It is insane to say southern oil belongs to the North

WHENEVER you hear certain pirates talking about the North, park well. They are bums who have no aboriginal stake in Nigeria but have robbed, lied and cheated their way into near total cornering of the national wealth for decades. They are people no one should meet on waking up from bed or leaving the homestead. As Chinua Achebe says in A man of the people, they are sophists who have “stolen too much for the owner not to notice.” They habitually speak of “the North” but become tongue-tied when their people commit genocide in Plateau and Benue, and they are quick to make an Ilorin person running for president aware that they would not endorse a Yoruba under any guise. They took up arms when Olusegun Obasanjo appointed persons from the Middle Belt as service chiefs in 1999, saying that the appointments did not favour the “core North.” Surely, their “North” does not include Lokoja or Jebba, a Yoruba kingdom whose chief has been treated with scorn for ages. They speak of “Ilorin culture” without indicating what precisely this culture entails. They condone the terrorists who feed newborns to dogs.

There is no country in the world that has ever prospered with the kind of ethnically insensitive and provocative structures that Nigeria parades, but that’s perhaps no news. Some people have simply chosen to perpetually threaten fire and brimstone and bully others because of their God-given wealth. One lunatic openly called for the execution of the First Lady, Senator Remi Tinubu, a woman who has been married to her husband for decades, on account of her religious leaning.  He was never arrested for his murderous call, being apparently a protected breed. This week, playing semantic games anchored on a murderous hegemony, Dr. Usman Bugaje, a former federal lawmaker and academic, doubled-down on his claim that the North owns the oil in the South. Hear him: “According to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the ownership of natural resources is vested in the Nigerian state itself. The idea that there is an oil-producing state is at variance with our constitution… The idea that there is an oil, gold, or copper producing state is out of either ignorance or impunity.”

Asked the question, “You made a claim that 78% of oil belongs to the North?,” this is how Bugaje replied: “I did say that the oil belongs to the North. However, let me explain. As we know, the constitution has made it very clear that oil and any other resources belong to the Federal Republic, yet you find some ignorant people talking about their oil.”

The amalgamation was between North and South, but people like Bugaje habitually use geopolitical zones (South-East, North-East, etc) when purveying their infantile logic. Bugaje can’t even make up his mind: he says that the oil belongs to Nigeria (which is correct, going by the fraudulent law Nigeria operates), but he then goes on to equate this Nigeria with the North. So, in his view, the North is the sole custodian of whatever belongs to Nigeria; like Abuja, say.

It’s clever, isn’t it, for Bugaje to speak of the constitution because it is in his hegemonic interest to do so? But even at that, his submission is utterly repugnant. If there are no oil-producing communities, then what’s the Niger Delta ministry, NDDC and others about? So the people who eat crude oil in their fish are ignorant for saying they own oil? Fun fact: the people Bugaje calls ignorant owned their oil before his forebears were born. Besides, is Bugaje saying that the Niger Delta people need a law promulgated by military adventurists to tell them about the oil they have owned for millennia? In Bugaje’s demonic view, the North owns Niger Delta oil because it is larger than the oil-producing communities. But the USA is bigger than Texas, and it has never sought to rob that state of its oil wealth. Oil and gas production in the state of Texas is primarily regulated by the Texas Railroad Commission.

Indeed, Dr Bugaje shouldn’t stop at claiming the Niger Delta oil for his North. He should also claim the bodies, spirits and souls of the people. After all, “the North” essentially controls oil blocks, and any southerner in Aso Rock is only a tenant. But let me sound it loud and clear: a Nigeria in which some people believe that they are born to lord it over others can never work. Nigerians waited 13 years for the PIB, but when it came, the Senate under Ahmad allocated just 3 per cent equity shareholding to the oil-producing communities while setting aside 30 per cent for oil exploration in the North. The southern senators who collaborated with their northern counterparts to execute such a declaration of war on the oil-producing communities have earned themselves everlasting damnation. Whatever they achieve in this life, they will end up being treated in the same shameful manner they have treated their own people. They short-changed the communities that had borne the burden of despoliation for ages. What a shameless bunch of rogues!

In November 2022, President Muhammadu Buhari enthused: “We are pleased with the current discovery of over 1 billion barrels of oil reserves and 500 billion cubic feet of gas within the Kolmani area and the huge potential for more deposits as we intensify exploration efforts. It is good to note that the discovery has now attracted investment for an end-to-end integrated development and monetisation of the hydrocarbon resources …It is therefore to the credit of this administration that at a time when there is near zero appetite for investment in fossil energy, coupled with the location challenges, we are able attract investment of over $3 billion to this project.” Have you heard of any exploration going on in Kolmani? Like Zamfara’s gold,  “the North” isn’t eager to share Kolmani with the rest of Nigeria. Besides, the constitution that Bugaje references is not superior to the people of the Niger Delta who existed long before certain greedy dogs from a bloodthirsty, rapacious and irredeemably corrupt island cobbled this worthless union together.

The state and the law are not inviolate; they must be negotiated. Over to Murray Rothbard: “It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.” And to think that Rothbard was even speaking of a serious state!