Nigeria Has No Control Over Its Oil —Akinjide

NIGERIA’S foremost legal luminary and former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Chief Richard Akinjide, CON, SAN, has disclosed that Nigeria has no oil because its has no control over the resources.
Chief Akinjide made this statement on Tuesday, while delivering a lecture on the topic “Nigeria beyond oil” in continuation of 2015 Press Week of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Oyo State Council, held at the Dapo Aderogba hall, Press Centre, Iyaganku, Ibadan.
The former Minister of Justice and Attorney General said “Nigeria knows little or nothing about oil and gas. By now, all our universities should have departments in oil and gas. If you have oil and gas and you do not control it, your economy is not in your hand. Nigeria’s economy is in the hands of foreigners.



“The price of oil and gas now dictates the state of our economy. There is oil and gas in Lake Chad. They now produce what they need and they do not rely on us. They supply oil and gas to the foreign countries and I will not be surprised if our own part of Lake Chad can produce plenty of oil and gas.
“As regards oil and gas, Nigeria is in a hole and we continue digging. Angola is making better use of their oil and gas than Nigeria, but I hope they will not make the mistakes of Nigeria,” he noted.
He went further to reveal that Nigeria’s oil and gas do not belong to Nigerians because the country collects rents on them.

“We haven’t got oil. What we collect from our oil is rent because we lease out our oil and collect rent on it. The actual owners are the people that pay us the rent.”
Commending the founding fathers of Nigeria, though, he maintained that the country was created to serve the commercial interests of the Europeans, Akinjide, who was also a member of the Parliament in 1959, advised that Nigeria should find alternative to oil.
“Our critical product before was agriculture. We must go back to that in a big way.
“We can once again make our economy thrive by investing more in agriculture. In the 60s, agriculture largely dominated the Nigerian economy as oil was progressively becoming an important source of government revenue. The Nigerian economy blossomed with agriculture. Let’s make agricultural sector competitive.

“We should also go back to mining our solid minerals in Nigeria. Solid minerals have been abandoned since the oil boom. Nigeria is blessed with numerous solid minerals like coal, lime stone, gold and silver, etc, the government and private sector should invest in solid minerals and not just petroleum oil alone,” he said.
Tribune.