From Nengi Josef Owei-Ilagha
President of the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC), Jonathan Lokpobiri is on a mission to change the story of youth activism in the Niger Delta for the very best. He has his eyes on the future, and his actions show him to be determined enough in the march towards laudable results.
For a start, he is undertaking the construction of IYC’s corporate headquarters that is bound to serve as the council’s worldwide secretariat, comprising an international conference and events centre.
Standing right beside Ijaw House along Isaac Adaka Boro Expressway, Yenagoa, the secretariat will be a three-storey architectural delight that will provide a commodious hall for parliament, and administrative offices for national, zonal and chapter executive officers alike. The administrative building will also provide space for the Izon-Ibe Students Union.
Behind this impressive secretariat complex will be a massive structure playing host to development workshops and skills acquisition facilities for youths. Lokpobiri is of the view that the IYC is mature enough to champion a homegrown training programme, such as obtains under the amnesty arrangement to send youths abroad for training.
He has already engaged an Indian consultancy to design the skills acquisition curriculum, since many amnesty beneficiaries are sent for training in India. He means to replicate the experience on home soil, and be cost effective in doing so. He is grateful for the goodwill support he has received so far from well-meaning sons of the Niger Delta, especially the mastermind behind Tantita.
What’s more, for the first time in the history of the Ijaw Youth Council, the President has summoned the presence of mind to undertake a book project on the IYC, guaranteed to underscore his unique place in the historical profile of youth leadership in the struggle of the Ijaw people.
This book promises to fill a gap so yawning that it traverses the turbulent early days of the youth body, and its spirited agitation against the excessive vices of a government with little regard for minority inclusion in deciding the fortunes of a nation feeding from the oil trough of the Niger Delta swamp.
The outcome of the Kaiama Declaration thus far has not been documented in terms more concrete than will be evident in the pages of this landmark publication. New Heights For IYC will enjoy wide popularity with the youth population in the region, and awaken them to the imperative of spelling out a progressive future for the next generation of swamp dwellers.
This book will equally find welcome space in the catalogue of university scholars, embassies, the political class, government at all levels, and will be useful to sundry researchers on youth leadership around the world. It highlights the importance of speaking out in the face of inequity, economic tyranny and brazen injustice, and underscores the civic duty of every law-abiding citizen to make a fundamental claim to peace, order and equity in an egalitarian polity.
Given the spectacular infrastructural dreams conceived by Lokpobiri’s leadership in a bid to propel the ideals of progress for the IYC, this book documents his legacies in visible terms, and shows his visionary example as worth emulating. New Heights For IYC will be formally unveiled to the public at the valedictory ceremony marking the end of Lokpobiri’s tenure as IYC President in six months.
