Delta Killing Evokes Memories of Odi Massacre Where An Entire Village Was Razed Down, Leaving Only Three Buildings
A reprisal attack reportedly carried out by the Nigerian military in response to the killing of 16 army officers, including a commanding officer, two Majors, one Captain, and 12 Soldiers at Okuama, Delta State, resulted in the community being razed.
On Thursday, March 14, 2024, troops of the 181 Amphibious Battalion, Bomadi Local Government Area of Delta State, responded to a distress call after a communal crisis between the Okuama and Okoloba communities in the State but were attacked and killed by youths.
In response, angry soldiers on a vengeance mission invaded the community and set aflame residential buildings, according to Channel TV. The images of burning buildings evoke the Odi Massacre in Bayelsa State carried out by Nigeria’s military in 1999 under the administration of former President Olusegun Obasanjo and his vice president Atiku Abubakar.
The massacre in Odi, then a community of about 15,000 people, resulted from the killing of seven policemen on November 4, 1999, by an armed gang led by Ken Niweigha. Niweigha, the son of a former police officer, was a notorious gang leader terrorising Yenagoa, the State Capital. Armed and reportedly empowered by the then-governor of the state, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, to help him rig the 1999 election by snatching ballot boxes, Niweigha, after being abandoned by the State government, turned to terrorising Yenagoa with his ‘boys.’ In September 1999, a confrontation with the armed forces led Niweigha to flee to Odi, his hometown, with his boys, where they regrouped and soon became a nightmare for residents in the community.
Coming at a time when the military ceded power to democratic rule just less than six months prior, the killing of military personnel in the November attack by Niweigha cast a shadow on the stability of Nigeria. Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler who emerged president in the 1999 election, issued a widely circulated letter to Alamieyeseigha, giving the governor a two-week ultimatum to apprehend the culprits or face the declaration of a State of Emergency in Bayelsa.
Four days before the expiration of the fourteen-day deadline, more than 300 soldiers under the command of a lieutenant-colonel approached the town of Odi on Saturday, November 20, 1999, at around 2 pm, while Governor Alamieyeseigha was attending the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) convention in Abuja.
What followed was a bloodbath; tens of innocent people, including women, were killed, and residential buildings were set ablaze without ensuring that no lives were inside. Shops, markets, and schools were burnt down. After the siege, what remained of the entire community was a bank, a church, and a health centre.
“It was an unforgettable day. Odi will not forget that incident even in the next 100 years,” Goddey Niweigha, the community development chairman of Odi town, told Premium Times in a 2019 interview.
The reprisal attack sparked outrage that reverberated across the world, with many alleging that Obasanjo ordered the onslaught on the community.
An indigene interviewed by Human Rights Watch (HRW) less than a month after the attack said, “Why would any government use such excessive force and endanger the lives of so many innocent citizens of Nigeria for the sake of arresting between ten and thirty criminals? It makes no sense.”
While the number of fatalities remains a matter of speculation, with an official figure putting the number of deaths at 43, including eight soldiers, a 1999 Executive summary on the massacre by Human Rights Watch claims that “soldiers must certainly have killed tens of unarmed civilians, and that figures of several hundred dead are entirely plausible.”
However, Nnimmo Bassey, a former executive director of Environmental Rights Action, claimed that nearly 2500 civilians were killed.
While the federal government paid an out of a court settlement of N15 billion to the Odi community in 2013, the Odi massacre is one out of several instances where the Nigerian military has been accused of mass killing, usually without consequences.
On October 22, 2001, soldiers invaded several villages in Logo and Zaki-Biam Local government areas of Benue State over the killing of 19 soldiers in Zaki-Biam. Human Rights Watch said more than 100 civilians were killed during the invasion. Also, in December 2015, HRW reported that soldiers killed and quickly buried the bodies of at least 300 Shia Muslims in Zaria, Kaduna state, after the group was accused of attempting to assassinate former Chief Of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai.
With circulating videos and images of burning buildings and with President Bola Tinubu granting “the Defence Headquarters and Chief of Defence Staff full authority to bring to justice anybody found to have been responsible for this unconscionable crime against the Nigerian people,” the Delta crisis not only recalls scenarios many are used to when the military is given authority to quell unrest but shows a pattern that mirrors a possible total breakdown.
