Dr Obari Gomba, Fred Agbeyegbe, Nnimmo Bassey Dr Sanya Osha at the Lagos Book And Art Festival
Mr Fred Agbeyegbe has said that the Hausa people from the north have been profiting from the oil rich Niger Delta at the expense of the minority people in the region.
He said this during a discussion session during the 17th edition of the Lagos Book and Art Festival (LABAF) in honour of Ken Saro Wiwa at Freedom Park in Lagos on Friday, November 13.
The discussion which also included Dr Obari Gomba, Dr Sanya Osha and environmentalist, Nnimmo Bassey centred around the formation of Nigeria and whether it is still worth keeping as a single nation.
Agbeyegbe said Nigeria was created by loot by the British empire and that the culture of loot has prevailed since which is evident in what he considered a situation where the north dictates what happens in the south.
He said: “Nigeria is a country that was created not for the purposes of Nigerians. Everything here is loot. The creators of Nigeria in the name of empire and colonisation have their reasons for coming here.”
“Nigeria is not a country created by God…The good lord in his wisdom created water, land including sand. He decided that I Fred Agbeyegbe should come from water and the slums and that some people should come from the desert. Today in Nigeria, the desert inhabit come to Warri to teach me how to swim in my water. A few days ago, Buhari was saying the Olu of Warri who died was a very good Nigeria citizen. He carried the Nigerian flag but to what? When did you last hear that anyone from Delta did anything in this country?
“Nigeria democracy is a system by which the majority conspire to deprive the minority of those things that were natural to them; inalienable rights given to each and every community. What we have here is that that community that provides he goose laying the egg must be ignored.
“We do not want ethnicity to thrive but we are here talking about right of ways of cows. These cows will go everywhere to devastate farms on which people have spent time and money and some legislators are saying there should now be a law so cows come grazing wherever they like. So I should drop everything that is ethnic about me but the Fulani man should keep the ethnicity of his cows going around my backyard in the same way as they come digging up oil from my area. When you talk to them, they say there is federal character.”
He added that the method of distributing revenue was unfair as it was unreasonable that oil producing states were not allowed to control what belonged to them. He said that this was not the case when cocoa and groundnut were the chief export goods but the formula changed when oil was discovered.
Dr Gomba raised the question of what the governors in the Niger Delta were doing with the 13 per cent oil allocation that they get citing that while some past governors of the region are serving prison sentence, others are facing court charges for corruption.
Mr Bassey suggested that each region be allowed to control its wealth and then remit a percentage in tax to the government instead of the government taking charge of the wealth and using it to develop other regions.
Agbeyegbe earlier said that there was no difference between the quest for Biafra propagated by the Igbo people and the quest for resources control which is championed by the people of the Niger Delta as both have suffered in the country.
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