Periscoping Port Harcourt City

Although the celebration of Port Harcourt at 100 in December 2012 has come and gone, it is important to revisit and periscope the state of the city. It is obvious that the one-time Garden City of Nigeria has passed through many processes of transformation compared to what it was before its pronouncement as the political and administrative headquarters of the then newly created Rivers State in 1967.

Created in 1912, both in regional and national contexts, Port Harcourt has remained an important city, all-time,because of its position as a port and as one of only two railway termini in Southern Nigeria. Its importance has taken added dimensions: Firstly as an important centre of the booming oil and gas industry in Nigeria and secondly, it is now producing more and consuming more, developing faster and attracting more risk capital.

The vast development is gaining powerful momentum, involving expansion and diversification of industrial and commercial activities. Port Harcourt is filled with vast promises and also brings with it unimagined and immeasurable consequences.

Thus, to minimize consequences of rapid development, a master plan for Port Harcourt was produced with the primary task of providing the framework for physical planning, roads, housing, water system, electricity, drainage amongst others. Realising that the success of physical planning depends, to a very large measure, on the human factor, policies on health, welfare and productivity of its population were formulated ultimately for the development of the city’s total resources, as well as the country’s.

The history of Port Harcourt cannot be complete without mentioning the fact that the area was first a settlement for  Ikwerre farmers and Okrika people. The area comprising the Port Harcourt municipality, according to records, was prior to 1918, largely a farmland and secondary forest, known by the Ikwerres as Obomotu while the adjoining areas – creeks were occupied mainly by Okrika fishermen.

The region of Port Harcourt municipality was, therefore, a meeting place for the agricultural Ikwerre and the fishing and trading communities of the neighbouring Delta such as the Okrika, Kalabari and the Ibani (Bonny). The Ikwerre sold yams, livestock and other farm products in exchange for fish, salt and variety of European goods. As a result of this commercial exchange between the Ikwerre and their Delta neighbours, the municipal area also became a place for cultural interaction. Many linguistic elements, fashions in dress, styles of music, songs and dances were exchanged along with the trading in goods.

The present Port Harcourt municipality was created by the British colonial administration of Nigeria between 1912 and 1914 when Lord Lugard, the first Governor-General was planning the best ways of exploiting the resources of the country. Lord Lugard saw the need for a modern port to serve in the evacuation of the agricultural produce of Southeastern Nigeria and the minerals from the Plateau of Northeastern Nigeria and also to attract government installations, foreign business as well as workers and businessmen from many parts of Nigeria and West Africa. The government then began to construct a modern harbor and Port Harcourt became the eastern terminus of the Nigerian Railway in 1927. Several European trading firms formerly operating at Delta ports moved to Port Harcourt and commercial activities throughout the riverine areas began to be drawn towards Port Harcourt including workers in the colonial government establishments.

By the end of 1912, the area of the present Port Harcourt metropolis was chosen in preference to sites at Okrika and Bonny and Lord Lugard had ruled that the city be named Port Harcourt, after the then British Secretary of State for the colonies, Lewis Harcourt. By the Hargrove Agreement of May 1913, a piece of land measuring about twenty-five square miles in extent was acquired from persons representing the Ikwerre communities of Diobu, Rumueme, Rumuomasi, Rumuobiakani and Oginigba and representatives of twenty-five Okrika villages.

The government of Port Harcourt was run at the whims and caprices of a single British official for five years while the Township Advisory Board was established as part of the implementation of the Nigeria Townships Ordinance (NTO) passed in that year. The Advisory Board was empowered only to request and to recommend and not to decide or implement decisions.

To many from the hinterlands Port Harcourt became a strange social, economic and political environment because any trip to Port Harcourt at that time was regarded as a foreign trip to a communally heterogeneous and functionally specialised urban setting. Workers in the colonial government establishments, and in the private sector of the British, French, Syria, Lebanon, Sierra Leone and Ghanaian civil servants, lawyers, doctors among others, Yoruba, Efik, Edo, Hausa, Ibo and members of other Nigerian groups inhabited the area.

With the founding of Port Harcourt’s first newspaper, the Nigerian Observer in 1930 and with the inauguration of the African Community League in 1935, the ideological impetus was given to wrest political power from the European minority.

Another stage of political development in Port Harcourt between 1944 and 1945 saw the transfer of local power from Europeans to Africans through two main factors, the increasing  militancy of the African Community League and the introduction of the franchise, though there was no overt hostility against the European or colonial rulers. There was a state of political tranquility. During the period, the African Community League made some demands such as; that Port Harcourt be accorded representation in the Nigerian Legislative Council and that the city be elevated to the status of first class township with an elected and fully responsible town council with an elected majority, a request that was granted and inaugurated on June 15, 1949.

