By Amb Boladei Igali

THE BACK STORY
Known towards the closing years of his life as the author of the famous book “Down the River Nun”, which no less than the great poet Gabriel Okara had fantasized about, His Royal Highness, Chief Nicholas Abo Frank-Opigo, would for all times be remembered as one of Ijaw nation’s greatest ever. Although this book was a reminiscence of his ebullient life’s journey covering diverse fields, it clearly stands in a class of its own, akin to epic-dramas, J P Clark’s “Ozidi” and Okara’s “Fisherman’s Invocation,” in depicting the Ijaw microcosmos. On Sunday, 19th April, 2020, many around the world, especially Frank-Opigo’s progeny and friends, mark the tenth anniversary of his departure.
A pioneer university graduate, a pioneer educationist, pioneer politician, a pioneer Federal Law Maker, pioneer Chief Executive of what is today Bayelsa (then known as Yenagoa Province), a traditional ruler, writer, historian, etc. Like many great men of his genre generation, Frank-Opigo’s life is poignant, with many interesting moments and high points of triumph and fête, but no less of ache and mistaken portrayal.

A TYPICAL IZON BOY ON THE BANKS OF RIVER NUN
Born in 1926, into a privileged family of King Dawai who, 200 years ago, had ruled the Oporoma Clan, known as one of the epicentres of Ijaw civilization. Like most others of is time, his youthful days were full of fantasy and adventure around the fast disappearing luxuriant deltaic environment of the great River Nun, one of the main tributaries of the River Niger. Just like the Amazon River, most early European explorers found the delta of the River Niger, with its unique richness of aquatic life, fauna and even rare birds, some form of Eldorado until the almighty “black gold” was found in the area in the 1950s. The River Niger, which starts from the Fouta Djallon hills and snakes for 2, 600 kilometres miles, bifurcates into the River Forcados, which traverses the territories of Western Ijaws, Urhobos, Isokos, Kwales, etc. and River Nun, it’s twin passes through the heart of Ijaw territory and washes into the Atlantic Ocean around Brass. Historically, this is what the great explorers Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton, as well as the John and Richard Lander, and the many others at great peril to their lives, tried to “discover”. Many writers of History note that Angiama, in Southern Ijaw Local Government of Bayelsa State, the home town of Frank-Opigo, is where, was well visited by Richard Lander.

But growing up in a typical Ijaw settlement for Frank-Opigo was not only pleasurable but an unending voyage of adventure. Fishing and harvesting all manner of fresh water species with relatively little ease, farming in, perhaps, the world’s best alluvial soil where inorganic matter had no place. Even more interesting was a life of regular relation through swimming, daily bouts of intra-family or peer group wrestling or intra-communal and inter-communal wrestling festivals. With the clamour for western education and the monetization of the hitherto peaceful subsistence living was the need for all young men worth their fathers’ names and family ‘kule’ (Ijaw praise name), Frank-Opigo joined the bandwagon of climbing palm trees, harvesting same, processing it into palm oil and preparing the kernel for sale to European companies, like United African Company, (UAC) which had offices and commissioned agents all around the delta. Most early educated Ijaw sons and daughters all got western education through the sale of palm produce. It was, as it were, a rite of initiation, perhaps as Cocoa was to a typical Yoruba or Rubber to a Bini or Groundnut to a Hausa of the time.

The engagement in Palm business came as a result of the introduction of “Legitimate Trade” by the British Government in the 1800 following the abolition of Slave Trade in 1807 and Slavery in 1833, both by the British Parliament. This is why the area became known as “Oil Rivers Protectorate” in 1884, when the British decided to embark on gunboat diplomacy and colonial conquest. By a twist of destiny, the same area – the Niger Delta – finds itself in some other form of internal conquest with its Crude Oil being carted away for over 60 years now with little footprint in terms of development of the area. History, they say, has a way of repeating itself. The same way the Niger Delta leaders of old, like King Koko of Nembe, King Ibanichuka of Okrika, King Jaja of Opobo, Nana of Itsekiris and others fought them, so, over 120 years, is the allegory of the Niger Delta Struggle and the emergent heroism of the types of High Chief Government Ekpemupulo, alias Tompolo.

