Coming out soon: When Warri Was Warri
AFIMAG.com –
Every city has its peculiarity. In its heyday, the ‘City of Warri’, in Delta State, assumed the status of an Oil City, boasting a remarkable number of oil companies and an ‘eternal’ gas light burning at the middle the Warri refinery and petrochemicals, a symbolic burning furnace that was seen from every part of the city at night.
The huge concentration of oil corporations and companies like NNPC, Shell BP, Chevron, Snaprogetti, Agip, Westminister Dredging, DSC, Schlumberger, Saipem, McDermott etc. and a circulating ‘petrol naira’, the city commercial activities roared into life and made millionaires of oil magnates and marchants. And with a well-located and active port authority- the NPA, superintending the buzzing maritime activities, the city would affirm its position as one of the commercial hubs of Nigeria.
When Warri was Warri_ paints a fictive picture of Warri in its heyday and how its diminishing fortune came typify the present day Warri City.
Godstime provides an illuminating spectacle of how the elders and politicians aggrandised the collective patrimony and royalties of Warri; therefore encouraging restiveness of youths who held the oil companies, marchants and land developers by the jugular through unwholesome hostilities and strangulating demands which notoriously became ‘deve’.
The writer vividly captures how, before long, the youths and ethnicities in Warri turned against themselves in a series of crises which forced the companies and other agents of development to relocate, in their droves, to safer climes where they can do their business without fear, hostilities and intimidations.
The novel is a critical source book for all those who intend to read about the declining fortune of Warri.
Authored by Assin Godstime, 2022 UPU Awardee; Onigege Ara (Stylist Storyteller) of Tapa-Ekiti Kingdom.