Senator you are completely out of point. HE Obong Victor Attah did well with the fight for the abolishment of Onshore-Offshore dichotomy policy that hitherto saw AKS with relatively few Onshore oil wells and the Nigerian State owning all the Offshore oil wells.
However, there’s an existing political agreement signed in 2006 by President O. Obasanjo, HE Obong Victor Attah of AKwa Ibom State himself, HE Dr. Peter Odili of Rivers State and HE Donald Duke of Cross River State. In the agreement Akwa Ibom was given 100 oil wells, Rivers State 86 oil wells and Cross River State 76 oil wells.
About 3 years down the line RMFAC decided to administratively stop the allocation of 13% derivation funds to CRS on its 76 oil wells with the hurried and then technically unverified claim that Cross River State has lost its littoral status owing to Nigeria’s loss of Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroun by the 2002 ICJ judgement and subsequent Green Tree Agreement. They failed to recognize that not every square inch of Bakassi Peninsula and the territorial waters were lost to Cameroun even by that judgement and the UN supervised Mixed Boundaries Commission was yet to conclude its mandate of delineating the maritime and land boundaries with Nigeria, Cameroun, Sao Tome & Principe and Equatorial Guinea (Gulf of Guinea countries).
Frustrated with the anomaly and unjust treatment by Federal Agencies, CRS had to approach the Supreme Court for interpretation. With the information available to it at the time the Supreme Court ruled in error that CRS was no longer a littoral State. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court did not order that the CRS 76 oil wells be handed over to AKS. Its judgement rather required further technical mappings and delineations of coordinates by the relevant Federal agencies to determine where the coordinates are truly located so that derivation can flow as appropriate.
Concurrently and around the same 2008: Abia State, Akwa Ibom State, Cross River State and Rivers State all petitioned then President Yar’Adua on their oil wells disputes. RMFAC and NBC were invited to make submissions as well. Surprisingly, the NBC was said to have produced and submitted an incomplete and temporary mapping same 2008 that forced CRS 76 oils to AKS on the basis that CRS was no longer a littoral State.
President Yar’Adua set up a Presidential Committee that had the then VP GEJ as Chairman, AGF, Minster of Finance and others as members with the mandate to look into the petitions and proffer solutions. Nothing eventually came out of that Committee in terms of final resolutions and policy recommendations.
In summary, the historical title of the ownership of the 76 oil wells has always been held by CRS. By some accident of misinterpretation of the ICJ judgement AKS took what was not its own, and by some strange arrangements RMFAC continued to pay AKS 13% derivation on those 76 oil wells in defiance of a key ingredient of the SCN judgement on the matter that required technical verification by relevant agencies for derivation to follow.
Even now it beggars belief that AKS is still fixated on the 76 oil wells with the funny belief that CRS should not be able to have any other oil wells beyond the 76 oil wells. Yet, the recent delineation exercise mandated by PBAT was provoked by CRS’s petition. Beyond, the contentious 76 oil wells at the least another 226 oil wells have been discovered to belong to Cross River State. To respect SCN judgement pending any further review, the 76 oil wells have been kept in abeyance while the 226 oil wells in Cross River State territory are now being proposed to be shared 113 apiece with AKS. What has AKS really lost in all of these? Nothing!
I hope this helps to put things in clearer perspective. I have been deliberately simple and non-technical in presentation so that a wider audience can easily understand all the issues.
Let peace reign, let love lead and let justice be done and seen to be done!
God bless Nigeria!
Ceejay Ojong
An Economist, Chartered Accountant and Public Financial Management expert was at the time 2009 – 2011 Senior Specialist Assistant to the Minister of Finance on Policy & Institutional Reform and Technical Advisor of the defunct National Economic Management Team (NEMT).