PADDLING THROUGH THE CREEKS IN SEARCH OF KNOWLEDGE
Due to their coastal location, the people of the Niger Delta were amongst the set of Africans to have contact with Europe. When the Portuguese came in the 15th century, they mixed with the various ethic groups, especially the Ijaws, Itsekiris and Binis. The Bini King Oba Esegie opened diplomatic relations with them and sent his son and successor, Oba Orhogbua to Portugal to study in the 16th century. However, after that it took another 400 years for an Ijaw Prince who later became King George Pepple (Perekule VII) to go to study in London. But the abolition of Slave Trade and penetration of missionaries, especially from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of the Church of England into the Nigeria Delta, led by Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, led to the spread of western education and the establishment of schools. Schools which were attached to church life sprang up. St Luke’s Nembe, St Barnabas, Brass, St Stephen’s Bonny. By 1870s Prince George Ockyiya, who was also a Nembe man of blue blood, studied in England. But most of these efforts were in the eastern delta, for geo-strategic reasons, being on the Atlantic springboard. This produced such Ijaw pioneers of knowledge as TK Cameroon, First Secretary General of the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT), Reginald Agiobu-Kemmer, a one-time Principal of Kings College, Feniobu Ajumogobia, Former Director-General of UNESCO, Dr. Isaac Dagogo Erekosima, First African Principal of Government College, Umuahia, Dr SJS Cookey, First African Principal of Dennis Memorial College, Onitsha.

However, missionary penetration took hold in the central delta in the early 1900s and schools began to spring up in most communities at the basic primary level. Frank-Opigo got his first introduction into western education, through a goulash of English and vernacular at his own Angiama community. As was the custom, he had to move to a bigger school in a nearby town to read up to Standard Three. In his own case and as most people in present Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa State, it was only at St Johns School, Ekowe, or at St Stephen’s Primary School, Amassoma. On completion at Ekowe, he had to move up the River Nun to the faraway District headquarters, at Kaiama town, in Northern Ijaw, where there was a school that had senior primary education – Proctor Memorial Primary School. Interesting enough, Angiama is just across his own big town, Oporoma, the Divisional headquarters, but there was no school there at that level for years. In compensation, Oporoma, was given the first Secondary School in SILGA in 1960s.

Rather than return home to take up royal engagements or continue the family legacy of palm oil trade, farming and fishing, Frank-Opigo passed high and secured a place in the newly established Okrika Grammar School. This school, established in 1940, like Government College Umuahia before it, was supposed to be for high flying young men from Rivers area and came only next to Enitonna High School, which was established by a missionary in 1932. In the subsequent Cambridge Examinations, Frank-Opigo came on tops with Grade One amongst the few from OGS who wrote the examination at Kaiama and Yenagoa.

At all these various locales, academic hard work and cutting of palms during holidays was key to being able to remain on top of the academic rolls and pay for school expenses. He always, also, had to paddle his way from the remoteness of Angiama, up and down the River Nun and the various creeks and rivulets during the holidays. But then, these were indispensable stages of the life formation process for a typical young Ijaw man of his time and ilk.

“FRANCO AND THE PIONEERS OF UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN ”
With the completion of secondary education, in those days and still now, in the Niger Delta and indeed in Nigeria, where there is so much wealth to automatically proceed to higher education, the absence of scholarship schemes, education grants, bursaries, forced such young people to seek jobs. He therefore got a job in the Colonial Customs Service between in 1945. His stay in the Customs Service in Lagos and later Burutu in the Old Warri Division, where inter-ethnic politics were rife amongst the various groups, also introduced him to the intricacies of Nigerian politics, and obviously prepared him for active engagement in public service as a politician in the years ahead.

Frank-Opigo, armed with a good School Certificate, got scholarship into Nigeria’s pioneer University of Ibadan in 1949 as one of the pioneer students. It should be pointed out that, although Ibadan was established in 1948, its doors were open to students early 1949. Indeed, along with people as Amb. Joe Iyalla, he was one of the first Ijaws to enter Ibadan. Records have it that, in those early days, such famous alumni as Amb. Joe Iyalla, Chinua Achebe, Bola Ige, Meredith Akinloye, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Amb. B. A. Clark and his younger brother, J. P. Clark, Tekena Tamuno, Elechi Amadi, were his contemporaries and successors. He was an all-rounder and quite famous known simply as “Franco”.
As once attested by Prof. J. P Clark, “Franco was slightly older in age and therefore a rallying point for we the Ijaws at the time”. While in Ibadan, he was at the time also in touch with the “Ijo Union” in Lagos and even Kano. Further, Ibadan was a good theatre for political incubation, as he could find time to go to good old Mapo Hall to listen to the debates and political maelstrom between the intellectually vivacious, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his opponents.

