BY Ebuka Nwankwo
Last week, an APC and Arewa Consultative Forum chieftain, Senator Joseph Waku, added his voice to the increasing agitations in the country. He had strong words for the militants in the Niger Delta and he also condemned the activities of the Movement for Actualization of Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB).
For MASSOB, Waku said: “If they are talking about creating their own sovereign state, the South-South states will not support them. They are taking us (middle Belt) for granted. They have oil and they want to break out, but then, we here in Middle Belt will hold onto our yams and food. After all, it is the money from our agricultural produce that they used to build those refineries. Moreso, oil is a perishable commodity. They have had enough.”
Waku’s intervention consists of fundamental misconceptions that have been bandied around for a long time. And if this misconception is not corrected, we might not develop – as a nation, we need to know the role agriculture played in the country and the roles it is likely to play in the future.
Earnings from yams, cocoa, palm oil and groundnuts were never used to build Nigeria’s refineries nor develop its oil and gas infrastructure. In fact, by the late 1960s, oil had replaced these crops as Nigeria’s biggest foreign exchange earner.
The earnings from those cash crops were used effectively in projects, which are well-known, in the regions, when the country practised what looked like a federal system. This is a topic for another day.
In fact, in 1966, just before the Civil War, Nigeria was already producing 420,000 barrels of crude per day. We now know that the huge earnings coming from oil, from the then Eastern region, might have influenced Ojukwu’s insistence on sessession.
Until Shell found commercial oil in 1958 at Olobiri, most locals thought they were prospecting for palm oil. Shell built Port Harcourt refinery in 1965 in partnership with Nigeria, which used royalties from oil to fund its stake. Nigeria was not in control of revenues from crude oil until decrees, starting from Gowon’s regime, reversed this trend.
Also worthy of note is that: between 1960-70, when agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, our GDP grow at 3.1 percent, while during the oil boom of 1970 -78, the GDP grew by 6.1 percent. It was in this period of oil boom that the Warri and Kaduna refineries were built. Of course, mainly with revenue from the oil boom.
Subsequent expansions of these refineries, by successive governments, were substantially financed from earnings from crude.
Again, by 1975, Nigeria had become a net importer of basic food items. Obviously, revenues coming in during this period, which were used to finance our ‘industrialization’, was from the mining and mineral sector of the economy.
Going back to Waku’s intervention, it is true that oil is a perishable commodity, but we can’t do without it, for now, even in the nearest future. Since we don’t print dollars, we need commodities that can earn us dollars. It is only when these dollar revenues are well utilized that it can act as catalyst for our much desired agricultural development – you need money to make money.
Besides, in developed countries, agriculture no longer creates the number of jobs it used to create in the 60s. Now, farms and food processing plants are seriously mechanized, and even computerized– machines and robots have taken away jobs in farms and food processing plants.
The point here is that we need money from oil to develop our agricultural sector and we also need money from oil to develop our human resources. The ability to program those robots, which now do menial works, will determine who gets the jobs of the future – this is where human resources come in.
For folks like Waku, who might believe that everything was fine in the 1960s, because of agriculture, they might not be very wrong.
Oil came with its own problems, no one can deny this. The commodity not only fueled corruption, it also distorted our economy. Nigeria’s economy, which never experienced double digit inflation in the 1960s, had inflation spiral to 23 percent in 1976. This distortion was caused by oil money.
Having stated this brief history, I would have expected an elder statesman like Waku to relate the course the 1966 Civil War to the agitations going on in Nigeria.
Among other reasons, historians believe that the exclusion of the Eastern region from power was fertile ground for the war. Those Easterners felt they could survive with the oil wealth from their region. This kind of scenario seems to be playing out today.
Balarabe Musa, former governor of Kaduna State, sums up my thesis in this article with his recent intervention. The former governor believes the President made enemies for himself when he excluded the South-East from his Kitchen Cabinet. Interestingly, members of this Kitchen Cabinet are stronger that the ministers. Musa believes this exclusion gave rise to the Biafra agitation.
The former governor might be right. But, everybody can’t be at the centre. This is why a true federal system might just be the solution. I still believe that Nigeria is better off as one country!