Kaiama Declaration

Kaiama is a small town in Western Ijaw, about half an hour’s drive from Yenagoa, the capital of Bayelsa State. Historically Kaiama is famous for being the birthplace of Major Isaac Adaka Boro, an Ijaw nationalist who in 1966 proclaimed “the Niger Delta Peoples Republic.”

On December 11, 1998 5,000 Ijaw people representing over 40 Ijaw clans, chose the historic town of Kaiama to articulate their aspirations for the Ijaw people, and to demand an end to 40 years of environmental damage and underdevelopment in the region. They formed the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) and adopted a declaration which attributed "the political crisis in Nigeria" to "the struggle for the control of oil mineral resources," while asserting that "the degradation of the environment of Ijawland by transnational oil companies and the Nigerian State arise mainly because Ijaw people have been robbed of their natural rights to ownership and control of their land and resources."

On the 11th December, 1998, they assembly presented the Kaiama Declaration which also included a number of resolutions, of which the most important were statements that all land and natural resources (including mineral resources) within the Ijaw territory "belong to Ijaw communities"; and that the IYC ceased to recognize all decrees "enacted without our participation and consent." In line with these statements, the youths also called for the military to withdraw from the region, and warned oil companies that they would be regarded as an "enemy" if they relied on military protection.

THE KAIAMA DECLARATION BY THE IJAW YOUTHS OF THE NIGER DELTA BEING COMMUNIQUE ISSUED AT THE END OF THE ALL IJAW YOUTHS CONFERENCE WHICH WAS HELD IN THE TOWN OF KAIAMA THIS 11TH DAY OF DECEMBER 1998.

INTRODUCTION

We, Ijaw youths drawn from over five hundred communities from over 40 clans that make up the Ijaw nation and representing 25 representative organisations met, today, in Kaiama to deliberate on the best way to ensure the continuous survival of the indigenous peoples of the Ijaw ethnic nationality of the Niger Delta within the Nigerian state.

After exhaustive deliberations, the Conference observed:

a. That it was through British colonisation that the IJAW NATION was forcibly put under the Nigerian State

b. That but for the economic interests of the imperialists, the Ijaw ethnic nationality would have evolved as a distinct and separate sovereign nation, enjoying undiluted political, economic, social, and cultural AUTONOMY.

c. That the division of the Southern Protectorate into East and West in 1939 by the British marked the beginning of the balkanisation of a hitherto territorially contiguous and culturally homogeneous Ijaw people into political and administrative units, much to our disadvantage. This trend is continuing in the balkanisation of the Ijaws into six states-Ondo, Edo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers and Akwa Ibom States, mostly as minorities who suffer socio-political, economic, cultural and psychological deprivations.

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