By Theophilus Ilevbare
The ongoing national conference
has been fraught with some very controversial issues one of which is the
agitation for control of resources by the delegates from South-South Nigeria
pitching them against their Northern compatriots. If the last resource control debate
at the confab had lasted for 30 more minutes, insults and fisticuff would have
ensued; such is the fervor with which such issues are debated. The northern delegates
have never flinched while openly canvassing for their region in a manner that
irks the South. There is a certain predisposition from the northern elders at
the confab that some have described as arrogance. It appears they want to lord
it over the Niger Deltans to control their God given resources. The
self-acclaimed marginalised Nigerians from the south-southargue that the
federal government, the oil majors and the Nigerian elite have grown fat and rich
on the petrodollars from the oil producing regionand it is being used to
develop other parts of the country whileneglecting the people from the Niger
Delta to groan in the squalor of the pollution and environmental degradation of
oil exploration activities.
In the most dishonest manner, northern
leaders have taken a stand in the face of profoundly disturbing spate of bloodletting;
they blame the poverty in the North on the 13 percent derivation of oil revenue
given to the Niger Delta states. Recently, Governor Murtala Nyako made allusion
to this in his scathing criticism of the federal government contained in a
missive to the Northern Governor’s Forum that poverty and illiteracy has
festered terrorism which would have considerably been reduced if the revenue
from Nigeria’s oil were more equitably distributed. In the words of Niger Delta
elders, such comments are unfair and lack appreciation of the fact that the oil-producing
states are the goose that lay the golden egg.Gov. Nyako failed to realise that
there are non-oil producing states in the South who receive meager allocations
like those in the north buthave managed to steer the ship of state aright.
Former governor of Central
Bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, while he was still Governor of the Bank, shared
similar sentiments expressed by Nyako and many northern elders at one point in
time or another on the meagre allocation to Northern states from the Federation
Account. Sanusi attributed the uneven distribution of the country's wealth to
the upsurge of violence in the North and the rabid Islamism that snowballed
into Boko Haram and other terror groups. Add the clamour for power to return to
the North in 2015, then you get a bunch of 'elders' who are self-serving, whose
parochial interest to gain juicy contracts, oil blocs and appointments is their
motivation. They care less if poverty, diseases and illiteracy is ravaging the
ordinary northerner.
Northern elders should be more
concerned about keeping our nation united at this trying time. Above anything
else, leaders of the North have abdicated their responsibility. They have
failed in calling their youths who run the state ragged with mindless killings
and abductions to order. Theirs remind us of the Niger Delta restiveness. Oil
installations were vandalized and sundry militant activities to boot, the elders
in this region called the youths together with their leaders in the creeks and
presented the government’s amnesty program to them. The rest today, is history.
Amid the horrendous terror extremists have unleashed on Nigerians, the elders
of the North have been unable to call them to order. These are the issues that
they ought to grapple, because with rising insecurity, no meaningful
development can take place even with so much oil money to spend.
However, the issue of resource
control and revenue allocation formula is so contentious that none of the
revenue sharing formulas adopted at various time by different regimes since
1964 has gained general acceptability with the Nigerian people. It is
instructive to note, that under the independence constitution, the revenue
sharing formula allocated 50% to states who owned resources and they merely
paid taxes to the federal government. That was the time of groundnut pyramids, cotton,
tin, hides and skin that were produced by the North. But as soon as oil became
the main source of revenue, everything changed, it was reduced to 13 per cent. From
the foregoing, it is glaring that derivation has essentially become a political
rather than economic tool.
The oil rich state of Texas (in
the United States, where we copied and pasted our democracy), does not mine its
oil for the government in Washington to split among the states in America.The
practice of true fiscal federalism has ensured that Texas’ resources are
controlled by private individuals and companies involved in exploration but taxes
are paid to the federal centre. That is what the people of Niger Delta want.
Government should empower each federating unit(or geo-political zone as they
are called now) to control its own resources with which they can develop their
regions at their own pace. According to the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo,
revenue from resource control should accrue to individuals, not the state, and power
should be devolved to the federating units. This he espoused as a veritable
tool for rapid regional development.
The standard of living of
Nigerians was higher when the three regions of the North, East and West were
operational during the First Republic. The oil boom has brought its own share
of corruption and hardship on the populace. In the First Republic, the poverty
rate was 16 per cent. Now it is 75 per cent. Then, agriculture accounted for about
80 per cent of our export earnings.
What happened to the abundant
mineral deposits in the North?Plateau, Nasarawa and Adamawaamong other states
in the region have discovered over 32 different minerals from tin to silver,
gold to lead and columbite. Individuals from those areas are allowed to mine
these resources with the revenue accruing to them but oil revenuefrom the south-south
is the one that must be shared at Abuja for the states of the federation.
The North can learn from Japan
to free its econ0my from oil (a non-renewable source of energy that will dry up
a few centuries away) and seek alternative source(s) of revenue. Japan has no
single drop of oil but has been able to fast track its development to become
one of the leading economies in the world. They have made a success of their country
by tapping immensely into their human resources.
The current arrangement that all
oil discovered on and off shore belongs to the Nigerian state has to change
with the window that the national conference presents.Those who bear the brunt
of the degradation and other hazards of oil exploration that has destroyed the
ecosystem of littoral states should be in control of their resources. As a
delegate at the confab posited, if the petroleum deposits in the South were
owned by the North, as their antecedent have shown, they would still enjoy 50%
resource control as in the days of groundnut pyramids.
Beyond the question of
whichstate gets what, it will be interesting to know howjudiciously the
billions of naira the states collect as monthly allocation from thefederal
governmentare being spent.Federal allocation is moreor less the governors
monthly pay cheque. And your guess is as good as mine where the large sums they
collect as security vote ends.
(Ilevbare is a public affairs commentator.
Engage him on twitter, @tilevbare and his blog,http://ilevbare.com.)
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