By Ibrahim Haruna
There are moments in public life when ambition ceases to be aspiration and metastasizes into appetite — when the hunger for advantage grows so swollen it begins to consume memory, moderation, and moral proportion. In the lingering oil wells controversy between Cross River State and Akwa Ibom, the posture adopted by former governor Victor Attah has not been that of a statesman rising above parochial arithmetic. It has instead resembled the spectacle of a man wrestling with inconvenient facts, and choosing, with theatrical indignation, to disown them.
History is often betrayed not by strangers but by those who once swore fidelity to its record. Here is a beneficiary of Cross River’s hospitality — proprietor of 11,000 flourishing hectares of oil palm in Ekong Anaku, Akamkpa LGA — standing upon fertile soil that fattens his investments, yet declaring with astonishing composure that the geography underwriting his prosperity is negotiable. He reaps from Cross River’s earth, counts dividends distilled from its rainfall and sunlight, and yet labours publicly to redraw its coastline into nonexistence. If irony were combustible, this contradiction would ignite the entire estuary.
This is not disagreement. It is mendacity rehearsed. To shield Akwa Ibom’s formidable derivation inflow, figures whispered in trillions, a narrative has been conjured that Cross River possesses no authentic maritime character. No estuary worthy of recognition. No legitimate mouth opening into the Atlantic. By this reasoning, coastlines become elastic, and rivers recede at the command of rhetoric. The 119 oil wells whose coordinates were validated in the 2025 technical verification exercise are treated as apparitions, only visible to surveyors, but invisible to ambition.
Erase the coastline, and entitlement evaporates. Delete the estuary, and derivation dissolves. Question the waters, and you question the economic spine of a federating unit. Such argument is not geography; it is greed seeking vocabulary.
The audacity of this revisionism demands collective amnesia. We are invited to believe that naval operations in the Calabar axis patrol illusions. That historic port activities dating back to 1906 were staged upon theatrical sandbanks. That Odukpani, Calabar South, Bakassi, and Akpabuyo — communities shaped by brackish tides long before amalgamation, have suddenly misplaced their maritime inheritance because budgetary arithmetic finds it inconvenient.
We are asked to distrust rivers and trust rhetoric. Yet logic, like water, refuses to remain suspended in air. If proximity to Cameroon nullifies maritime legitimacy, then what becomes of Akamkpa — host to the very plantation from which profits flow? By the same strained reasoning, that land too drifts into sovereign ambiguity. But here, the argument grows shy. Geography is only fictional when it threatens another treasury; it is perfectly real when it protects one’s own assets.
This selective reasoning is not elder statesmanship. It is opportunism perfumed with nostalgia.
For decades, Cross River has chosen composure over confrontation, process over provocation. But patience mistaken for weakness invites escalation.
When a former governor publicly advances claims that erode another state’s territorial integrity — while retaining vast economic interests within that same territory — the contradiction ceases to be philosophical and becomes profoundly ethical.
Strip away the oratory, and the calculus stands exposed: preserve one derivation by amputating another’s coast. Safeguard one treasury by casting doubt upon another’s coordinates. It is fiscal cannibalism disguised as federal debate.
And yet coastlines do not vanish because they inconvenience revenue tables. Estuaries do not recede at the sound of televised assertions. Coordinates, once verified, do not dissolve in nostalgia.
Nature is stubborn. Law is patient. Truth endures.
Posterity will not be seduced by volume or vintage titles. It will examine this episode and ask whether those entrusted with influence rose above appetite — or surrendered to it. It will ask whether mendacity masquerading as advocacy deserved applause or admonition.
For in the final reckoning, one principle remains immovable: you cannot anchor your wealth in Cross River’s fertile soil, harvest its abundance year after year, and in the same breath declare its waters imaginary.
To do so is not debate. It is greed, avarice, mendacity, inscribed upon the tide.
Haruna, a public Affairs Analyst writes from Federal Capital territory, Abuja.
Let us respond with clarity, not incense. With record, not rhetoric. Because when outrage is staged as literature, facts must walk in uninvited.
Your article is not analysis. It is indignation arranged in paragraphs. It accuses Obong Victor Attah of greed, hypocrisy, territorial vandalism. Yet it carefully tiptoes around the one arena where this matter was actually settled — the Supreme Court of Nigeria.
Let us descend from metaphor to law.
First, who is Victor Attah in Nigeria’s oil politics?
