Former presidential aide, Okoi Obono-Obla, has hit back at Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, over comments on Cross River State, accusing him of misrepresenting the state’s geographical position and making an unsubstantiated claim about its population.
Obono-Obla, in a statement issued in Abuja on Friday, rejected assertions attributed to Akpabio that Cross River is landlocked, that the Nigeria-Cameroon boundary lies in Akwa Ibom State and that 40 percent of Cross River’s population are people of Akwa Ibom origin.
He argued that the controversy over Cross River’s littoral status should not be confused with the state’s geographical relationship with the sea.
Roots of the dispute
The dispute has its roots in the International Court of Justice’s October 10, 2002 judgment in the Cameroon-Nigeria boundary case, in which the Court ruled that sovereignty over the Bakassi Peninsula lay with Cameroon and ordered Nigeria to withdraw its administration and security forces from territory falling under Cameroonian sovereignty.
Obono-Obla acknowledged that the subsequent legal consequences stripped Cross River of the benefits associated with littoral status, including its claim to 76 offshore oil wells.
The Supreme Court, in the 2012 case between Cross River and the Federal Government and Akwa Ibom, held that Cross River no longer had the seaward boundary necessary to qualify as a littoral state for offshore oil-well attribution.
But Obono-Obla maintained that the legal position does not erase the state’s geographical history.
‘That is a legal fiction, not geographical reality,’ he said, arguing that Bakassi historically formed the southernmost part of Cross River and extended into the Gulf of Guinea.
Land boundary vs maritime boundary
On the Nigeria-Cameroon boundary, Obono-Obla said Akpabio’s reported comments amounted to a conflation of the land boundary with the maritime boundary.
‘The land boundary is in Cross River State,’ he argued, adding that what the courts determined was that the maritime boundary following the loss of Bakassi no longer gave Cross River the littoral status it previously enjoyed.
The ICJ judgment itself distinguishes between the land boundary running to the Bakassi Peninsula and the subsequent maritime delimitation between Nigeria and Cameroon.
Obono-Obla also addressed the appointment of Senator Asuquo Ekpenyong as Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Niger Delta Development Commission, describing the appointment as commendable.
However, he questioned the political significance attached to bringing a Cross River senator to an event while, according to him, simultaneously describing the state as landlocked and non-littoral.
He described that as ‘political tokenism’ and said genuine support for Cross River would involve backing its demands over its maritime status, oil-well interests and the resettlement of displaced Bakassi people.
Population claim challenged
The former presidential aide also took issue with the reported claim that 40 per cent of Cross River’s population are Akwa Ibom people.
He said he was unaware of any empirical basis for the figure from the National Population Commission, National Bureau of Statistics or another credible statistical authority.
Obono-Obla described the assertion as divisive and called for greater sensitivity from political leaders.
The wider Cross River-Akwa Ibom dispute over the 76 offshore oil wells has been litigated for years. In its 2012 judgment, the Supreme Court found that Cross River had ceased to be a littoral state following the implementation of the ICJ judgment and that the disputed offshore wells could not be attributed to the state on that basis.
Obono-Obla, however, is now seeking to reopen the broader political and geographical conversation, insisting that the legal loss of littoral benefits should not be presented as evidence that Cross River is geographically without a coastline.
‘Cross River remains a coastal state in geography, history and in the hearts of its people,’ he said, while acknowledging that the law has, for now, removed the benefits attached to littoral status.
He called for ‘statesmanship and sensitivity’ in the handling of the issue.