“No Manipulation Can Change What The Census Already Revealed” Says Ijaw Stakeholders Group, Charges INEC To Implement Delineation Report -

By Esther David

IJAW STAKEHOLDERS OF WARRI FEDERAL CONSTITUENCY

OPEN LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA

THE MAP IS NOT A THREAT — IT IS A TESTAMENT

Delineation has come to stay. Not as a favour extended to the Ijaw people or the Urhobos, but as a birthright long denied. It is the product of law, justice, demographic accuracy and moral courage. It is the long-awaited answer to decades of distortion, colonial shadows and institutional cowardice. The map is no longer silent. It speaks the language of truth and that truth terrifies those who have built thrones atop lies.

We are watching the desperate cry of a minority elite who fear the arrival of balance. They have exhausted every strategy of delay, blackmail, propaganda, false protest, political romance and now, exposed by the map, they reach for their final weapon, noise. But no amount of volume can reverse the judgment of facts. No manipulation can change what the census already revealed. And certainly, no crown, however borrowed, can bend the lines of a map ratified by the law.

The Ijaw people have endured quietly. We went to court. We submitted population data. We waited on institutions. We respected due process. For years, we lived as majorities treated like minorities. For decades, our vast ancestral territories were tucked beneath political maps shaped in colonial boardrooms, not by indigenous presence. We were expected to be grateful for being ignored.

Now that justice has come knocking, suddenly the liars are screaming. Now that delineation has exposed the imbalance, they speak of marginalization, those who held every seat, every contract, every favor. They label justice as conquest and equity as aggression.

But let the truth be told: the Ijaw people are not seeking revenge. We are not seeking to displace anyone. We are only reclaiming what history and humanity already gave us. We are demanding that INEC reflect the truth, not theories or threats but truth as visible as our numbers, as ancient as our rivers.

The Portuguese explorer Pacheco Pereira recorded our presence in Escravos and Forcados in 1485. He met the Ijaws, not anyone else. Long before the palace was erected, before a prince from Benin fled to seek shelter in our creeks, we had names, families, gods and governments. The map is only now beginning to echo what the mangroves have always known.

Those who protest today did not protest when their kind monopolized the state. They did not cry foul when ward boundaries were drawn to erase us. They never wrote open letters when Ijaw voices were silenced at the polls or when oil pipelines passed through our lands with no benefit. But now, because fairness has risen, they suddenly remember the courts and the cameras.

We call on the Independent National Electoral Commission: do not waver. Do not fall prey to the blackmail of historical manipulators. The data is with you. The court orders support you. The communities have waited long enough. Publish the delineation and let democracy breathe again in Warri.

To the Federal Government, we say: your silence is becoming complicity. A government that watches injustice and does nothing becomes part of the injustice. You cannot claim to serve a diverse nation and yet allow a manipulated narrative to suppress a majority. Your institutions must be brave enough to defend the truth, not fear the noise.

To the DSS, your work is commendable in the recent exposure of arms trafficking in Asaba. But we ask: why the silence since then? Where are the names mentioned in that raid? Why has the case gone cold? Is it because it leads to a crown? Or are certain citizens above the law simply because they wear traditional beads?

Peace cannot grow where justice is gagged. Development cannot take root where land ownership is based on colonial fiction. A people cannot be called equal when their identity is edited for the comfort of others.

Let it be made clear to Nigeria and the world: the Ijaw people of Warri are not troublemakers. We are the original owners of these lands. Our footprints are older than the treaties. Our population is not a rumour, it is a fact. Our kingship is not borrowed, it is indigenous. Our claim is not a conquest, it is ancestral.

Those who chant “ownership” today must first account for their history. They came as strangers. They were welcomed. But hospitality is not an invitation to rewrite geography.

We do not fear the truth. We fear its suppression.

And so we rise, not just for delineation but for dignity.

Not just for wards but for our rightful voice in a land that has long silenced us.

The map must be published.

The liars must be named.

The justice system must not blink.

Nigeria must decide, whether it stands for truth or for titles.

Let the institutions speak.

Let the people rise.

Let the truth be louder than the lies.

And let every enemy of justice know: the time of reckoning is here.

Signed,