As the Joint Committee on Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) tours the country for stakeholders’ inputs, Cross River State governor, Sir Ben Ayade, has tasked the National Assembly to handle related issues to the bill with circumspection to avoid contentions that are likely to trail its ultimate passage into law.
Addressing the committee members led by its Chairman, Senator Sabo Muhammed Nakuda, during a courtesy call at the Governor’s Lodge, Calabar, Ayade said owing to its delicate and controversial nature, “the details of the PIB remains a subject for further analytical dissection.”
Governor Ayade added that “in spite of the haste with which we want to drive the PIB, we must exercise ecclesiastical caution to ensure that the PIB bill does not throw up other developments that will bring about other contentions and continuous struggle.”
Specifically, Ayade flayed the focus of the bill which he noted, centred more on oil-bearing communities, with scant regard to communities that suffer the direct impact of exploration activities.
“While we make haste, we must show caution as the people of Cross River State have a very strong feeling that the PIB bill must address their unique concern,” the governor charged, decrying that “the PIB bill focuses so much on producing communities without emphasizing the adversely impacted communities.
“We are the most impacted, because all the oils within the “Akpami” fields find their way into Cross River State.
“Right here where you sit, directly behind my house here, is the Calabar River, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean directly into the Akpami wells. One of those wells is just 36 kilometres from here. When there is a spill, where does it go to? It comes here.”
Ayade who lamented the plight of some of his coastal subjects whose main occupation is fishing said “our people depend on fishing, our state has been completely dislocated from the oil-producing states.”
On the state’s non-oil producing status, Ayade queried: “I do not understand how on earth Edo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom States, as well as Cameroon will have oil and only Cross River will be a non-oil producing state.
As a professor of science, and one who had worked in the oil industry before coming into politics, there is no science, no spiritualism, no magic that can explain this except for politics.”
According to the governor, “the PIB must address that. You cannot even in law and even biblically, take from a brother who has so much to give to a brother who has little. But to take from a brother who has nothing to give to a brother who has more is a political issue that the National Assembly and indeed the PIB must cure.
“A good example is how Cross River State gets less than two billion naira allocation in a month while a sister state will be dealing with twelve, thirteen billion. Such an unequal distribution of wealth exacts pains and anguish. It is unnatural and that is the essence of the National Assembly.
“For an egalitarian distribution of resources, this nation can only become one when there is fairness, equity and justice. That’s all we seek and that’s all we crave as a state.”
Reeling out more of the litany of woes wrought on the state, occasioned by a series of injustices by the federal government, Ayade wept: “As a state, we feel pained. I have been on the same downstream Committee. I asked what is the petroleum consumption of Cross River State? It is near nothing because they have kept us in abject poverty. We have been reduced to want in body, spirit and in the soul.”
Seeking remedy from the Joint Committee of the National Assembly on PIB, Governor Ayade entreated: “This is a great opportunity for us as a people to say if you are making a new law, please whatever is the revenue, whatever