On graduation, again in flying colours, he relocated home to try his hands at politics as elections became due in 1953 into the Eastern Regional House of Assembly. Unsuccessful at the nomination stage, he briefly took up a job as a classroom teacher at Baptist High School in Port Harcourt. He left in 1954 to try his hands again at politics. He lost the nomination yet again within his own Zikist Party, the NCNC, and the party’s eventual candidate and incumbent, Rev. Bens, lost to the young Melford Okilo of the local Niger Delta People Congress, a party hurriedly formed by the inveterate patriot Chief Harold Dappa Biriye. Frank-Opigo happily returned to his alma matter Ibadan as an Administrative Staff – Assistant Registrar in charge of Students. This was an obvious appreciation of his brilliance at a time when Europeans who ran the school also insisted on the best.

DRIBBLE BETWEEN GOVERNANCE AND EDUCATION
Being quite brilliant, Frank-Opigo had so many other job offers, including in the new Oil industry. This industry was making interesting finds in his home Niger Delta, including his area, Oporoma, known in oil industry circles as “Nun River”. He also had offers in the Eastern Regional Civil Service, as the colonial government, with the various Constitutional Conferences in London, was preparing to hand-over and leave. Eventually, with a heart for education, which he made in return to Ibadan in the first place, he came back to Port-Harcourt and took up job as Vice Principal of Enitonna High School, eventually becoming the Principal in 1956. Following a life-threatening incident, he resigned as Principal and took up appointment in the Civil Service, which he had rejected in the past, becoming District Officer for Abak in 1957 and Calabar in 1958. While doing this, he also acquired a large expanse of land at Rumuola on the outskirts of Port Harcourt and established the Niger Grammar School, the first by an Ijaw man in the then Eastern Region. Although this prematurely cost him his Civil Service job, in hindsight, it opened the flood gates to education for many more indigent Ijaws and other ethnic groups around Port-Harcourt, such as the Ikwerres, his host, Ogonis, Ekpeyes, etc, who could not afford the more expensive government and missionary schools.

Through this restless voyage in life and against the backdrop of two failed attempts at entering the Eastern House of Assembly, success came his way in 1964, as he secured a seat into the House of Representatives in Lagos, representing Brass South (South Ijaw), where he served until the first Military Coup in 1966. While in Parliament, affairs in the country deteriorated, and Chief Frank-Opigo opined as follows: “We put the responsibility for the state of affairs squarely on the shoulders of the Prime Minister and his Government for inaction, and also on the Parliament for limited experience and literacy of its members. The Armed Forces and Police too were not exempted as they also suffered from predominant youth and inexperience”

WAR YEARS AND EMERGENCE OF AN UNPLANNED BENEFACTOR
The writer, Richard Kadrey, once remarked “being able to embrace contradiction is a sign of intelligence. Or insanity”. Following the January 1966 military coup and the inability to save the Nigerian state from tearing apart, several great Ijaw nationalists, like their counterparts from other eastern minorities who were members of the NCNC, were unwittingly caught up with the secessionists. They found themselves sandwiched in a cul-de-sac. What were the choices: escape quickly to safe, at a neutral ground or remain and do the best for your people?

Accordingly, to eye-witness accounts, Frank-Opigo, who was an NCNC big-wig, was caught in-between after unsuccessfully trying to escape with his family to Cameroon. Subsequently, he was appointed Administrator of Yenagoa Province, created by the General Ironsi administration and inherited by the secessionists. Without dwelling on detail, accounts by the Spiff Family of Brass (whose son had just been appointed Military Governor by General Yakubu Gowon), the patriarch, Senator Amatari Zuofa, former Executive Secretary of the Niger Delta Development Board, surviving older people of Peremabiri in the Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa, and many more, attest to his singular efforts in staving genocidal intents of the Biafran troops at the time. This was not understood in the immediate aftermath of the Nigerian victory when emotions and resentment against people like him were rife.

