By Iniruo Wills
Hardly is there a more fulfilled life, hardly a finer specimen of humankind and intellect, modeling lifelong leadership in academic excellence, professional accomplishment, public service and community development, than Prof Youpele Orukalama Beredugo.
He belonged to that rare class of Nigerians who did not merely witness history but shaped it.
The sage was already in his autumn when I first encountered him, at the founding meeting of the Nembe-Ibe Road Projects Group (NIRPG) in Port Harcourt in 2003.
That body of illustrious Nembe Se indigenes was convened by Professor Kingsley Danekite Allagoa to pursue the actualization of road projects to connect the Nembe-Ijaw speaking kingdoms of coastal Nigeria with mainland Nigeria, some of those roads having been proposed since the 1940s but left undone until these Nembe Se patriots convened almost sixty years later to decide that the Nigerian government’s infrastructural neglect of their homeland must become history.
The legendary historian, Emeritus Professor Ebiegberi Allagoa (now Chief Kala-Joe) led as the first Chairman of the Group and the revered Prof Y O Beredugo served as the pioneer Vice Chairman. Mentally sprightly, morally courageous and boyishly handsome even at his age, his face was luminous like one wearing an invisible halo. So instructive was my first sighting of him.
These venerable elders along with quite a few others of their ilk, like Alabo Jigekuma Ombu-Kieri, Prof Bio Kombo, Prof (Mrs) Ayebaemi Spiff – Nembe Se’s first female Professor, and Prof Monday Godwin-Egein – the Group’s ultra-diligent founding Secretary, took the frontline in a community development campaign like no other, meeting every month, publishing rigorous position papers in national dailies, and engaging federal ministers (of Works), successive Bayelsa State governors, other relevant federal agencies and private corporations.
Despite intermittent government-side frustrations and the occasional intrigue, the engagements bore first fruits in the decision of the Niger Delta Development Commission in 2003 to construct the Ogbia-Nembe Road (in place of the earlier chosen Otuegila-Amurekini-Amuroto-Kugbo-Nembe Road) in partnership with The Shell Petroleum Development Company Limited.
The road was officially commissioned in 2024 by NDDC and stands as a concrete testament to the patriotic activism of citizen leaders like these.
A walking institutional memory of roads and development history, especially of Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, and armed with a flowing pen and digital savvy, Prof Youpele Beredugo naturally chaired the writing corps that churned out most of the Group’s publications and written addresses. It was a delight for younger elements like myself, Prof Atei Okorobia, Atei Beredugo and Dr Ebinyun Young-Dede to serve in his shadows in scripting some of those position papers.
But the aged Professors, Allagoa and Beredugo, didn’t just write or talk. They led marches too, from the front. Almost twenty years ago, when the Group got tired of being ignored by both the Federal Government and the Bayelsa State Government, it decided to embark on a protest march to Government House, Yenagoa and the Ogbia Junction starting point of the awarded but still-delayed Ogbia-Nembe Road project.
Both these towering intellectuals, living in Port Harcourt, travelled down to lead the protest. When the then governor heard that morning of their arrival, he sent word that he would come to meet us instead where the group was meeting in final preparation for the march. Too late, alas.
The marches took place, at both ends. Afterwards, the state government worked to resolve the security and logistical issues impeding work on the NDDC-Shell (Ogbia-Nembe) road project.
That wasn’t Prof’s last ember of fire.
In November 2021, when the Shell-Aiteo Santa Barbara oil well 1 exploded into a flood of crude oil and gas unleashed upon the communities and coasts of Nembe and Brass Local Government Areas for thirty-eight days, community folks were dumbfounded that there had not been a whimper of concern from both state and federal governments in all of the first two weeks.
On a community media platform where he was perhaps the oldest member by far, Prof Beredugo bellowed out that Nembe Se elders would stage a march to Government House, Yenagoa and demand that the Governor must personally lead a delegation to President Muhamnadu Buhari to compel a response to the blowout.
The equally explosive signals from the ensuing debate culminated in the visit of the then Minister of Petroleum to the site of the oil disaster, one that ranks with the globally notorious Exxon Valdez and BP Gulf of Mexico spill disasters.
The then Minister of Environment also visited, but the executive tourism to the pollution field has resulted in no action, no cleanup, no compensation, and no sanctions until the Prof’s passing over four years later.
That Professor Beredugo lived a life of legacy is self-evident. To the bargain, he lived to see the continuation of his legacy. NIPRG transmuted into Nembe Se Congress under him and Prof/Chief Allagoa (Kala-Joe) to advance the wholesale development of Nembe Se. Years after they both transitioned from being unanimously re-elected leaders of the Congress into its living Patrons, but building on the foundation they laid, their Congress’s engagements with Governor Douye Diri in 2022 yielded the contract award for construction of the Nembe-Brass Road by the Bayelsa State Government, to extend the Ogbia-Nembe stretch to hit the mouth of the Atlantic Ocean at Brass and Beredugo’s native Okpoama Town.
Taking a cue and prodded by the state government, the federal government has now taken on the Brass segment of the road, to ensure completion. All these would still have been mere proposals, but for the catalytic leadership of activist patriotic elders like Professors K D Allagoa, E J Allagoa and Y O Beredugo, who galvanized their like to take their people’s destiny into their own hands and actualize it.
Although Prof. Beredugo’s journey took him from local classrooms to some of the finest institutions across the world – Belfast, Delft, Ontario – his heart never left home. He returned with knowledge not as personal capital, but as national investment and community development. This is legacy in its purest form.
Having completed his assignment, Prof Beredugo has laid down his tools. The engineer has rested from his labour, but the legacy of his works will follow him as a concrete memorial as a founder and Patron of Nembe Se Congress transitions further into a Patron Saint of Nembe Se and national advancement, may his soul enjoy eternal bliss in the bosom of our Lord, God, and may we never run out of men and women of his caliber.