The charge from Alamieyeseigha was fresh that morning of 7 July 2000, and Clinton Ayabowei can still recall how he felt. After all the celebration at the household level, after all the congratulations from kith and kin, he came face to face with the reality on ground. The Ministry of Justice had no worthwhile administrative office structure. Judges and magistrates had a big challenge of accommodation before them. Movement of judicial staff was no less tedious. The government was that handicapped.
‘The allocation to the state from the Federal Government was far less than one billion,” recalls Ayabowei. In fact, it was eight hundred million naira and some fraction per month. But then, President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the Oil Fields Verification Exercise to address disputes between Rivers and Bayelsa, and between Delta and Bayelsa States.
‘Each state had to form a counterpart body called the Oil Field Verification Committee. The Deputy Governor of Bayelsa State, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, was to oversee the work of the committee, and to ensure logistics and welfare for members’.
On 12 November 2000, the presidential committee on verification of oil fields and wells finally arrived Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital. Governor Alamieyeseigha was on hand to receive the chairman of the committee, Major General (Dr) A.B. Mamman, MNI and members of his entourage. It was an open secret, said the Governor, that the economy of the Nigerian federation was based on crude oil production. It was a matter of regret that Bayelsa State, which occupies the central axis of the Niger Delta and produces the largest quantity of on-shore crude oil and gas, had been short-changed in revenue allocation on account of the use of imaginary rather than factual indices.
The crux of the matter was that nineteen oil fields and fourteen oil wells situated in Bayelsa State were wrongly attributed to other states. For instance, Opomoyo and Etelebou oil fields located in Peretorugbene and Nedugo-Agbia in Ekeremor and Yenagoa local government areas of Bayelsa State were wrongly attributed to Rivers State.
Similarly, Benisede, Kono and Kanbo oil fields in Ekeremor local government area of Bayelsa State were equally attributed to Delta State. There were also producing oil wells in Bayelsa State such as the Idu Oil Wells 1 to 10 that were not even listed as producing, and therefore not counted as belonging to Bayelsa State. In like manner, the Obuama and Odioma oil fields located in Nembe and Brass local government areas respectively in Bayelsa State were also attributed to Rivers State. All of this was robbing the state of its fair share of the much-needed revenue for development.
For the records, it was important to note that over fifty per cent of all the gas being supplied to the NLNG plant in Bonny come from Bayelsa State. Ironically, however, the state was not recognised as gas producing. Yet again, the proposed South Forcados Associated Gas Gathering Project (STAGG), was already credited to Delta State, when in fact all the gas to be sourced for the project spring from Ekeremor local government area of Bayelsa State.
What’s more, on Thursday, 26 October 2000, a meeting on this project was called in Warri, Delta State. Indigenes of the host communities in Bayelsa State were invited to the opening forum but no Bayelsa government functionary was notified. On the other hand, the Delta State government, NNPC and the Federal Government were fully represented at the meeting. The leaders of the South Forcados Associated Gas Gathering Project had a difficult time explaining their hidden agenda to critical observers at the venue.
For Alamieyeseigha, this put in perspective the genuine demand of the people to control their resources. He reiterated the call for the inclusion of gas as a bona fide resource that should be so credited to Bayelsa State and duly paid under the 13 per cent derivation principle arrangement. The intractable problem of offshore crude oil and gas production by states was yet to be solved by the Federal Government, and Bayelsa featured prominently in the offshore production line of the oil industry.
‘Rivers and creeks still serve as both natural and administrative boundaries in this part of the country,” said Alamieyeseigha. “The map of nature should be respected. The accrual from the disputed and wrongly attributed oil fields and wells that rightly belong to Bayelsa State should be so calculated and paid to the state in arrears.
‘Similarly, those wells which were not disputed but were not recorded in the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) listings, and those wells that were not credited to Bayelsa but rightly belong to the state, should also be calculated from the date of production and credited to Bayelsa State accordingly’.
This was the onus of the demand by the Bayelsa State government, and Clinton Ayabowei, Commissioner for Justice and Attorney-General, had the burden of pushing this argument, and getting redress for the state. He was the active head of the state committee, supported by another brilliant lawyer, Fedude Zimughan, and the Surveyor-General Awudu Ebisinte from Lobia, now of blessed memory.
Their singular mandate was to go into all oil wells in Bayelsa State. Awudu drew up a map of the oil wells in dispute. To be truly certain about the facts of the matter, the committee even had to proceed to Kew Gardens, London, UK, a veritable archive of international repute, to search for old judgments between Kalabari and Nembe.
