Interrogating oil search in Benue Trough

(Columnist)

The Group Managing Director of Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Dr. Maikati Baru while receiving a delegation from Benue State recently  announced that the oil firm  is under a marching order to commence exploration activities in the Benue Trough, a major geological formation underlying a large part of Nigeria, extending about 1,000km North-East from the Bight of Benin to Lake Chad following up to the Northern Nigeria Development Corporation’s hiring of a British firm to speed up up the process.

When Senator Salisu Ibrahim Musa-Matori came to represent Bauchi South in the Senate in 1999, the major issue he fought throughout his tenure was to get Nigeria to commit resources to the search for all in the Benue Trough where NAPIMS carried out seismic data acquisition between 1984 and 1989. Chevron, Shell and Elf were even allocated blocks for non-existing oil in the area in 1993 under a Petroleum Sharing Contract.

In December 2001, the Senate Committee on Petroleuem headed by Senator David Brigidi took a tour Bauchi, Yobe, Gombe and Borno states to find out why oil prospecting companies withdrew from the area. They discovered that a sum of $378,977,248.02 had been committed to the project without any result. They had dug about 3,000 meters at the time and they were being told that they needed to go 6,000 meters as the work was approved by NAPIMS without being guided by proper geophysical report. The oil companies who were no arms of Arewa Consultative Forum but for-profit groups abandoned the fruitless search since they had cheaper source of oil within the “same” country.

What could be termed the major highlight of the Committee report was that oil blocks to be allocated  in the Benue Trough should be coupled with those of the Niger Delta and states willing to participate in oil search should be allowed to do so.

The desperate return to this white-elephant project at a time oil is becoming largely irrelevant in our world and when the country is in a “technical” recession is therefore more political than economic and this we need to interrogate.

Many Northern elites, among whom own most of the oil wells in the Niger Delta, have never hidden what they would have done to Nigeria if oil were to be in their region. In a 47-page document marked “Key issues before the Northern delegates to the 2014 National Conference” which has a sub-title: “Northern Nigeria, the back bone and strength of Nigeria”, a think tank constituted by Northern Governors, the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation made so many provocative claims. They said it was the size of the North that gave Nigeria access to the Continental Shelf and the oil therein.

“The North demands a reversal to status quo ante. All mineral resources should remain under the exclusive rights of the Federal Government as provided for by the International law (1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea UNCLOS, Article 76 on territorial waters/boundaries which stipulated that 200 nautical miles off the continental shelves belongs to the central government exclusively”.

The document said that the funding of the civil war was entirely done by the North at a great sacrifice to its wellbeing, at the expense of investment in human and economic development of the entire region.

The North, it said, sold forward all its groundnut and cotton for some years, risking forward delivery contract of three years for all its agricultural products to prosecute the civil war.

It followed on an earlier presentation by one of the lead speakers at the Northern Leaders’ Conference, Usman Bugaje, who raised a controversial issue on the ownership of Nigeria’s crude oil domiciled majorly in the Niger Delta region.

According to him, it is wrong for any state to claim that it is oil producing because 72% of the total land mass in the country belonged to the North and that by the United Nation’s law, it is only the North that actually has the right to claim ownership.

“Whatever mileage you get in the sea, according to the United Nations Law of the sea, is a measure of the land mass that you have; that is what gives you the mileage into the sea…and the land mass of this country, that gives that long 200 nautical miles or more into the ocean, is because of that 72% of the land mass of this country, which is the the north”.

In 2001, Dr. Bala Usman whom Prof. G.G Darah described as “the scion of the Katsina feudal aristocracy” and “ideological point-man of the Fulani oligarchy” was the star of the cover story of the Abuja-based “Weekly Trust” that devoted seven of its 40 pages to him. On the front page story, Dr. Usman declared: “Yoruba cannot stop coup”. On Page two of the newspaper, he said:  “There is no Ijaw nation” while “Igbo politics backfired” occupied page three. On page four, Usman warned, “There may be more violence”. Page six was taken up by “American democracy is a sham” while page seven carried a familiar theme, “Oil caused the civil war”.

Usman made so many vitriolic comments like “So these people who think that you cannot have a coup because the Yorubas will shout or the Lagos papers will not agree or the human rights groups will shout is rubbish. You can easily have a coup. How long will it take to crush them and what can they do anyway? The moment they start shouting, they will just bomb them off… There is no way ignorant people can lead. Unless something is done, these nincompoops will continue to shout true federalism.”

His most comic was his geological postulation that the north was the primary producer of oil as it was the cow bones from the region that turned to oil in the Niger Delta!

From this background, it is clear that at a time when we are paying lip service to diversification and we should be digging for the solid minerals of the north, we are going to be throwing the little we have left in pursuit of a regional mirage borne out of etnophobia. We will be spending fortune searching for what is not there while ignoring what is readily available because of the contradictions of a dysfunctional polity.

This “we also have our own oil” project punctures the whole lie of “one nation, one destiny” that has been peddled (or is it padded?) over the years. The true colours are showing gradually!

To Alan Lennox-Boyd, Secretary of State for the colonies, we return when he wrote in a 1958 memorandum on Nigeria: “The North fears and dislikes the more educated Southerners and if they were not economically bound to the Federation would be glad to be quit of”.