However, history bore him out as a wise man who stooped low as a “Guest Administrator” in the midst of marauding soldiers, to save his people. It was a Mordechai and Esther type of wisdom. He became fully reintegrated into mainstream politics. He subsequently served Rivers State as Chairman, Agricultural Production and Marketing Company, Chairman Delta Rubber Company, Vice President, Port Harcourt Chamber of Commerce and member, Federal Constituent Assembly leading to return to democracy in 1979 after many years of military rule. His later efforts to govern Rivers State under various platforms, however, were unsuccessful. In the later days of his life, he however became installed as the King of Oporoma Clan, beyond his headship of his community, Angiama, which he had been bestowed since 1960.

WHAT THE ULTIMATE CHRONICLER WILL SAY
Those who know the remoteness of the southernmost, most riverine, most deltaic and most coastal parts of Nigeria, would easily appreciate the courage and determination of people like His Royal Majesty, King N. A. Frank-Opigo, in acquiring western education and becoming celebratory personalities of their days. Despite the vicissitudes of life, he ended a great hero of the Ijaw nation and one of the most outstanding Nigerians of his

Dr. Igali was invited to deliver lecture online by the he Frank-Opigo Family and Foundation.

By Edwin Madunagu

Sometime in 1999, as both the 20^th century and the second millennium were drawing to a close, the Pluto Press, London, released a book with the title: “The Lugano Report” and subtitle, “On preserving capitalism in the 21^st century”. The author, Susan George, who shares this name with another well-known but much younger woman, was born in 1934. The older woman, our own Susan George, is an American-French Leftist, a writer, a global popular-democratic activist and a public intellectual.

Before writing the “Lugano Report” in 1999, Susan George had written several research-based books on world poverty (and its roots), hunger and famine, debt, capitalist structural adjustment and neoliberal capitalist globalization. Her other books include “How the Other Half Dies” (1976), “Fate Worse than death” (1987) and “Another world is possible” (2004). However, in this piece, we are concerned directly with “The Lugano Report: On preserving capitalism in the 21^st century”, a 213-page book that warns of the heavy cost, in human life and human civilization, of allowing capitalism to endure long into this century.

The comrade who lent me a copy of the book when it was newly published warned that it would “frighten”, or at least “unsettle” me. “The Lugano Report” had both effects on me. Let us hear from the author herself why she decided to frighten her readers: “I was convinced that another book of analysis and criticism was pointless. I have spent 25 years of my life describing hunger, famine, debt and structural adjustment and what they are doing to the people, and virtually nothing has changed. So, I thought, why not make things really clear by taking the logic of the global system to its logical conclusion? I wanted to put the case clinically to show the horrific consequences of continuing down the economic road we are now.” And that was precisely what she did.

On my part, I am re-introducing the book at this time because I believe that Nigerian Leftists ought to search out and read or re-read this book either now or as soon as this grave global threat to humanity and human existence – the Coronavirus – is over. I believe that beyond the struggle to defeat and survive the COVID-19 pandemic, the primary task now – as important as it is – is not to determine who, in particular, is responsible for the calamity or whether it was a deliberate human act, a human accident or a natural occurrence.

The task before the global Left and the Nigerian Left is to become more conscious of how doubly endangered humanity as a whole and its segments – including Nigeria – have become under global capitalism. Humanity’s double tragedy is that the global social forces responsible for this tragedy are also the selfish and corrupt forces in power and directing the solution! This is the proposition that Susan George demonstrated in her book, “The Lugano Report”. I believe that those Nigerian Leftists who see the need for a “People’s Manifesto” and a “United Left” to confront the ruling class and its state will benefit from the book – its form as well as its content.

The “Lugano Report” carries two central messages. The first message, from which the book got its title, was issued through a fictional group of intellectuals commissioned by the owners and controllers of the leading transnational corporations that now dominate the global capitalist economy. The intellectuals, assembled at the Swiss seaside resort of Lugano, were to answer just one question: “How can global capitalism be preserved in the 21^st century?”

Well paid, well endowed, with all needs and facilities provided in abundance, the intellectual group (called the “Working Party”) went to work. Claiming to be “ideology-free” they produced a copiously documented report within 12 months. They asked to be taken seriously and apologized for their terrifying language. But they pleaded that their report could never be as terrifying as what they had actually seen. The second message carried by the book is an introduction to a refutation of the Working Party’s Report by Susan George. The author does not provide a comprehensive refutation – which she had hitherto been doing – but a method of refutation: Attack the premises of the “Lugano Report” rather than its conclusions and recommendations. For if you demolish the premises, the conclusions and recommendations will collapse.

