Oshiomhole tasks royal fathers on crude oil theft
(Nigeria) 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, when he received the South-South
Monarchs at the Government House, Benin
City , said “I think your Royal Majesties have a role
to play to lend your voice against oil theft because that is destabilizing the
country and creating huge environmental challenges which we will confront when
we may not have the resources to do so.
“When the oil dries up when it will dry 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, too many of our people who want
quick money are involved in crude oil theft. In Edo State ,
around Agbede, it’s 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.
“Being in government, there are things I no longer can say,
but that does not mean that those things are not in my heart. I am 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 that 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.
“Nigeria
must find the courage to speak truth to power, including traditional power and
if any of us, president, governor, minister or traditional ruler fouls the
atmosphere, we should be dealt with according to law. 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 to copies of the book which they launched at their conference.
He said, the monarchs decided to form a forum to meet and
share ides 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.”
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