As stated by H. E. Wolpe, “with the elevation of Port Harcourt’s administrative status, the local centre of political gravity immediately shifted from the African Community League to the Town Council of which public offices were held by those who proved their popularity at the polls. The battle for the political control of Port Harcourt was between the Ibo and the non-Ibo elements of the Rivers Province.

The position of Port Harcourt turned full when the Federal Military Government of Nigeria created twelve autonomous states in 1976, and at the end of the subsequent Civil War in 1970, there was established a Rivers State with Port Harcourt as headquarters.

Since 1970, the political and administrative control of the city has been in the hands of indigenous Rivers people, and the population has remained cosmopolitan, reflecting the city’s position as a national harbor and industrial centre. Its new status as a state capital has attracted many more people to come to settle and work in it from all parts of Rivers State and beyond including foreigners.

From 1970, Port Harcourt city witnessed various forms of development and changes in road network, traffic conditions, public transport, housing, port facilities, airport, public services such as education, health, recreation facilities, military bases and other facilities.

Port Harcourt began to witness its modern development in infrastructure during the military regime under the administration of Alfred Diette-Spiff, the first indigenous Military Governor of the Old Rivers State. Since then till-date, the Rivers State capital has a whole new network of roads, with pedestrian and standard drainage system and parking lanes. Most main roads of Port Harcourt that were very narrow have been expanded as traffic volumes increase. The Aba road which is trunk A  has been upgraded just as the Ikwerre road. The East-West road from Calabar to Port Harcourt is currently under construction as well as the Old Airport road linking the Port Harcourt International Airport road.

Immediately after the civil war, (1967 – 1970) the Rivers State Government established the Transport Corporation which operated bus services due to the shortage of vehicles from the private sector. The story is different today as the number of commercial privately-owned vehicles congest our roads in Port Harcourt. Communities which had no road connections were served by the ferries of the Transport Corporation but presently, people from Buguma, Degema, Abonnema and other riverine areas that had no motorable access travel by road from Port Harcourt to their homes while there are plans to link more areas through land transport.

Port Harcourt is in a unique position in that it is the only town in Nigeria beside Lagos, which has a port with a railway connection. Though the port and the railway were the elements around Port Harcourt when it was built, but the railway has, however, lost very much of its relative importance to other modes of transport as it no longer functions.

After the civil war, Port Harcourt witnessed some favourable developments and has increased its share of the total international cargo through the Nigerian ports and also increased its capacity. A new port was planned for Port Harcourt in the Trans-Amadi area to complement the existing port but it was deemed not to be necessary now.

The first airport in Port Harcourt was situated on Aba Road, at about four miles from the city centre. It was equipped to handle daylight fights with medium-sized aircraft such as Fokker F-27 and F-28. The Nigeria Airways had about fifteen direct local flights from Port Harcourt to Lagos, and a number of other direct flights to Calabar, Enugu and Benin. In view of the envisaged heavy future air traffic to and from Port Harcourt, it was decided that a new airport be built hence the Port Harcourt International Airport, Omagwa which has the capacity to handle jumbo jets was built.

Since missionaries saw education as one of the chief instruments of evangelism and the ultimate guarantee of the performance of their work, western education in Port Harcourt followed in the wake of the start of the first church in the city. No sooner than churches were founded, schools opened for converts, a process that began from around 1916 with the opening of St Cyprian’s Day followed by the Banham Memorial School in 1928 with establishment of the Methodist Church there about 1920. Other schools were established through similar circumstances, except perhaps, the Township school, which seemed to owe its establishment to direct British imperial policy.

At that time, the missionaries were reluctant to undertake secondary education until when they felt challenged by a Sierra Leonian freelance educationist, Rev. L. R. Potts-Johnson, who established the Enitona High School in 1932, followed by Okrika Grammar School (OGS) in 1940, and the St John’s Training College in 1942, Archdeacon Crowther Memorial Girls School, Elelenwo – 1943, all founded by the Anglican Mission, then came Stella Maris College opened by the Roman Catholic Mission and the Baptist Mission in the late 1940’s which established the Baptist High School.  Several efforts have contributed to the greatness of Port Harcourt in the present day.

Although a lot is being done to bring Port Harcourt back to its Garden City status, more has to be done in terms of cleanliness while existing sanitation laws should be enforced in view of the fact that the more the population, the high rate of refuse generation by the residents.

Shedie Okpara