ALLEN ONYEMA: I FEEL FULFILLED WORKING FOR MY COUNTRY
Chairman of Air Peace, Chief Allen Onyema, is a Pan Nigerian who believes in the Nigeria Project. In this interview with CHARLES AJUNWA and AHAMEFULA OGBU, he revealed how he risked his life traversing the oil-rich Niger Delta to pull militants from the creeks, changing their mindsets, their deradicalisation, training and equipping them with various skills. He also spoke on sundry issues W
What is your belief system?
I don’t know what you mean by that but I believe absolutely in God and I believe that He is my refuge and I don’t fear nothing. I also believe in Christ as my personal saviour.
How do you handle mind boggling incidents of near air mishaps?
Airline business is not a business for the faint hearted, it is one of the most difficult businesses under the sun yet the least appreciated. If you leave your money in the bank, Nigerian banks will be giving you double-digit interest rate but some of us have reasons to go into it and that is to create jobs. Seeing the faces of over 3000 people earning their means of livelihood over here because of the platform one has provided, I glorify the Lord God Almighty, He alone deserves to be praised, that is what makes me happy. If you look at the myriad of problems, challenges and the fallouts of owning an airline, it is enough to kill somebody. Until your planes come back in a day, at the end of every day, if there is one plane still remaining in the sky, so will your whole world remain with that plane in the sky. Nobody prays for anything, I believe that Air peace is God’s own, God is only using me as human being to run Air Peace. Because of God’s protection of Air Peace, I know what I am talking about, nothing will happen.
What you call near miss is not near-miss anything; those are things that will happen and it is because we are excited people in this country. Any little thing that happens in this country it is over-celebrated in the media and made to look extraordinary. All over the world, planes fall out of the sky or worse things happen; in Nigeria if you notice that a dashboard light comes up and you decide to do air return; and that light could be as a result of faulty switch, it could even be that the switch is okay but there are some dirts covering it, it will be giving wrong signal but the pilot must have to take precautions, you don’t assume totally so you go back to base, not life threatening, the next thing 200 people almost crashed because of air return; two million people almost died because of air return in so airline. At times it makes me wonder if people are praying for accidents because of the way we react when there are issues other people would not bother reporting.
The other day we were going to Owerri and the pilot discovered there was no fuel in Owerri and decided to turn back. Every plane has maximum take-off and landing weights, for safety, you are not allowed to put beyond that weight or the plane could wobble out of the sky, so in aviation that is why you may travel from here to the United States when you get there you won’t see your bags, it is not missing, it was deliberately removed to reduce the weight. So that day we were going to Owerri and there was an overweight of luggage if we were to carry too much fuel so we can take more luggage and load up fuel when we get there. We took off, after Benin when you start coming down, we contacted Owerri which said they had fuel and they said they no longer had fuel, that the fuel they told us they had was bought by a private jet, meanwhile, we told them to keep the fuel for us. We had to turn back after Benin and announced to the passengers the predicament. If that aircraft had continued to Owerri, what would have happened was that the plane would have been stranded, it will land but won’t be able to go anywhere. Anytime fuel finishes in Owerri it takes about three weeks to get fuel there and it will affect other flights. The pilot turned back to take more fuel and drop some bags. As soon as they landed back in Lagos, one girl they said was in Big brother posted that she survived an air crash and the thing was trending everywhere, I don’t know if she was praying to die. Whenever we have any incident, no matter how minor, it pains because the schedules of passengers will be disrupted. For example, this is rainy season, anyone that says his performance will be 100 per cent the person is deceiving you.
How did you feel the first time you entered the aircraft and saw Nigerians that you were able to bring back from South Africa as a result of Xenophobic attacks?
I felt good and I thank God Almighty for using me. I allowed God to talk to me, so I was happy that God used me to touch lives and to save the lives of those who were stranded for years. So I felt good. When they are talking about what one has done for them and that if not for you maybe they would have died, lost their properties. They were holding hands there- Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Edo singing our National Anthem, so I broke down. I felt happy that at last, God has used me to bond Nigerians together. A lot of people thought they were all Igbo. No, you have seen the statistics. I knew it was not just Igbos in South Africa because I was doing business there. I used to train and transform militants there since 2005. I knew but people thought it was one section of the country. Thank goodness they have seen the statistics coming out from the federal government.
What is your advice for the Nigerian youths?
I want every Nigerian youth to shun vices of internet fraud, Yahoo Yahoo fraud, prescription drug both in consumption and marketing. Drug kills. It’s not only when you pick up a gun to shoot somebody that you kill the person. In fact, death through drug is even worse. When you sell a drug, you are committing murder, you are attempting murder.
