28th September, 2014
Jethro Ibileke/Benin
Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo state has appealed to royal fathers in the South-South to help check the menace of crude oil theft in the region.
The governor made the appeal over the weekend when he received the South-South Monarchs at the Government House, Benin City. “I think Your Royal Majesties have a role to play to lend your voice against oil theft that is destabilising the country and creating huge environmental challenges which we will confront but we may not have the resources to do so. When the oil dries up the damage already done to the environment will persist and the resources that will be required to regenerate the environment to deal with the consequences of the pollution may not be available.
“Across the South-South, many of our people who want quick money are involved in crude oil theft. In Edo state, Agbede is not an oil producing area but for some strange reasons, there are all kinds of illegal refineries there polluting and destroying a place that is ordinarily very suitable for agriculture,” he said.
The governor disclosed to the royal fathers that being in government, there are things he no longer can say, but that does not mean that those things are not in his heart, adding that, he is worried about what appears to be a free hand for criminals to help themselves with our common patrimony called oil and gas.
“One of the long term consequences of this kind of situation is that you have “small, small” boys of very little exposure, having access to huge resources that is not the result of hard work and because they are criminal in nature, and the volume and sum involved is huge, they have enough money to raise alternative army, to procure the deadliest weapons in order to defend their territory which is basically an area they have carved out for the purpose of their heinous crime.
“I am very worried about the future of our country if few people take so much and the rest of us in the country have so little to share and these people are not invisible. If the volume of oil smuggling is so much and you know the amount, it means you should know the smugglers.”
Oshiomhole pointed out that Nigeria must find the courage to speak truth to power, including traditional power and that if anyone, be it president, governor, minister or traditional ruler, fouls the atmosphere, he should be dealt with according to law, noting that Nigeria is greater than any of his sons.
On local government administration, he said “most of the Local Government reforms are the outcome of ill-digested military solution to far more complex problems. I think we need to carry out reforms to truly make local governments responsible for what happens in their local government”.
He said a situation where the Local Government Service Commission is responsible for recruitments and staff posting in Local Governments will not augur for developments as a local government may be overstaffed by the commission such that the local government will use all its allocation to pay wages to the detriment of other development projects.
Earlier, the Chairman of the South-South Monarchs Forum, HRM, Edmund Daukoru, said they were in Benin to hold a meeting and to present him with copies of the book which they launched at their conference.
He said, the monarchs decided to form a forum to meet and share ideas because “our institution is the one that can effectively partner with government to penetrate down to the grassroot level and we can’t do that if we stay in our respective palaces, if we never get to meet, we never get to exchange ideas.”