Requiem for Comrade Douglas Oronto

This Saturday, he will be on his final journey home. Comrade Oronto Natei Douglas fought cancer with valor, courage, hope and jokes. He knew he was going to die. In March, his doctors in California briefed him about the long-expected doom. He was informed death would inevitably pay a visit to him in few weeks, grab him with her chilly claws and then take him away without any armed guard anywhere in the world being able to stop the grim arrest. Death is vicious, even callous. Armed with this sordid information, Oronto departed the US for Nigeria, on a 13 to 14-hour flight, only to come home and die. A gracious man of many parts has left us. He will not return. Sadly. Unknown to many people, OND, as we used to call him was a silent pillar, and one of the most cherished in President Goodluck Jonathan’s government. He has an apartment in Abuja which allies refer to as “Control Tower”, a clear admission of his influence in the Jonathan’s administration. Oronto was the brain box, or one of them, behind the constitutional conference organized by the Federal Government. He was genuinely committed to the restructuring of Nigeria, he told me several times, beyond shoddy political gimmicks.
Days after, relations, friends and allies continue to gnash their teeth for the death of a lean, emaciated fighting spirit that on Thursday, left the world and never to return. He was arguably President Goodluck Jonathan’s most trusted aide. In the build up to the presidential election, his voice suddenly became pale and ghostly. He was nowhere to be seen, fueling speculations of a deteriorating health.
I was informed he passed on in the early hours of Thursday. The human rights community at home and abroad received the news like a whirlwind rumbling through a thick forest. The previous night, I had seen him dancing on a gritty floor, his face lighted up, his white garment, flying to the drumbeats of the wind. His oval face was unnecessarily snow white. He had a chain on his right hand, and what looked like a book on his left hand.  Then he stared at a long nexus of cobwebs, that clouded the sky. Suddenly, he turned into a master spider and zoomed through the endless network.
He later took a break and then headed skywards. “Oronto, oronto.” I woke up. So it was only a dream? What manner of dream?  Sometimes, death is crazy. She is the invincible mover of all things. She is speechless, but very wicked and indiscriminate. No age is  old enough for one to die and no age is too young to die too. Death is even more pitiless, when she kills slowly. There is nothing as traumatic as seeing death hovering around one’s bedroom, like an incubus beast, and you are left with nothing to do. You stare at the spiteful claws of death. Every morning and at sundown, she tells you only one sentence “I’m here to take you, but I will be slow and steady.”
For us his close friends, Oronto was only waiting for his death, painfully but true. He had been struck by a terminal sickness for close to one decade. Oronto, the son of poor but humble parents, from a riverine community that has access to neither road nor drinkable water, a community where most people are the wretched of the earth, had a brutal fight with cancer. He lost the battle, inevitably.
I now do not know how history will place Oronto, having served a regime that recently collapsed like a heap of cards, but what is clear to me is that Comrade Oronto remains one of the strongest pillars in the fight for democracy and the sacking of the military in 1999. He was a fighting spirit whose alliance with liberty and freedom began in his days at Abeokuta where he had his secondary education. We met around 1993, in the heat of the June 12 struggle, when the military ruled the country with irons, knives and bullets. Apart from the late Ken Saro Wiwa, I do not know of any other Nigerian that stood so strongly for environmental justice and the rights of indigenous peoples like him. By 1995, Oronto’s voice had become one of the most iconic on environmental issues across the world. By 1996, he was already meeting Head of States of many African and European countries. He became the most sought after on issues of environment and indigenous rights in Africa and beyond. He had to travel for engagements almost every month across the world. Though a hero in the global community and among his largely impoverished Ijaw nation, he was one of the ‘devils’ the late General Sanni Abacha had to destroy.
Between 1994 and 1998, Oronto was a priced prisoner, wanted by the henchmen of the late General Sanni Abacha. We were informed he was one of the top 10, a list that included Prof Wole Soyinka, Professor Adesegun Adebanjo and General Alani Akinrinade, being sought by the marksmen of the junta. Prof Adesegun was the first on the hit list. He had brought in over 3,000 AK47 rifles into Nigeria. The idea was that he would start the rebellion in Abeokuta and then moved on to capture most of the South West after which he would declare the independence of the South West from the rest of the country. Prof Adebanjo, the immediate junior brother of the late Col Victor Banjo of the Biafra fame, was captured in Benin Republic tried in the court for over one year and later released even though the late Abacha wanted him auctioned for 20million dollars, so that he would be repatriated to Nigeria. Prof Banjo had used all his life savings in the fight for his motherland. Only last month, I  established a link between Prof Banjo and Oronto. Prof Banjo is also down with cancer and has not been able to raise the 4 million naira needed for the treatment. He also has no job. Oronto promised to help. Now, he is gone. Under Abacha, Adebanjo and Oronto were marked to either be killed or to be made to disappear. Oronto had to live in his country and meet the obligations of his local campaign.
For more than 10 years, I had the delicate responsibility of hosting him in my Lagos flat. He had a room in the flat which we both nicknamed “Abayomi Room”. I had to keep visitors and friends away. I had to ensure relations who wanted to stay with me were politely or sometimes rudely told there was no space. My doors had to be locked every minute and every day. Sometimes I would lock him inside the flat, feigning the impression for visitors or foes, that the house was empty. I had to ignore all violent banging on the door by early morning or late night visitors. They could be the undercover agents, they could be the military. One day, robbers in daylight visited a journalist friend and neighbor, Chika Izuora then of the News Agency of Nigeria, (NAN). Chika was a Lagos State House correspondent when Col Buba Marwa was the military administrator. Chika then used his position to invite about 50 armed soldiers who stormed our compound. Oronto was locked indoor, sleeping at the time. The soldiers searched one flat after the other. Months earlier, I had packed all ‘subversive’ material in my flat and kept them under the staircase in three huge bags. The soldiers ransacked the bags, but did not probe the content further. I had device a way of keeping dirt and putrid waste on top of the bags. They dragged the bags into the centre of the compound but left them due to the offensive odour. If they had seen the content and had entered my flat, it would have been a ‘discovery’ for Abacha and his hatchet men. The soldiers did not come to my flat. Chika told them I could not have been a suspect. When I returned, Oronto complained he had some noise and violence in the compound. I told him there was a fracas between street boys and that soldiers came to intervene. I did not wish to create panic in him. I also did not want to raise unfounded suspicion about the safety of my apartment. During this terror campaign, Oronto had designed an ID card that carved him out as an Engineer. We made several complimentary cards in this regard. He had face cap on him permanently. At least on two occasions, we were accosted by the police in Lagos and the ID card saved him. On the ID card was the name Abayomi Yagba. One day, we ran into a retinue of armed soldiers right in front of the Ikeja Cantonment. We were returning from a private visit to Odiagha Odambo, the then Country Representative of Ford Foundation. One Army Captain led soldiers to us and halted our movement. He wanted to know who we were. I would not disclose myself as a journalist neither Oronto as a lawyer. We gave different wrong identities. It was shortly before midnight. The Captain took a look at the ID of Oronto and then his face. He said we should be on our knees. I thought: “This is the end. They have caught us.” After about one hour, the captain came back, bragging that he had secured the order of his boss, Col Frank Omenka, to march us into the guard room at the office of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, (DMI).
By fate, he looked at the ID card again, murmuring to himself “Abayomi Yagba, Engineer!” he took a second look at us and then asked: Are you against us? We had to explain that as business men, we would like to take contract from the military if possible, we had nothing to do with politics. He then dismissed us. But unease hunted us. As we walked away, my eyes were in the front while my mind was on my back: Would a bullet be fired to kill us.? Did they know him? None of us could take a look backwards. But there was no incidence. In one instance, two strangers suddenly emerged at my door one early morning. I ran to them as I opened the door. They were armed. Oronto was in the living room. It was shortly before sunrise. My heart skipped. “Are you Wale?” Before I could answer, the agents said “We have the instruction not to enter your flat.” Apparently, they were secret operatives sent by the police to further investigate the robbery, weeks after the incidence. I thanked them and rushed down the stairs, banging the door behind me. I told Oronto who didn’t have a good look at them that the visitors were co-tenants. There was another instance. Oronto had visited a friend at the 1004 flat in 1996. As soon as he left the apartment, armed under cover agents stormed the flat, searching for him. The owner of the flat was arrested and kept at the DMI for more than one year. One of the most embarrassing incidences was when Oronto met with the then President of the United States, (US) Mr Bill Clinton and I had to use the picture in The Punch as the  Head of Investigation. The military invited me and asked several questions. My excuse was that the picture was given to me by the Environmental Rights Action, (ERA) where Oronto was the Deputy Director.