The core premise of the “Lugano Report” is that “the market, at its broadest and most inclusive, is the closest we are likely to come to the wisdom of the Almighty.” It is therefore desirable, the Working Party strongly affirmed, to preserve the free-market economy. Their warning, however, is that by the way the transnational corporations (TNCs) are currently pursuing production, it is not only capitalism that is endangered, but the planet Earth itself. The TNCs must therefore fashion mechanisms to discipline themselves in two directions: saving the environment and coming to terms with the inevitability of the “system” not being able to accommodate everyone, or, to put the matter directly and concretely, that the world is dangerously over-populated.

Flowing logically from the “finding” in the preceding paragraph is “Lugano Report’s” core recommendation: Population reduction strategies must be evolved to check population growth, and then reverse it, most particularly in the countries of the global South. The Working Party is convinced that the world had exceeded its optimum population by at least 40 per cent, and that most of the “excess” population comes from the South. Drastic measures must therefore be initiated to bring back the population to the optimum. Concretely and in practical terms, population reduction measures must become conditionalities for economic assistance. Fortunately, history has also provided instruments for population reduction, including Conquest, War, Famine and Pestilence – the four “Horsemen”.

We end this piece with four particular submissions of the Working Party: One: “The means so far devised for overseeing, safeguarding, and perpetuating the free global market economy are grossly inadequate. A brief inventory of existing global institutions shows that most of them are worthless for escaping the dangers on the horizon. They may be worse than useless in so far as they convey a false sense of security. We live today in a tragically under-managed world. But if the globalized free-market economy is to be self-sustaining, it needs rules. Those rules can best be made by the major actors in that economy,” that is, the Transnational Companies (TNCs).

The second submission: “It should come as no surprise that unregulated markets are quite capable of creating tensions (mass unemployment, social upheaval, environmental degradation, financial crash) that undermine the market system itself. Global shock-absorbers are not being installed on our standard model. Given an inherently fragile system lacking legitimate enforceable rules, we can only warn against global accident sometime in the early twenty-first century – if not before”. Three: “The twenty-first century must choose between discipline and control or tumult and chaos. The only way to ensure the greatest welfare for the greatest number, while still preserving capitalism, is to make that number smaller”.

And Finally: “We do not foresee the renaissance of some neo-Soviet empire; we seriously doubt that any alternative world political economic system can reasonably compete with the global market economy on theoretical or on practical grounds in the decades to come. A resurgent, credible Marxism is not on the cards. So, the fate of the world is directly tied to the fate of capitalism: If the latter collapses, so will the former.”

These submissions are combinations of “premises”, “findings”, “recommendations” and “warnings” issued by the “Working Party” for the “preservation of capitalism”. Over to you, the Nigerian Left. But, then, is Susan George a pessimist? Not exactly, she says: “If you are fatalistic, you say that capitalism just rolls on like a juggernaut, crushing greater parts of humanity and the environment. But the system is fragile, with lots of cracks. We just have to get out there with our pickaxes and work along the fault lines”.

Humanity will survive this pandemic as it survived others before it. But the Left and all anti-capitalist forces should determine that global capitalism, together with its regional and national segments, will not be allowed to reconstitute its pre-pandemic political hegemony when all this is over.

Madunagu, mathematician and journalist, writes from Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.

By Amb Boladei Igali

THE BACK STORY
Known towards the closing years of his life as the author of the famous book “Down the River Nun”, which no less than the great poet Gabriel Okara had fantasized about, His Royal Highness, Chief Nicholas Abo Frank-Opigo, would for all times be remembered as one of Ijaw nation’s greatest ever. Although this book was a reminiscence of his ebullient life’s journey covering diverse fields, it clearly stands in a class of its own, akin to epic-dramas, J P Clark’s “Ozidi” and Okara’s “Fisherman’s Invocation,” in depicting the Ijaw microcosmos. On Sunday, 19th April, 2020, many around the world, especially Frank-Opigo’s progeny and friends, mark the tenth anniversary of his departure.
A pioneer university graduate, a pioneer educationist, pioneer politician, a pioneer Federal Law Maker, pioneer Chief Executive of what is today Bayelsa (then known as Yenagoa Province), a traditional ruler, writer, historian, etc. Like many great men of his genre generation, Frank-Opigo’s life is poignant, with many interesting moments and high points of triumph and fête, but no less of ache and mistaken portrayal.

