Elder statesman and second republic political adviser to former President Shehu Shagari, Alhaji Tanko Yakassai, has fired back at the leaders of the Niger Delta states, saying their disposition in the current efforts at ensuring genuine peace and end to the crisis in the area is less than commendable.

Tanko Yakassai spoke to Daily Sun in Kano, against the backdrop of the unending hostilities by militants in the Niger Delta as part of their agitation for better concerns, as well as comments of the leaders of the area.

The Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) recently expressed strong exception to the flare-up in the Niger Delta area, while calling on the people of the area to call their leaders to task on what might have happened to their resources. Reacting, many of the leaders came up hot against the North over that comment.

Yakassai said what was happening in the region “is really a very bad development to the efforts that we are all making to build a successful nation. Oil is the lifewire of the economic activities in the country today. It has not been the case before, but now, we rely very heavily on oil to finance the budget, not only of the Federal Government but that of the states and the local governments. The development of the country is heavily dependent on the revenue we are now generating from oil. To that extent, I think it is very unfortunate.”

He believed that those among the Niger Delta leaders who believed that the rest of the country, especially the North, had no right to interfere in the crisis in the Niger Delta area, or to point out the nature of the problem, were out of their mind, while stressing that since their actions constituted a threat to the basic survival of the other parts of the country, the other regions had a right to join efforts to return the area to normalcy.

The elder statesman spoke further: "Those of them who are thinking along this line are not in their proper frame of mind and sensible people in the Niger Delta know that they belong to Nigeria and if not because they are part and parcel of Nigeria, there would not have been a Niger Delta as it is today. Nigerians came together to liberate them, years ago, to make them free. They should also remember that some years gone by, there was no oil in the Niger Delta and the money actually that we used to liberate them did not come from oil. It came from other sources of revenue, like groundnuts, cocoa and so on.
"Two, this matter of oil, for anybody to think the oil belongs to the Niger Delta people alone is a very wrong conception.

The mineral resources in Nigeria belong to the entire nation. I think what led to this mistake is the concession that Nigerians made to the Niger Delta that in calculating the revenue that should accrue to them that differences should not be made in terms of onshore/offshore. If that position, which is the patriotic position and which is applicable anywhere else in the world, was maintained in our statute book, this kind of argument could not have arisen. It is a mistake made by the rest of Nigerians and now they are paying for it,” he said.

Yakassai, however, held that the question of North and South had no place in this discussion, as Nigeria had 36 states out of which nine were oil producing.
Alhaji Tanko believed that there were two elements involved in the recent upsurge of distortions in the Niger Delta area, explaining that they include, “those who are fighting the cause of the so-called Niger Delta people and there are the criminal elements among them who are engaging in these activities in order to enrich themselves, they are people who are known smugglers of petroleum products, the oil bunkerers. They have their own people, they engage the militants, they pay them heavily, they steal and sell the products on the high seas and in return, import arms and ammunition to fight their cause in order to sustain and continue the stealing of oil money from the country.”

He stated that, "the first group is more reasonable. They are those who are committed to the country, only that they think that they need more attention. Unfortunately, those people in the Niger Delta area don’t seem to realize that not only the Federal Government should be blamed for their woes, their own people, by and large, should bear most of the responsibilities because the amount of money the government of the Niger Delta states are receiving from the federation account is so much that I think it represents about 30 per cent of the total money accruing to the country.

He said that, "Rivers State alone is receiving more money than the whole Igbo-speaking states or the six states in the North-Central zone. Bayelsa State alone is receiving more money than the five Igbo speaking states, including the two oil producing states in the East and yet, I am sorry to say that the amount of the money the Niger Delta states are given is not commensurate to the economic and developmental activities that they are carrying out in their areas. On top of that, the local government areas in their areas are also receiving huge amount of money. Quite apart from all these sources of funding, they have the NDDC.”

He added that the NDDC was “receiving a huge amount of money from the federation account for the purposes of developing the Niger Delta. All these institutions - the local governments, the NDDC, and the state governments - are manned by people from the Niger Delta area and nobody else. Therefore, the people from the Niger Delta wrongly tend to believe that the Federal Government is responsible for their woes. The fact is that the Federal Government is responsible for the overall development of the country. Definitely, the state governments, the local governments and the NDDC are receiving whole lot of money on their behalf, which would have made a lot of difference in their lives, in terms of the quality of lives of the people of that area.”

He rejected the position that discontinuing the trial of the detained leader of MEND would usher in a fresh breath of peace in the area, contending that the behaviour of the Niger Delta people in the recent past had not encouraged other Nigerians to buy that thought line. He noted that similar conjectures were made in respect of Mujahid Asari-Dokubo and a former governor, when he was in detention, adding, however, that despite the release of Asari-Dokubo, peace had continued to elude the area.
He said it was unfortunate that the Niger Delta people were negatively inclined to the appointment of Professor Ibrahim Gambari to head the proposed Niger Delta summit, saying that in the first place, they could not dictate to the Federal Government as to who should serve on that committee or not, while adding that with that sort of behaviour, it would be difficult to make progress.

He also noted that whoever was going to preside over that meeting had very little influence in terms of the conclusion of the summit. “It is they who would be responsible for most of the decisions and the intention is to arrive at a consensus for the development of the Niger Delta and for the solutions to the Niger Delta problems. And so we don’t need to come and say this man should not serve on that committee and so on. It is not a committee to discuss the Niger Delta peculiar problems alone. It is a committee that would discuss the Nigerian problem with particular reference to the Niger Delta area. Niger Delta is part and parcel of Nigeria and, therefore, it is wrong for anybody to think that other Nigerians have no right to participate.”