So the youths should come out of it and every youth should look around him and look for those challenges around his environment within his country and proffer solutions to those challenges. You become a millionaire when you proffer solutions to challenges around you that nobody has proffered solutions to. You begin to look for those challenges in our country that don’t have solutions yet. If you are the first to proffer solution to such challenges you become a millionaire before others even set in. So youths expend their energy looking for what they can contribute to the country and in the long run that will make them. I’m a good example of that. What I did in the Niger Delta, yes, of course, I made money. Why wouldn’t I but I didn’t set out to make money? I was spending my own money training militants because I saw hopelessness, I saw helplessness in the region. Businesses were taking a flight out of Nigeria then, foreign oil companies were almost closing down, foreigners were running away and oil production went down to about 500,000 barrels per day in 2005 at the peak. It was a lost battle because the militants knew the terrain more than even everybody. I now started thinking about how could I be of help to my country. For a country of about 200 million and 177 million people then depending on 500,000 barrels of crude oil. That was the recipe for disaster to come. So, I decided to do something about it.
The first thing I did was asking Joy Emeli, my staff, here how can we help? God Almighty is my witness, that was what happened and I remembered that nonviolence because first of all, you have to study what was the issue?
The militants believed the South-south was marginalised. They believed they were the ones producing the oil, they were not getting anything from it and they decided to engage the authorities. They felt nobody listened to them when they were civil and they now decided to take up arms to attract attention. But, then, criminality also set in. Armed robbers that were not from Niger Delta relocated to Niger Delta because it was fashionable to be called a militant than to be called an armed robber. So people who have no business in the Niger Delta, criminals from every part of this country relocated to Niger Delta to be committing crime and feeling good about it, not hiding about it and that was the beginning of militancy.
The first task for me was how do I change the narratives. I decided, okay, that nonviolence education should be the way out. If they were looking for equity the best way wouldn’t be by resort to arms. It should be tackled through another means other than violence. Violence begets violence, I now remembered nonviolence education. I now remembered that other struggles in the past led through violence never succeeded but those ones led through nonviolence succeeded because nonviolence philosophy knows no defeat. It works with the soul and it works with love too.
Mahatma Gandhi used nonviolence education to bring down British Rule in India without encouraging his followers to attack any Briton. In fact, it was the other way round. When you attack a non-violence practitioner, he does not attack you back. If you slap me now, what do you expect? You will expect that I will slap you back with even more force and velocity. But if you slap me and you are expecting me to slap you and I looked at you and say ‘God bless you, thank you’. My brother, you are finished. So those who don’t do violence are courageous people. Those who do violence are cowards, the inarticulate. So those of us who are practicing nonviolence it’s a very powerful thing. Mahatma Gandhi used it in India.
Lech Walesa of Poland and his solidarity movement; it was a nonviolent movement. They never used encouraged violence.
Lech Walesa used it to bring down the all-powerful Communist regime in Poland in 1981 without encouraging any violence. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr who was my mentor used the nonviolence philosophy to bring down official segregation in the United States of America. By law people were segregated then, he used nonviolence actions to bring it down. So history is replete with many places and of recent when South Africans were fighting wars with Apartheid regime it never worked. But when they decided to apply the nonviolence actions they got what they wanted on a platter of gold. So I decided that I will go all out. But then I didn’t know anything about nonviolence, where do I go from there. I now decided to research and I discovered the man that worked with Martin Luther King in his civil rights days Dr. Benner A. Jr, he is here in my shelf and I wrote him. He was a director at the Centre for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, University of Rhode Island, United States. I said I would like to train myself and my staff about 22 of us, that I would like to train them in nonviolence so that we can come back here to train others in order to arrest the Niger Delta issue.
He that was noble, he said that he would want me to write an essay not less than 400 words on why we should be admitted to the university to do that programme . I wrote and they gave us admission. We went to the American Embassy and they didn’t give us visa. They thought maybe I was leading a group of people to run out of the country. We tried three times, they didn’t give us and already we have paid for the programme. I wrote to them and said, ‘Please, the embassy will not give us visa. Why not come and help my country. Come down to Nigeria and teach me. I’m ready to pay your faculty for everything’. He now said, ‘I want to go and see this Martin Luther King of Nigeria’. That I reminded him of his former boss, who never said no to challenges.
On the day, he set foot on the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos, he said ‘Nigeria and Niger Delta will never be the same again. It had just started today’. The rest is history.
So he came, trained me and my staff. We did two more programmes. Then he took us to South Africa to do another two weeks programme at the King Luthuli Transformation Centre to deepen it. We came to Nigeria and started going to the creeks to pick these people and that was a dangerous assignment. I started reaching out to them through different people, through parents, through moles and other means. I started training and transforming them, bringing them to Eko Tourist Beach Resort in Akodo for the Nigerian training. The other leg took place at the King Luthuli Transformation Centre in Johannesburg.
Everywhere in Niger Delta people started singing a new song ‘Nonviolence, Nonviolence’. One day, he asked me, what is the most powerful organisation in the Niger Delta? I said the Ijaw Youth Congress (IYC). Do they support what is happening there? I said yes, they do. That the political wing. How do they get to the position of their leadership? I said it’s through elections and their elections are always well contested. He said okay. He said I want you to identify a good mobiliser, an orator, a good leader who will take on that leadership.