A TYPICAL IZON BOY ON THE BANKS OF RIVER NUN
Born in 1926, into a privileged family of King Dawai who, 200 years ago, had ruled the Oporoma Clan, known as one of the epicentres of Ijaw civilization. Like most others of is time, his youthful days were full of fantasy and adventure around the fast disappearing luxuriant deltaic environment of the great River Nun, one of the main tributaries of the River Niger. Just like the Amazon River, most early European explorers found the delta of the River Niger, with its unique richness of aquatic life, fauna and even rare birds, some form of Eldorado until the almighty “black gold” was found in the area in the 1950s. The River Niger, which starts from the Fouta Djallon hills and snakes for 2, 600 kilometres miles, bifurcates into the River Forcados, which traverses the territories of Western Ijaws, Urhobos, Isokos, Kwales, etc. and River Nun, it’s twin passes through the heart of Ijaw territory and washes into the Atlantic Ocean around Brass. Historically, this is what the great explorers Mungo Park, Hugh Clapperton, as well as the John and Richard Lander, and the many others at great peril to their lives, tried to “discover”. Many writers of History note that Angiama, in Southern Ijaw Local Government of Bayelsa State, the home town of Frank-Opigo, is where, was well visited by Richard Lander.

But growing up in a typical Ijaw settlement for Frank-Opigo was not only pleasurable but an unending voyage of adventure. Fishing and harvesting all manner of fresh water species with relatively little ease, farming in, perhaps, the world’s best alluvial soil where inorganic matter had no place. Even more interesting was a life of regular relation through swimming, daily bouts of intra-family or peer group wrestling or intra-communal and inter-communal wrestling festivals. With the clamour for western education and the monetization of the hitherto peaceful subsistence living was the need for all young men worth their fathers’ names and family ‘kule’ (Ijaw praise name), Frank-Opigo joined the bandwagon of climbing palm trees, harvesting same, processing it into palm oil and preparing the kernel for sale to European companies, like United African Company, (UAC) which had offices and commissioned agents all around the delta. Most early educated Ijaw sons and daughters all got western education through the sale of palm produce. It was, as it were, a rite of initiation, perhaps as Cocoa was to a typical Yoruba or Rubber to a Bini or Groundnut to a Hausa of the time.

The engagement in Palm business came as a result of the introduction of “Legitimate Trade” by the British Government in the 1800 following the abolition of Slave Trade in 1807 and Slavery in 1833, both by the British Parliament. This is why the area became known as “Oil Rivers Protectorate” in 1884, when the British decided to embark on gunboat diplomacy and colonial conquest. By a twist of destiny, the same area – the Niger Delta – finds itself in some other form of internal conquest with its Crude Oil being carted away for over 60 years now with little footprint in terms of development of the area. History, they say, has a way of repeating itself. The same way the Niger Delta leaders of old, like King Koko of Nembe, King Ibanichuka of Okrika, King Jaja of Opobo, Nana of Itsekiris and others fought them, so, over 120 years, is the allegory of the Niger Delta Struggle and the emergent heroism of the types of High Chief Government Ekpemupulo, alias Tompolo.

PADDLING THROUGH THE CREEKS IN SEARCH OF KNOWLEDGE
Due to their coastal location, the people of the Niger Delta were amongst the set of Africans to have contact with Europe. When the Portuguese came in the 15th century, they mixed with the various ethic groups, especially the Ijaws, Itsekiris and Binis. The Bini King Oba Esegie opened diplomatic relations with them and sent his son and successor, Oba Orhogbua to Portugal to study in the 16th century. However, after that it took another 400 years for an Ijaw Prince who later became King George Pepple (Perekule VII) to go to study in London. But the abolition of Slave Trade and penetration of missionaries, especially from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) of the Church of England into the Nigeria Delta, led by Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, led to the spread of western education and the establishment of schools. Schools which were attached to church life sprang up. St Luke’s Nembe, St Barnabas, Brass, St Stephen’s Bonny. By 1870s Prince George Ockyiya, who was also a Nembe man of blue blood, studied in England. But most of these efforts were in the eastern delta, for geo-strategic reasons, being on the Atlantic springboard. This produced such Ijaw pioneers of knowledge as TK Cameroon, First Secretary General of the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT), Reginald Agiobu-Kemmer, a one-time Principal of Kings College, Feniobu Ajumogobia, Former Director-General of UNESCO, Dr. Isaac Dagogo Erekosima, First African Principal of Government College, Umuahia, Dr SJS Cookey, First African Principal of Dennis Memorial College, Onitsha.

