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B N W: Biafra Nigeria World News |
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Northern Governors and Onshore/Offshore Act
ALL the governors of the 19 Northern states artfully got three of their South-West counterparts to file a suit in the Supreme Court against the Allocation of Revenue (Abolition of Dichotomy) Act, 2004. With the impetuous decision of the three South-West Governors of Ekiti, Oyo and Osun states, to make common cause with the Northern Governors in this suit, the latter have almost effectively and disingenuously removed the impression that the fetid and obnoxious action against the littoral states is an act of legal and political warfare being waged by the North against the South. This political artifice is not new to Nigerian politics; neither is the Machiavellian wheeling and dealing for which the Presidency has come to be well known.
It must be noted that President Obasanjo's perfervid agitation against the abolition of the onshore/offshore dichotomy as soon as he became President in 1999, and his subsequent decision to file an action at the Supreme Court against the littoral states in the suit falsely titled Attorney-General of the Federation vs. Attorney-General of Abia State & 35 ors. (2002) (also falsely known as "Resource Control case), were the very antecedents of the bellicose an scornful suit filed by the 22 Governors.
As soon as he assumed office, President Obasanjo covertly intended to deal a deathblow to the littoral States' agitation for 50 per cent of the revenue derived from their region. He hatched a cunning stratagem: he went to the Supreme Court, from which he elicited a judgment that was highly favourable to the Federal Executive (a metonym for President Obasanjo himself), but which judgment clearly savoured of a case precommitted to a partisan conclusion, making it one of the most controversial judgments ever delivered by the apex Court. In spite of the available corpus of fact and the law, favouring the defendant littoral States, the Supreme Court found against them.
The uneven scales and rank injustice depicted by the judgment became manifest as at least one State, Akwa-Ibom, was not only doomed to receive zero allocation from derivation, but was expected to spew up a whopping sum of N33 billion into the Federation Account for all of the northern and southern States, including the Federal Government, to share. And all that in spite of Decree 106 of 1992, an existing law under the provisions of section 315 of the 1999 Constitution, which abrogated the reeking Onshore/Offshore dichotomy. The President had triumphed, and the oil-producing State Governors had to go to him, cap in hand! He would show 'magnanimity' if they stopped asking for 50 per cent of the proceeds of any royalty received by the Federal Government in respect of any mineral extracted from their States, as it was in the beginning.
There is a sense in which it might be correct to say that all the 22 gubernatorial litigants have contracted pathological amnesia, morbid narcissism and baneful selfishness: They deserve all the grammar! I owe them no apology. How can a State Governor forget the foundation, the structure, on which the superstructure of this nation-space was built?
Section 134(1)(a)(b) of the Independence (1960) Constitution inflexibly provided: "There shall be paid by the Federation to each Region a sum equal to 50 per cent of (a) the proceeds of any royalty received by the Federation in respect of any minerals extracted in that Region, and (b) any mining rent derived by the Federation during that year from within that Region..." Those provisions were repeated ipsissima verbis in section 140(1)(a)(b) of the Republican (1963) Constitution. Those were the days when every geography lesson in my primary school classes tortured me with " "tin and columbite (Jos), gold (Lokoja and Ilesha), iron (Jebba), cocoa (Ibadan and Akure, coal (Enugu).." Such was the invidious mantra. The swan song was to change, with the discovery of petroleum in commercial quantity, in the land of the downtrodden minority ethnic nationalities. Selfish Decrees in 1968, 1969, 1970, 1978, etc, took care of that.
Our sagacious founding fathers had insisted on fiscal federalism. As far as they were concerned, the sustenance of the federal arrangement was contingent upon it. In his seminal book, The Strategy and Tactic of the People's Republic of Nigeria, the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, former Premier of the Western Region, pontificated, with aplomb and information, on the virtues of resource control, as follows: "In discussing this principle (i.e. of revenue allocation on the basis of derivation), I would like to make only six observations. Firstly, in a capitalist society, whether it is a Federation or not, it is untenable and dishonest in the extreme, to insist on sharing another person's or another State's wealth on any basis other than that which the rules of the capitalist game allow. In this type of society (i.e. the Nigerian society), every State is perfectly entitled to keep any wealth that accrues to it whether by the sweat of its brow, by cunning, or by the unaided bounty of nature. And to accuse a rich State of lack of fellow-feeling or patriotism because it insists on keeping practicably all that comes to it by whatsoever means, is unreasonable and unrealistic. For it must be remembered that, in a capitalist society, the over-riding code of conduct is naked self-interest". In all probability, Chief Awolowo borrowed this thought from the United States of America, where such oil-rich States like Alaska and Texas are the cynosure of all eyes. In 1970, Chief Awolowo, as Commissioner for Finance in the Gowon government, was to begin a process of expropriating minority rights, when he introduced the onshore/offshore dichotomy wahala.
In his own honest contribution to the debate on resource control, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the late Sardauna of Sokoto and Premier of the defunct Northern Region stated: "No nation should sacrifice its valuable resources for the sake of short-term monetary benefits. By extracting oil without regard to the side effects on the quality of citizens' health and longevity, the nation does not improve either its social or its economic sectors; instead a declining trend will be onset. Those who may feel that the problems of oil-producing area are not in their backyard, and who may feel a safe distance from the oil communities, should be reminded that Nigeria is an entity within one environment; decay in one part will ultimately affect the rest of the nation. The fate of the mineral producing communities should be of concern to all of us. When ordinary people and their environment become victims of destructive economic expansion without adequate protection or provision of alternative means to improve their social and economic circumstances, they will remain vulnerable. Therefore, the need to broaden the social responsibility and performance of the oil industry in order to maintain economic progress with environmental balance should be a better compulsion".
That was by the late Ahmadu Bello, whose 21st century successors have decided to exhibit the cloven hoof, by giving vent to rancid insensitivities and insufferable insolence that cry havoc to high heaven. The suit by the 22 governors against the littoral States should be seen from the angle of vision of immemorial usage and people's ineluctable need for drama in some form. It is entirely bereft of commonsense, and shows utter disregard for the plight and mood of the people of the Niger Delta, the wealth from whose land has sustained this country for upward of four decades.
That extreme poverty, misery and despair stare the citizens of the region hard in the face means nothing to the starry-eyed and selfish governors, who may never have visited the ecologically degraded source of their livelihood. What the President couldn't achieve by his studied opposition to the abolition of the Onshore/Offshore dichotomy, the 22 governors intend to achieve by a vexatious legal and political war against the South-South. One can only wish them good luck!
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