President Muhammadu Buhari is facing another potential headache with the revival of separatist sentiment in the country’s southeast and renewed debate over the sharing of oil wealth.
Recent weeks have seen a wave of protests calling for an independent state of Biafra, 45 years after the end of the brutal civil sparked by a previous declaration of independence.
Now, campaigners in the oil-producing Niger delta are demanding total control of resources to develop the region, which remains under-developed despite billions of dollars earned from crude.
Last Friday, the Niger Delta Self-Determination Movement (NDSDM) lobby group, declared the current agreement, whereby oil revenue is divided among Nigeria’s 36 states, was unfair.
“The 13 percent (share for the Niger Delta) enshrined in the 1999 constitution by the military is depriving us of our God-given resources,” the group’s convener Annkio Briggs told reporters in Lagos.
“We want 100 percent control and ownership of our oil so that we can control our future.”
– Northern ‘dominance’ –
Nigeria’s crude-reliant economy has been battered by the fall in global oil prices, hampering government spending and even the payment of state-sector salaries.
Crude accounts for 90 percent of Nigeria’s export earnings and 70 percent of government overall revenue.
In 2014, the country earned $77 billion from oil exports, according to the US Department of Energy, down from $84 billion in 2013 and $94 billion in 2012.
How much each state in the federation gets from the sector has long been a thorny issue, exposing barely concealed regional and ethnic rivalries.
Demands for a greater share of oil revenue were a factor in the violence that gripped the delta in the 2000s until a government amnesty programme, which ends this year, bought off militants.
Briggs’ group argues Nigeria’s political architecture, with 19 states classed as northern and 17 in the south, unfairly penalises the southern states where oil is found.
“Of the 774 local government areas (administrative divisions within each state), the north is given almost 70 percent,” she said, calling it “manipulations for… socio-economic and political dominance”.
She blamed a succession of northern-dominated military governments for forcing through the revenue-sharing agreement down the barrel of a gun “without our free, prior and informed consent”.
Briggs denied calling for a break away from the federation but argued every region instead should use its own natural resources to develop itself.
The NDSDM was founded last year during a national conference convened by former president Goodluck Jonathan at which delegates recommended the delta region received 18 percent of oil revenue.
The recommendation was not implemented before Jonathan left office.

Source
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/11/we-want-100-percent-control-ownership-of-our-oil-ndelta-group/

*coughs*

The real oppressors will come now and tag them faceless mushroom group

Wow serious

I is obvious cha

Disintegrate the zoo let them cease to exist

This agitation sounds fair even though it should have been channelled through their NASS representatives instead of newspaper rambling.
However, it is high time the FG consider and priotize the diversification of the nation economy instead of over relying on the oil whose fortune is dwindling but creating unnecessary rancour and suspicion within the nation's lining.
The oil revenue has not truly have the desire impact on the common man be it south or north, it is just the exclusive reserved of the movers and shakers of this country.