However, missionary penetration took hold in the central delta in the early 1900s and schools began to spring up in most communities at the basic primary level. Frank-Opigo got his first introduction into western education, through a goulash of English and vernacular at his own Angiama community. As was the custom, he had to move to a bigger school in a nearby town to read up to Standard Three. In his own case and as most people in present Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa State, it was only at St Johns School, Ekowe, or at St Stephen’s Primary School, Amassoma. On completion at Ekowe, he had to move up the River Nun to the faraway District headquarters, at Kaiama town, in Northern Ijaw, where there was a school that had senior primary education – Proctor Memorial Primary School. Interesting enough, Angiama is just across his own big town, Oporoma, the Divisional headquarters, but there was no school there at that level for years. In compensation, Oporoma, was given the first Secondary School in SILGA in 1960s.

Rather than return home to take up royal engagements or continue the family legacy of palm oil trade, farming and fishing, Frank-Opigo passed high and secured a place in the newly established Okrika Grammar School. This school, established in 1940, like Government College Umuahia before it, was supposed to be for high flying young men from Rivers area and came only next to Enitonna High School, which was established by a missionary in 1932. In the subsequent Cambridge Examinations, Frank-Opigo came on tops with Grade One amongst the few from OGS who wrote the examination at Kaiama and Yenagoa.

At all these various locales, academic hard work and cutting of palms during holidays was key to being able to remain on top of the academic rolls and pay for school expenses. He always, also, had to paddle his way from the remoteness of Angiama, up and down the River Nun and the various creeks and rivulets during the holidays. But then, these were indispensable stages of the life formation process for a typical young Ijaw man of his time and ilk.

“FRANCO AND THE PIONEERS OF UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN ”
With the completion of secondary education, in those days and still now, in the Niger Delta and indeed in Nigeria, where there is so much wealth to automatically proceed to higher education, the absence of scholarship schemes, education grants, bursaries, forced such young people to seek jobs. He therefore got a job in the Colonial Customs Service between in 1945. His stay in the Customs Service in Lagos and later Burutu in the Old Warri Division, where inter-ethnic politics were rife amongst the various groups, also introduced him to the intricacies of Nigerian politics, and obviously prepared him for active engagement in public service as a politician in the years ahead.

Frank-Opigo, armed with a good School Certificate, got scholarship into Nigeria’s pioneer University of Ibadan in 1949 as one of the pioneer students. It should be pointed out that, although Ibadan was established in 1948, its doors were open to students early 1949. Indeed, along with people as Amb. Joe Iyalla, he was one of the first Ijaws to enter Ibadan. Records have it that, in those early days, such famous alumni as Amb. Joe Iyalla, Chinua Achebe, Bola Ige, Meredith Akinloye, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Amb. B. A. Clark and his younger brother, J. P. Clark, Tekena Tamuno, Elechi Amadi, were his contemporaries and successors. He was an all-rounder and quite famous known simply as “Franco”.
As once attested by Prof. J. P Clark, “Franco was slightly older in age and therefore a rallying point for we the Ijaws at the time”. While in Ibadan, he was at the time also in touch with the “Ijo Union” in Lagos and even Kano. Further, Ibadan was a good theatre for political incubation, as he could find time to go to good old Mapo Hall to listen to the debates and political maelstrom between the intellectually vivacious, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his opponents.

On graduation, again in flying colours, he relocated home to try his hands at politics as elections became due in 1953 into the Eastern Regional House of Assembly. Unsuccessful at the nomination stage, he briefly took up a job as a classroom teacher at Baptist High School in Port Harcourt. He left in 1954 to try his hands again at politics. He lost the nomination yet again within his own Zikist Party, the NCNC, and the party’s eventual candidate and incumbent, Rev. Bens, lost to the young Melford Okilo of the local Niger Delta People Congress, a party hurriedly formed by the inveterate patriot Chief Harold Dappa Biriye. Frank-Opigo happily returned to his alma matter Ibadan as an Administrative Staff – Assistant Registrar in charge of Students. This was an obvious appreciation of his brilliance at a time when Europeans who ran the school also insisted on the best.

