By Tosan Blessing.
A DSS Director asked me where could Tompolo be, I replied perhaps in the forests of Oceania. This Photo was taken between 2008/2009. There was nothing called Tantita then. His persecution was on account of Messrs Global West vessel Specialists limited. Everyone wanted him dead. He was even used as a political pawn to negotiate political pickings by a nigerian politician recently implicated in a coup plot against the present civilian government. The guy told the intelligence network then that he killed Kenneth Nemoigha and that taking down High Chief was going to be nothing to him. In one of those difficult moments, Matthew Tonlagha in his deprecation and painful disability was said to have held to the landing gear/skid of a helicopter over certain unresolved communal issues for which the said oil company was identifiably arrogant and was taken up to over 15,000 feet above sea level, where were you guys? I only came into the fray several years later through Messrs GEECOMS. By 2016, I had entered the creeks to have a first hand look at the Nigerian Maritime University, which though former President Goodluck Jonathan ensured it commenced but the then Vice Chancellor was too timid to take residency. Where were you guys? I saw massive audio visual learning aids and massive digital boards and big screen colour TVs stocked in various holdings in the facility. This was from the sale of Mieka Dives which was to become the charter facility for the Nigerian Maritime University. The cost and evaluation was done by a government and private valuers and a proximate cost was put at 25 billion out of which the first 13billion was paid after the federal executive council approved the payment. The balance was never paid after EFCC was prematuredly corralled to investigate the transaction and it found nothing wrong. The EFCCs case was eventually dismissed by Justice Ibrahim Buba of the federal High court. Where were you guys? Then there was the activity of a former Minister of Transport, who pushed me for ever daring to letting him know that he lied that no parents would send their children across the Atlantic Ocean in the name of going to school. I presented a GIS naval survey of the area which showed that a greater part of the journey was through navigable creeks with a short bust of five nautical miles across the Atlantic littoral to Okenrenkoko or kurutie. I recall how keston Pondi against the risk of his own life wore a baseball hat to walk into kurutie at the vigil night of the burial of Chief Osen Thomas Ekpemupolo. Where were you guys? The DSS were everywhere looking for them. Ovie Christian became the daysman between the headwaters and its mouth Where were you guys? Soldiers even pointed guns at us and said if our boat did not stop at some point in the creeks, they would have ended our lives. I had to speak fulani kauta hore to the soldiers to explain we didnt see them. After struggling through nervous abatement, they let us go. None of us saw Tantita or saw anything great coming, we simply plowed ourselves to a cause worth fighting for and worth dying for. If for any twist of fortunes, you see yesterday’s just agitators becoming today’s celebrities you should understand they paid their dues. They didn’t just jump from the sky to the spoil to ask for freebies or their tribal allotment through making blame worthy literal subtleties and innuendos. They sacrificed their families, rights, personal dignities to achieve their present privileges. There were other flashpoints across the Niger Delta perhaps plied by compromise and convenience but this was a critical flashpoint for the Niger Delta sub theme. For High Chief this struggle burned into his consciousness—the awkward migrations from sea to sea, equatorial rain forests through forests, the tensions, the realization that the mythic bitter sweet future he’d imagined didn’t quite match the complicated outcomes before him. His team who could betray him stood solid as ever in the cold and dark nights of uncertainty, unknowingly anchoring the man whose wisdom and sense of ancestral devotion would one day become the Chief priest of Amasiekumor. What makes this struggle become even more poignant is what came after: Tunteriwei Gbaramatu Chief Osen Thomas Ekpemupolo, the father to High Chief would die in a tragic incident after an early morning naval invasion of kurutie and adjoining Oporoza in 2016, leaving High Chief with just this single perplexity of fragmented memories and unanswered questions that would later fuel his journey to understand identity, belonging, and purpose. High Chief couldn’t have known that these fractured pieces—a missing father, a resilient team devoted GEECOMS, and a multicultural upbringing in Warri —would forge the empathy and perspective that would define the historic framing later, of the critical road map to peace in the Niger Delta, proving that sometimes our deepest wounds become our greatest strengths.