Minority rights and resource-conflict in the poetry of Ibiwari Ikiriko, Nnimmo Bassey and Ogaga Ifowodo

Abstract

Minority rights appear to be more contentious wherever resource-distribution is contested. Oil and Power are linked inextricably in the poetry that Ibiwari Ikiriko, Nnimmo Bassey and Ogaga Ifowodo have written on the Niger Delta mosaic. Power determines control and dispossession. Thus, these poets have depicted the attitude of the state and its centres of control towards the condition of the oil-bearing communities. The exercise of state might is cast as a strategy of repression which is designed to ensure accumulation for the state and its privileged entities. This essay is to examine the extent to which the poems of Ikiriko, Bassey and Ifowodo stand as mirrors on various sites of tension and conflict in the Niger Delta.