, expired ethnic jingoists and their accomplices strive to restore and recreate divisions that intensify border tensions. Otuaro believes in functional borderlessness in running the PAP office because it is only borderlessness that can counter and stop targeted ethnicization, hegemonization and individualisation.

Because Dr Otuaro is at work to remove borders in PAP and enthrone borderlessness where the real beneficiaries can realise their dreams of self-actualization and social belonging, where beneficiaries can access any opportunity without a godfather or political connections, the self-acclaimed emperors who have positioned themselves as the deadly detractors of the Amnesty boss have contrived to throw image-killing deadly stones at Dr Otuaro through co-ordinated and evilly synchronised media war – sometimes vindictively extended to High Chief Dr Tompolo, who is the first incarnation of borderlessness in building functional relationships across all borders in Nigeria.

To create a meaningful sustainable space for my prefatory declaration I must clearly establish the stand that for Otuaro’s achievements in the PAP office traced to his roots in the policy of borderlessness, President Ahmed Bola Tinubu should call him to order by telling him to walk undistractedly on the borderless path in the running of the PAP because his ‘Macbethic’ detractors, deliriously wild with wild stories of denigration, will die a natural death when Dr Otuaro remains botherlessly borderless in his policy thrust as a veteran in the Niger Delta struggle who had tasted a forest life of survival in the heat of the Niger Delta agitation when Tompolo was declared wanted.

Ekanpou writes from Akparemogbene, Delta State.