Okobo

Story of a Nigerian People

At the core of this book is a passionate desire by the author to seek out Okobo and present it to the world. In a painstaking recollection of childhood memories, he started the book with a full-day homecoming journey to Okoboland from his place of work at Abuja, the new administrative capital of Nigeria in West Africa. The dramatic changes seen in one town known as Obufi was found replicated in all other towns and villages in Okoboland in domino. Anywhere he visited bore unmistakable evidences of advance and decline, both in terms of physical and human content of society. Looking at Okobo with new eyes after some four decades of first impression, he found a wonderful treasure trove of previously unknown information to share with readers. Okobo country rocks, its multiple waterways and vegetation, each had respective stories to tell. So also were its people and their traditional means of livelihood. A curious insight into its peculiarities threw more light on how Okobo as a frontier nation was able to survive among population hegemons of Efik, Oron, and Ibibio with whom it shared common borders at three fronts. Indeed throughout the Efik-speaking communities of the Lower Cross River region, Okobo was the only meeting point of the three major ethnic groupings. In many respects, Okobo created a great impact among communities that dotted all sides of the Cross River estuary. But somehow such roles had remained largely unacknowledged over the years. A brief review of activities of Okobo farmers, fishermen, and traders between their homeland in the Nigerian mainland and its locations at the Atlantic base sought to highlight some of these historically important roles played by Okobo men and women in the past. With a rather rude shock, Okobo people, in a recent international incident, saw the carpet swept away from under their feet when Nigeria bungled its case against Cameroon at the International Court of Justice at The Hague. In the manner of tales of the unexpected, Nigeria went to the quiet neighborhood of Greentree in upstate New York and signed away its territory along with its Okobo people living there. Without any pretension, this story, in its concluding section, therefore wish to expose the fraudulent international conspiracy and mother of all sellouts of the twenty-first century. The book declares in a very public manner that the people whose ancestral home was taken away from them were Okobo people. Matters became more bizarre when revelations in the book showed that Okobo inhabitants who constituted over 90 percent of the so-called Bakassi Peninsula were hardly consulted for their inputs before the Nigerian legal team boarded the plane on an ill-fated mission to the world court. In this epic write-up, real information about Okobo was reduced to moonlight storytelling, necessarily to loosen and broaden perceptions of readers and people interested in further research about Okobo. A tourist guide insight into huge population centres of Okobo Nation has been added at the end of the book. In a vivid expression of intent, Okobo: Story of a Nigerian People represents an exploratory effort to address who Okobo people are in the context of the Nigerian federal state. It envisages a massive outpouring of better-informed opinion about Okobo phenomenon by the time the last page is flipped.