INC to resist realignment of Akwa Ibom communities over 3% oil fund

*Map of Akwa Ibom StateMkpoikana Udoma

Port Harcourt — The Ijaw National Congress, INC, has vowed to resist alleged efforts to redraw the map of Akwa Ibom State, and realign oil producing communities across seven of 31 local governments in the state.

To this end, the apex Ijaw group has vowed to use every means possible to support and protect the economic interest of Ijaw settlements in Akwa Ibom in their quest to benefit from the 3 percent host community fund in the Petroleum Industry Act.

President of INC, Prof Benjamin Okaba, alleged that some interest groups, who are not comfortable with the natural endowments of oil and gas in Ijaw settlements in Akwa Ibom, want to use government machinery to distort Ijaw communities and create boundary crisis.

Okaba said it was regrettable that while the INC was in the struggle to reverse the marginalisation of the Niger Delta region in the Nigerian context, the people of the region were busy marginaising their kinsmen.

The Ijaw leader who described the plot as ‘internal colonisation’ said that it was both illegal and unconstitutional for a state government to delve into mapping and boundary adjustments which are clearly on the exclusive legislative list.

He explained that mapping and boundary adjustments were clearly the role of the Federal Government and the responsibility of the Surveyor General of the Federation and the National Boundary Commission respectively.

“It is laughable that people are claiming that Akwa Ibom State created over 35 years ago has no map, when the major requirement for state creation is a map. How then did the constituencies delineation take place if there is not map, on what basis does Akwa Ibom get its revenue from the federation account?

“The state of Akwa Ibom also won cases bordering on oil wells with neighbouring states at the Supreme Court and the map of the state tendered as evidence formed the basis of the verdit and the maps are still in the records,” Okaba said.

The Ijaw chieftain further said that claims that Akwa Ibom has no accurate map and needs to draw a more accurate map by the state government was a ploy to realign Ijaw communities in the state, in order to bring more communities into Ijaw settlements who are oil bearing communities.

“I want to place it on records that the government of Akwa Ibom will have the entire Ijaw nation to contend with on this, Ijaws may be minority in Akwa Ibom but we are majority in Niger Delta,” he said.