DRIBBLE BETWEEN GOVERNANCE AND EDUCATION
Being quite brilliant, Frank-Opigo had so many other job offers, including in the new Oil industry. This industry was making interesting finds in his home Niger Delta, including his area, Oporoma, known in oil industry circles as “Nun River”. He also had offers in the Eastern Regional Civil Service, as the colonial government, with the various Constitutional Conferences in London, was preparing to hand-over and leave. Eventually, with a heart for education, which he made in return to Ibadan in the first place, he came back to Port-Harcourt and took up job as Vice Principal of Enitonna High School, eventually becoming the Principal in 1956. Following a life-threatening incident, he resigned as Principal and took up appointment in the Civil Service, which he had rejected in the past, becoming District Officer for Abak in 1957 and Calabar in 1958. While doing this, he also acquired a large expanse of land at Rumuola on the outskirts of Port Harcourt and established the Niger Grammar School, the first by an Ijaw man in the then Eastern Region. Although this prematurely cost him his Civil Service job, in hindsight, it opened the flood gates to education for many more indigent Ijaws and other ethnic groups around Port-Harcourt, such as the Ikwerres, his host, Ogonis, Ekpeyes, etc, who could not afford the more expensive government and missionary schools.

Through this restless voyage in life and against the backdrop of two failed attempts at entering the Eastern House of Assembly, success came his way in 1964, as he secured a seat into the House of Representatives in Lagos, representing Brass South (South Ijaw), where he served until the first Military Coup in 1966. While in Parliament, affairs in the country deteriorated, and Chief Frank-Opigo opined as follows: “We put the responsibility for the state of affairs squarely on the shoulders of the Prime Minister and his Government for inaction, and also on the Parliament for limited experience and literacy of its members. The Armed Forces and Police too were not exempted as they also suffered from predominant youth and inexperience”

WAR YEARS AND EMERGENCE OF AN UNPLANNED BENEFACTOR
The writer, Richard Kadrey, once remarked “being able to embrace contradiction is a sign of intelligence. Or insanity”. Following the January 1966 military coup and the inability to save the Nigerian state from tearing apart, several great Ijaw nationalists, like their counterparts from other eastern minorities who were members of the NCNC, were unwittingly caught up with the secessionists. They found themselves sandwiched in a cul-de-sac. What were the choices: escape quickly to safe, at a neutral ground or remain and do the best for your people?

Accordingly, to eye-witness accounts, Frank-Opigo, who was an NCNC big-wig, was caught in-between after unsuccessfully trying to escape with his family to Cameroon. Subsequently, he was appointed Administrator of Yenagoa Province, created by the General Ironsi administration and inherited by the secessionists. Without dwelling on detail, accounts by the Spiff Family of Brass (whose son had just been appointed Military Governor by General Yakubu Gowon), the patriarch, Senator Amatari Zuofa, former Executive Secretary of the Niger Delta Development Board, surviving older people of Peremabiri in the Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa, and many more, attest to his singular efforts in staving genocidal intents of the Biafran troops at the time. This was not understood in the immediate aftermath of the Nigerian victory when emotions and resentment against people like him were rife.

However, history bore him out as a wise man who stooped low as a “Guest Administrator” in the midst of marauding soldiers, to save his people. It was a Mordechai and Esther type of wisdom. He became fully reintegrated into mainstream politics. He subsequently served Rivers State as Chairman, Agricultural Production and Marketing Company, Chairman Delta Rubber Company, Vice President, Port Harcourt Chamber of Commerce and member, Federal Constituent Assembly leading to return to democracy in 1979 after many years of military rule. His later efforts to govern Rivers State under various platforms, however, were unsuccessful. In the later days of his life, he however became installed as the King of Oporoma Clan, beyond his headship of his community, Angiama, which he had been bestowed since 1960.

WHAT THE ULTIMATE CHRONICLER WILL SAY
Those who know the remoteness of the southernmost, most riverine, most deltaic and most coastal parts of Nigeria, would easily appreciate the courage and determination of people like His Royal Majesty, King N. A. Frank-Opigo, in acquiring western education and becoming celebratory personalities of their days. Despite the vicissitudes of life, he ended a great hero of the Ijaw nation and one of the most outstanding Nigerians of his

Dr. Igali was invited to deliver lecture online by the he Frank-Opigo Family and Foundation.