If some home truth be told after taking stock of these just concluded elections, the South-South geopolitical zone really need to come together and intensify the fight for greater resource control and forget about what is happening in the center. Let them continue and sustain the resource control struggle from where former Gov. Victor Attah of Akwa Ibom State stopped. Let them hit a 50% derivation, because 13% is insufficient in comparison to the sufferings and environmental degradation ravishing the region through oil exploitation. It is better the industries are built today as oil will dry up in future. With the oil money earned, the Governors of this zone must initiate and judiciously invest in a workable blueprint that will transform the region.
Looking at the 2015 budget of just 4 states in the South-South which are going to be controlled by the new opposition party the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), we have the following:
1. Akwa Ibom State: ₦492 Billion naira
2. Rivers State: ₦385 Billion naira
3. Delta State: ₦327 Billion naira
4. Bayelsa State: ₦321 Billion naira.
You will need to add 2015 budget of nearly 20 States across the South-West (apart from Lagos) and North to get just what these 4 states have at their disposal:
For example 2015 budget of the following states:
- Gombe State: ₦86 Billion naira
- Yobe State: ₦80 Billion naira
- Zamfara State: ₦92.8 Billion naira
- Ekiti State: ₦80.77 Billion naira
- Jigawa State: ₦99.95 Billion naira
- Taraba State: ₦97 Billion naira
So don’t wonder yourself too much why the new ruling party APC will fight PDP to the grave (sorry to the courts) to see that they add Rivers State to their “collection”. Don’t wonder too long where APC funded their expensive political campaign from which took them to Chatham House in London and a steady private jet attached to Buhari and expensive media campaign. It was just funds from Lagos (Tinubu + Fashola) and Rivers (Amaechi). So expect a bloody fight to “reclaim” Rivers from PDP. (And one foresees a potential political crises arising in the country if Rivers Governorship elections is upturned).
If the raw truth be told raw as it should be, then South-South doesn’t need the rest of Nigeria in theory, but rather it is the rest of Nigeria that needs the South-South. Nigeria is for now completely depending on oil which comes from the region for her survival, and more control of this resources by the region and proper planning and investment will see the region been ahead of other parts of Nigeria. Outgoing Gov. Godswill Akpabio has shown to the rest of Nigeria that capital investment and infrastructural transformation can be achieved in Nigeria. If resource control are ceded to the regions and true federalism practically installed, this acrimonious fight for the center as witness every four years will be checkmated as the center will not be that attractive because the entire fight for the center is for the control of oil earnings and award of oil blocks contracts and everything that has to do with oil.
Even Akpos will tell it straight to their faces that if these resources ”feeding us” were reversed and deposited the other way round in the North, there will definitely NEVER have been a One Nigeria.
Diana-Abasi Udoh
Political commentator and Analyst
Twitter: dian4real