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.