‘We saw all the relevant documents, certified them, and brought them back with us’, said Ayabowei. ‘We also saw the boundary drawn by one John Hopkins in colonial times. The Kalabari people claimed that the boundary begins at St Bartholomew River, nearer to Nembe, while Bayelsa pushed the boundary to St Barbara River which was nearer to Kalabari territory’.
In the Ekeremor axis, Clinton Ayabowei ventured all the way to Benisede, a wide oil field, to verify the situation for himself. Equipped with native intelligence, he thought it wise to visit those places and interact with the people before the Federal Government team would arrive.
Accompanied by Degi Eremienyo, who was then serving as Chairman, Nembe local government area, Ayabowei also embarked on a trip to Oluasiri and all the fishing camps in that clan. He rallied all the fishermen together, and notified them that government officials were coming, and it was important for everyone to remain in their fishing camps for that visit, and they did.
‘I also went to Biseni which was counted as Rivers territory, at a time when Taylor Creek Oil Field was accredited to Rivers State’. Ayabowei virtually recalled his days as a hunter, fisherman, and farmer, walking through the jungle alongside his father. He was familiar with the terrain. He walked through that stretch of bush land, and confirmed the survey of the area. In the end, the federal committee was satisfied when it came to verify all those oil fields.
Before that, the Bayelsa committee under the charge of Ayabowei was invited to Port Harcourt to appear before the Commission from Abuja. Dr Goodluck Jonathan as Deputy Governor, led the Bayelsa delegation. Dr Peter Odili, Governor of Rivers State, was present at the plenary session. This was like a full-fledged case in court, and Ayabowei’s antennas in jurisprudence came fully awake. He tendered the plan drawn by Awudu, and argued that the natural boundary between Rivers and Bayelsa was the Orashi River, otherwise known as the Mbiama River.
To lighten the tense atmosphere at the hearing, Ayabowei quipped that Odili was actually a son of Bayelsa. ‘We are kind and generous to give you Odili our son as your Governor’, said Ayabowei. ‘We loaned him to Rivers State, because Ndoni is on the left side of the Orashi River’.
There was a great whoop of laughter. The gathering was still recovering from what they considered timely comic relief, when Ayabowei tendered all the documents from Kew Garden. For more than three hours, he was on his feet, addressing the Commission before the cameras of national television. The Attorney-General of Rivers State, a lady, was a poor match for Ayabowei.
Her submission was that her documents were not complete, and she would crave the indulgence of the Commission for more time. Ayabowei objected to the seven documents she tendered, knocking out five as irrelevant on points of law, citing the Evidence Act. She was left with two documents, and obviously needed to fish for more. The matter was summarily adjourned for subsequent hearing in Abuja.
When the verification report was eventually made public, the first allocation came in with higher figures for Bayelsa. From eight hundred million naira, the figure shot up to fourteen billion and some millions in fraction. When Alamieyeseigha first saw the new income schedule, he was overwhelmed. ‘All this na my money?’ said the Governor in a jocular frame of mind.
‘That’s the greatest thing I did for Bayelsa’, said Honourable Clinton Ayabowei. Without our efforts, Bayelsa’s revenue would have been very low’. Today, the fact is not known that the man who worked out that fortune is at the corner, like the stone that the builders rejected. Ayabowei is only glad that he is alive to see the progress of Bayelsa thus far.
In 1979, as a member of the Rivers State House of Assembly and Chairman of the Judicial Committee, Honourable Ayabowei pushed for the endorsement of the bill establishing the Rivers State University for Science and Technology under the government of Melford Okilo, working hand in hand with Professor Turner Isoun, first Vice Chancellor of the university.
Many years later, at the turn of the century in 2000, Ayabowei would be involved with the establishment of the Niger Delta University law in his capacity as Commissioner for Justice and Attorney-General of Bayelsa State. As may be expected, he brought the full weight of his experience to bear on the new project of establishing the first tertiary institution in Bayelsa State under the government of Alamieyeseigha.
He was overjoyed when the bill was passed into law by the Bayelsa State House of Assembly, in much the same way that he felt fulfilled when, under his watch, the Alamieyeseigha government went beyond the eight local government structure of the state, to establish twenty-four additional local government areas, in the name of Development Centers, bringing the total number of local governments in Bayelsa to thirty-two.