Oronto’s biography as a fighter, a human rights activist, a humanist and a dogged fighter for the rights of this people cannot be written in a short story. He was genuinely a man that gave his most productive years to the struggle for the emancipation of the people of the Niger-Delta. His research  and work on environmental issues in the Niger-Delta are amazing. He is a giver.  I was in Okoroba, his home town, for his father’s burial in December 2013. We had to be on speed boat for four hours. No road leads to his town, except through the river. Oronto is a mini god in his community. I was informed he buys the school uniforms and sandals for all the pupils in the town. The public library he built is the best public library in Nigeria that I know, with over 5million books, including those online. Interestingly, Oronto, in appreciation of his closeness to his Yoruba friends had also built a public library in Abeokuta, where he had his secondary education and another one in Irele-Ekiti, my mother’s hometown, which he had never visited. The last time he invited me to Eko Lomeridian, few years ago, he asked me: “What do you think President Goodluck Jonathan can do to appease the Yoruba?” My answer was simple: Let him restructure Nigeria, let him conduct a free and fair election; let him construct the Lagos-Ibadan express way and let him upgrade the Ibadan Airport to an International Airport. He told me, and I believed him, he would submit the memo to the President and that he would personally raise the issues with Mr President. Oronto was instrumental in the selection of Prof Attahiru Jega for the INEC job. The other person for his consideration was Mr Olisa Agbakoba, (SAN), underlining his genuine commitment to a free and fair election. On my request, he called me latter to tell me “Wale, I have done my part”. Now that Oronto is gone, all I can say is that “Comrade, you have done your part.” Goodnight and safe trip to the great beyond, knowing that death is a debt we all owe and a debt we must one day pay back.

Adeoye, a journalist is CNN African Journalist of the Year and four time winner of Nigerian Media Merit Award, (NMMA). He  writes from Lagos