He was not a man “shielding derivation inflow.” He was the principal civilian architect behind the struggle that dismantled the infamous onshore–offshore dichotomy — a federal policy that denied littoral states full derivation benefits from offshore oil.
Before that struggle, coastal states received derivation only on oil produced onshore. Offshore production — even if 5 meters from their shoreline — was treated as belonging to the federal purse. I wonder where this “HARUNA – the author” was at that time to have spoken up?
Attah did not defend privilege. He fought to expand equity.
The campaign culminated in the Allocation of Revenue (Abolition of Dichotomy in the Application of the Principle of Derivation) Act, 2004. That reform restored derivation rights to states from offshore production within their maritime boundaries.
So the irony is breathtaking: the very man accused of “fiscal cannibalism” was the architect of expanded resource justice for coastal states — including Cross River at the time.
Now, let us address the oil wells dispute itself.
In 2012, the Supreme Court of Nigeria delivered judgment in Attorney-General of the Federation v. Attorney-General of Akwa Ibom State & 35 Ors (2012) 6 NWLR (Pt. 1296) 199.
The Court did not whisper. It ruled clearly that following the cession of the Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon (pursuant to the ICJ judgment and the Green Tree Agreement), Cross River State ceased to be a littoral state.
The Supreme Court stated in substance that: “Cross River State is no longer a littoral state and therefore cannot lay claim to offshore oil wells.”
The Court further affirmed that oil wells previously attributed to Cross River, but located offshore from the Akwa Ibom axis, properly fell within Akwa Ibom’s maritime boundary.
The result? Seventy-six oil wells were re-allocated to Akwa Ibom State. Not by rhetoric. By judgment.
Let’s explain this like to a 10-year-old that you are, following your displaced and unbriddled sentiments.
Imagine two children sharing oranges from trees near a river. The rule says: you can collect oranges from trees growing in your backyard.
Now suppose one child used to have land touching the river, but later that river edge legally becomes part of another country’s land. That child no longer has backyard touching the river. Can that child still claim oranges growing across the river water? NO. Because the rule says you must have riverfront land to collect river oranges.
That is what happened legally after Bakassi was ceded to Cameroon. Without coastline, Cross River legally lost littoral status. Without littoral status, it could not claim offshore wells. This was not punishment. It was geometry.
Now to the plantation allegation — the moral theatre about oil palm and hypocrisy.
Obong Victor Attah’s family oil palm estate in Akamkpa did not sprout from opportunism. It predates the creation of Cross River State in 1976. It traces to the old South Eastern State era, long before today’s political cartography.
Land ownership does not dissolve because boundaries evolve. If that logic were applied consistently, thousands of Nigerians would lose inherited property across state lines.
So which is it? Are state boundaries sacred when arguing oil wells, but irrelevant when discussing private property? One cannot invoke federal permanence for revenue and revolutionary fluidity for family inheritance in the same breath. The accusation collapses under its own asymmetry.
What the Mr. Haruna’s article calls “erasing coastlines” was in fact a judicial recognition that coastlines change jurisdiction when sovereign treaties and Supreme Court decisions so declare.
The Green Tree Agreement implemented an International Court of Justice ruling. Nigeria’s Supreme Court then interpreted its consequences within the constitutional framework. That is not greed. That is constitutional order.
One more uncomfortable truth: the oil wells were not reassigned because Akwa Ibom shouted louder. They were reassigned because coordinates, maritime law, and constitutional interpretation placed them within Akwa Ibom’s maritime zone after Cross River lost littoral status.
Nature may be stubborn, as the article says. But so is jurisdiction. You cannot claim offshore derivation without offshore boundary. You cannot demand maritime entitlement without maritime frontage.
That is not moral drama. That is cartography plus constitutional law.
The article’s emotional charge attempts to transform a settled legal issue into a morality play. Yet the Supreme Court was not seduced by sentiment. It examined maps, coordinates, international treaties, and constitutional provisions. And it decided.
History will indeed judge — but history reads law reports more carefully than opinion columns like the one framed by an unfortunate columnist as Haruna.
The real question is not whether indignation sounds poetic. The question is whether a state that lost its coastline through international adjudication can still lawfully claim offshore wells. The highest court in the land has answered. And in a constitutional democracy, that answer stands above metaphor.
If we must speak in the language of tides, then let it be this: boundaries shift with treaties, revenue follows jurisdiction, and judgments — not adjectives — determine ownership.
The law has spoken.