Bubaraye Dakolo, HRM
Profile of HRM King Bubaraye Dakolo Agada IV, Ibenanaowei of Ekpetiama Kingdom, and Chairman, Bayelsa State Traditional Rulers Council.
His Royal Majesty Bubaraye Dakolo, Agada IV, FANA, Ibenanaowei of Ekpetiama kingdom, became a first-class traditional ruler in Bayelsa State, Nigeria in 2016 when the Ijaws of Ekpetiama Kingdom rose as one and anointed him as their paramount traditional head. He became Chairman, Bayelsa State Council of Traditional Rulers on March 16, 2022. He is also the Chairman, Conference of Ijaw Traditional Rulers and Elders (CITRE).
In November 2023, he became a Fellow of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). With critically acclaimed audacious book titles like The Riddle of the Oil Thief, Once a Soldier , The African Voice , Pirates of the Gulf, and The Kingfisher: An Intimate Portrait of Environmental Injustice in the Niger Delta. To his credit he now numbers among the greatest of Africa’s literary greats. King Dakolo stands out as a loud voice in the African continent on the subject of oil and gas exploitation and security and how Africa could overcome western imperialism.
Born two decades after the death of Marcus Mosiah Garvey in the decade of the wanton, reckless and ruthless assassination of Black Nationalists in Africa and in the Americas, that decade that saw African nations breaking free from colonialism, and stepping into neo-colonialism or imperialism; that decade which saw western powers’ reluctance to let go of the Africa they were milking dry, a continent suffused with diamond, gold, platinum, uranium, plutonium, and vast deposits of petroleum. It was a decade that witnessed the mindless plunder of beans, cocoa, coffee, and the open exploitation, rape and wastage of human life so long as it was African. Wasn’t that the decade to be born?
Although slave trade had been outlawed, the west herded us yet into another trap, a masked alternative means of governance meant to exploit Africa’s human and material resources in perpetuity. He was born during the beginning of that era. The era we are still grappling with.
It holds significance that he was born in 1965 in Otuabagi, the community where the first commercial-scale oil well was drilled in Nigeria.
Residing at his Nun Riverbank hometown of Gbarantoru, he also survived the great flood of 1969 as well as the deadly wave of fierce fighting that enveloped Ekpetiama Kingdom during the Nigerian civil war on account of the cut-throat contest to control the crude oil resource fields in the Niger Delta.
Shortly after the war in 1970, he lived with his father and siblings at the residential quarters of Nigeria’s pioneer petroleum refining company (NPRC) at Alesa Eleme in Rivers State where his father was then a brand-new post-civil war employee.
Oblivious of the danger posed by exposed oil pipelines, he – like other children – daily walked the four-kilometre-long distance to and from his Ibuluya-Dikibo State Primary School, Okrika, Rivers State, on those naked big oil pipelines. From the back of his school, he also watched sea-going massive oil tankers as they shipped petroleum from the refinery jetty near his school at the Okrika peninsular to the western world.
Aside from being exposed early to the messy realities of the oil industry in Nigeria, while they were still dripping fresh at Ogbia, he was equally exposed to the works of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr in his teens. The works and fate of early African nationalists, like Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Ahmed Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Nelson Mandela, and Steve Beko, helped to reinforce his pan-Africanist disposition into rock solid concrete.
Living in the Ekpetiama community of Gbarantoru, virtually within a 500-metre radius of the Renaissance Consortium - operated onshore multi-billion-dollar Central Processing Facility/Field Logistic Base (CPF/FLB) that produces over 60,000 barrels of crude oil equivalent of gas daily, with an extremely tall projected gas flare which spews large volumes of poisonous gases into the atmosphere since 2008. He has been a witness to life as a nauseating noxious affair in Ekpetiama kingdom and the rest of Bayelsa State.
Amongst several educational accomplishments, he holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Chemical Engineering, a Post-Graduate Diploma in Education, and a Master of Arts degree in Terrorism, International Crime, and Global Security. He is an alumnus of the Nigeria Defence Academy, NDA, Kaduna, and the University of Port Harcourt, both in Nigeria, as well as Coventry University, England. He is a Director of the New York-based International Center for Ethno-Religious Mediation, ICERM, and Chairman of its World Elders’ Forum. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Mediators and Conciliators of Nigeria, and an awardee of the Institute of Peace, United States of America.
Prior to becoming Ibenanaowei, he served in the Nigerian military, taught at the University of Port Harcourt Demonstration Secondary School, UDSS, served in government offices as the pioneer Director of Ethics and Compliance in the Due Process and E-governance Bureau of Bayelsa State, and pioneer Technical Assistant to the first Executive Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, Abuja.
He is a passionate environmental and human rights activist. A founding member of the Ijaw Youth Council, IYC, and the Ogbia Study Group, OSG, an intellectual partner of the Ijaw struggle for resource control from the late 1990s. He is the founder of the Nun River Keepers Organisation, a community-based organisation whose objective is to protect one of the most historically significant rivers in the world – the Nun River and its environment. With great optimism, he advocates for a Nigeria free of oil and gas pollution, and manages its oil resources equitably.
He is married to Her Royal Majesty, Queen Timinipre Bubaraye Dakolo, Igirigi I of the Universe, nee Ogiriki, an exceptionally beautiful and loving Ijaw woman. They have two lovely children.
His Royal Majesty identifies as a proud black African with an enduring love for his family, his people, music, reading, writing, learning and teaching.