ABUJA—THE All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP) is putting together a team of party leaders to persuade the northern governors elected on its platform to back out of the lawsuit filed by the 19 northern states and two from the South-West to void the act abrogating onshore-offshore dichotomy. National Chairman of the party, Chief Don Etiebet, made this known in Abuja yesterday at a press conference.
The ANPP National Chairman said although there were genuine grounds for the suit in view of the performance of the governors of the South-South zone, it would be in the interest of the country to evolve a political solution on the matter.
“We are all Nigerians living together in this country and we have been living together all along. When oil was not discovered in this country, we were living and taking care of Nigeria and in fact doing better things, building roads and bridges and airports and seaports and railway lines.
“Where did we get that money from in the past before oil was discovered? You must have heard about cocoa and groundnut pyramids and cattle and so on, which we all shared together. Now that oil has come in and there was no development in the area where oil is produced, the youths started to complain.
“The Nigerian government having gone through these processes of complaints, of degradation in the South-South area, took very strong decisions one of which was to set up 13 per cent derivation from oil.
They said if this money is not used to quell this instability, this insurgency, this violence by the governments of that area, then they can as well abrogate it and let the Federal Government take over and do things. We are talking to our governors in this regard so that they can take the necessary step to back-pedal on this case.”
The ANPP National Chairman also said the Federal Government should not heed the call by the state governments in the country that the excess crude oil fund be distributed to the states.
“If you look at the state of the economy, Nigerians are consistently retrogressing, poorer and poorer. Our per capita income today is smaller than in 1999, our purchasing power has become worse today. If I were the president of this country today, I would tap into the resources of this excess crude to pay our debts. Now that we have this money and we are not paying our debts, what will happen to our children when this debt grows and we don’t have money?”
