By Ife Osemedua
365Daily – Against the often bandied claim by some interests in the Northern part of Nigeria that the region funded the initial oil exploration in the Niger Delta from groundnut revenue, a popular Northern newspaper columnist, Farooq Kperogi, has said the North didn’t contribute a dime to the exercise.
Kperogi, a Professor of Journalism, made this revelation in his latest column captioned, “Top 10 Popular Nigerian Lies with Enormous Staying Power.”
According to the him, “Northerners cherish this mysterious claim. But not a dime of northern Nigeria’s money contributed to oil exploration in the Niger Delta.”
The issue of oil revenue and how it should be allocated to different sessions and interests in the nation has always been enmeshed in controversy, leading to the erroneous claims by some political interests from the North.
But Kperogi pointed out that “when oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Oloibiri in 1956, Shell bore the financial burden for the exploration. Other Euro-American oil companies later joined in oil exploration. It wasn’t until 1973 that the Nigerian federal government acquired 30 percent shares in oil companies. By 1973, Northern Nigeria had ceased to exist because it had been divided into states.
“In any case, the South earned more money from palm oil, coal, and cocoa than the North did from groundnuts and cotton. If the colonial government of the 1950s were interested in using government funds to explore oil in the South, it would use the South’s money, not the North’s. But neither colonial governments nor immediate post-independence regional and federal governments invested in oil exploration.”