The Surveyor General of Kogi state, Abolarin Michael Biodun, has identified political interference as the major cause of the lingering contention over the ownership of the oil wells along the Kogi and Anambra boundary.
In a recent interview, Abolarin said both states have been going back and forth and there seem to be no end in sight basically because of the presence of the natural resource – crude oil – found in the area where both states share boundaries.
He noted that the contention is largely due to political interference and the failure of the National Boundary Commission to adopt the right procedures to determine the boundary between both states.
“The issue of the Kogi and Anambra interstate boundary has lingered for a long time.
“The problem actually is that Anambra wanted to define what is below the ground or what is below the surface of the soil and claim it to be boundary. Anywhere oil is around the corridor of Aguleri they claimed that it is their land whereas oil is like a flow of river, you cannot say that the river flows and in this case oil flows in one particular place within your corridor. That has been a major contention between Kogi and Anambra state.
“The National Boundary Commission (NBC) has insisted that they will use the legal instrument of 1954 as the instrument by which they would delimit the boundary between Kogi and Anambra state. But we have objected to that because a ground-to-paper instrument would have been the best approach. And the result of the ethnographic survey that was conducted in 2017 would have been the best because even NBC has agreed that the legal instrument of 1954 is flawed with a lot of irregularities and inadequacies,” he said.
Abolarin explained that the major contention with the NBC is the choice of legal instrument of 1954 and that of 1936 in the resolution of the boundary dispute between Kogi and Anambra.
“The major differences are basically the tripartite points. For example, the legal notice of 1936 ceded Odeke and Lekitolo to Kogi state but if you know Odeke very well Lekitolo is just beside Odeke and the Odeke people have been the one exercising authority over Lekitolo and everyone knows that it is their fishing lake, they fish there. It is Odeke pond, but the legal notice of 1954 unfortunately ceded Lekitolo to Anambra state and that is the contention.
“It is contentious because the distance between them is insignificant and, in fact, Odeke has even encircled Lekitolo itself. It would, therefore, mean that if you cede Itolo to Anambra state part of Odeke will be in Anambra state, yet the people have one king, one chief, one house of assembly, have one local government council chairman, I mean the Ibaji Local Government Area end of Kogi state. That is the contention and the reason the ownership of the oil found there has remained unresolved.
“We have conducted ground to paper work and the Anambra people have not done so. In fact, those indigenous people around Aguleri have not claimed any portion of land that belongs to Odeke, which is in Kogi state. They have not the land that belongs to Ochohor or Odeke, which are in Kogi state. The people there intermarry because they are neighbouring communities yet no conflict between them over parcels of land.
“Besides, we have conducted an ethnographic survey- which is a kind of survey where people are interviewed and they show you their boundaries, tell you about how they inter-married and other social scenes between them.
“The survey was such that people from Agulere showed us their boundary, natural and physical features and we marked those points, and we made many other specific observations. That is what is called from a ground- to- paper survey. This is significant because when you plot the marked points the boundary will clearly come out.
“This has been our position but the NBC have said they are sticking to the 1954 legal instrument inherited from the colonial administration and they have also agreed contains a lot of errors, inadequate delineation points.”
