Bakassi

Bakassi

By

Bello Salihu, PhD

Lord Robert Salisbury, the British Prime Minster at the time when major European powers were carving up Africa as their colonies, enclaves and spheres of influence was quoted to have said “ We [the colonial powers] have engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man's feet have ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, but we have only been hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where those mountains and rivers and lakes were.”

His statement was as apt as it was true when it was made. Truer still is the sad legacy it bequeathed to later generations of Africa. In the great scramble for Africa of the 1880s, the embryos of the nations that later became Nigeria and Cameroon were formed. Ancient empires and civilisations that pre-dated the colonial adventures of the Europeans were carved up and traded as if they were farmlands in western Europe. It was during that time that a small chunk of northern Nigeria was traded from the French by the British in return for France’s desire for fishing rights off the coast of the Canadian Island of Newfoundland. The French also traded parts of Cameroon to the Germans in return for German recognition of its protectorate role over Morocco. In the south east of Nigeria, a small coastal extension into the Atlantic Ocean of about 1000 square kilometres and inhabited by tens of thousands of people was ceded to Germany by the British. That coastal extension is a Peninsula called Bakassi by its inhabitants.

It was an agreement of mutual benefit to the two powers in which one of them, Britain, wanted guaranty from the then stronger Germany of a clear passage to the important sea port of Calabar while the other, Germany, wanted access to the shrimp-rich waters around the peninsula and also to forestall any eastern expansion of the British colonial ambition. This arrangement was concretised in the Anglo-German treaty of 1913 which clearly put Bakassi on the German side of the border and the navigable portion of the peninsula on the British side. The British could do this because Bakassi was part of the old Calabar Kingdom which the then King of Calabar ceded to the British Empire in a Treaty of Protection agreed with Queen Victoria of England and signed on the 10th of September 1884. The inhabitants of the Peninsula belong to the Efik tribe which is one of the Nigeria’s main ethnic groups but a historical power play that they have had no hand in, has, without their consent, traded away the land they were literally standing on. Or in other words, they could as well be Nigerians but their land had ceased to be. To the colonial masters, that was an issue of little significance.

After the defeat of Germany in the First World War, the League of Nations, a fore-runner of the current United Nations, divided German colonies into two territories administered by Britain and France. At this point British Cameroons and Bakassi were recognised to be under British Mandate by the Franco-British Declaration of 1919. Bakassi was as of then administered through indirect rule by the same colonial masters ruling over Nigeria, but even then as a Cameroonian territory. After the Second World War, the United Nations maintained the same mandate leaving Bakassi still as a Cameroonian territory.

In the run-up to independence in both colonies the UN mandated the British to carry out a referendum in its western Cameroonian colony which stretches from the sahelian north to the atlantic coast in the south to ascertain which independent nation the indigenes want to belong to, Nigeria or Cameroon? British Northern Cameroons which include a large chunk of northeastern Nigeria voted to gain independence as part of an independent Nigerian nation. Due to security issues, the referendum was delayed in the British Southern Cameroons until after Nigeria’s independence in 1961. When it eventually held, the people voted to join the then also newly-independent Cameroon. Even the oft-mentioned meetings between Nigeria’s Gowon and Cameroon’s Ahidjo in 1971 in Yaounde and later in 1975 in Maroua (that led to the Maroua Declaration) did not place Bakassi in Nigerian territory but discussed the navigable maritime border between the two countries as contained in the earlier treaties of the early colonial era.

So the Nigerian nation lost the Bakassi peninsula long before the ICJ judgment of 2002. In fact, Cameroon successfully posited, with ample historical documentary proof, that Bakassi Peninsula was never and has never been part of the Nigerian nation in the first place. They argued that what Nigerians mistook for souvereignty was ethnic and language affinity that is present around every land border in the continent. Nigeria, seemingly, was never able to present a superior counter argument to that. 

I recall from my high school literature class the great Chinua Achebe saying that those whose palm kernels were cracked for them by a benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble. To paraphrase, even if Cameroon has its own version of a benevolent spirit the country does not, and will not in the foreseeable future, have Nigeria’s extensive and rich proverbial palm kernels. So it was a good to see that Nigeria, out of stark realism rather than altruism, chose the path of wisdom and humility and pulled away from contesting the ICJ judgment that handed over the Bakassi peninsula finally to the Cameroonians. 

The focus of the nation should now be the welfare of its citizens who have been grossly short changed by the ruling. There is a reason why they cherish being Nigerians and are ready to fight for the privilege. It is Nigeria’s turn to show them that their emotional attachment to the country is not in vain and will not be taken for granted.

Calculating on the basis of the ICJ court ruling in 2002 and the seeming hopelessness of Nigeria’s case, international oil companies operating on and around the peninsula quickly re-oriented their loyalties and sought new clients in Yaounde. They will still maintain Abuja and Port Harcourt as important ports of call on their other deals, but on anything to do with the oil riches of the Bakassi Peninsula, their first class tickets are now re-routed to Yaounde and Douala. Some companies that may need to do that sooner than later are the US giant ExxonMobil and France’s Total. The two companies, along with two Nigerian oil producers, Moni Pulo and Oriental Energy, all have oil blocks straddling the new border between Nigeria and Cameroon around the Peninsula which has the Bay of Cross River to one side and Bakassi Peninsula to the other. One of the fields in the area of potential border contention is Total’s deepwater OPL 222 block (co-owned with ExxonMobil and Nexen) which is estimated to hold nearly 100 million barrels of oil. This alone will add a quarter to Cameroon’s current estimated reserves.

The scramble has started already. Few days ago, a few hours after the expiration of the appeal deadline of the ICJ judgment, America’s Fox News reported that Sino-Swiss firm Addax Petroleum has discovered new oil and gas reserves in Bakassi, south western Cameroon. Cameroon’s Rio Del Rey basin in which Bakassi is now situated will be busy in the foreseeable future. Eagle-eyed energy prospecting companies have been encircling the Bakassi prospect waiting for a definitive signal of who to go into deals with. With this Addax statement, it looks like some of them have already perched in Cameroon.

In June this year, Dana Petroleum, a United Kingdom oil and gas company already active in Equatorial Guinea announced the signing of a production sharing contract with the Cameroonian Government for the Bakassi West block which covers over 390 sq. km. They have already stepped up mobilisation to commence exploration activities.

But even more important for Cameroon is that its ownership of the Bakassi Peninsula will further extend the size, not to mention the prospects, of their own little segment of the Niger Delta, the Rio Del Rey Basin, which is already hosting, and attracting interest, from many major international oil companies.

Similar resource-fueled border disputes in the Gulf of Guinea and elsewhere such as that between Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire over the West Cape Three Points prospects are worrisome to prospective exploration companies. The business of oil exploration is risky enough without such bothers.

Others attracting similar level of attention are the disputes between Sudan and South Sudan, between Kenya and Somalia and between Tanzania and Malawi .

This is hoping that all will be resolved with the same maturity and amity as shown by both Nigeria and Cameroon.

Fuel For Thought:

$75/barrel benchmark price in Nigeria’s 2013 budget

As discussed on this column last week, there are hints (just hints for now) of dark clouds in the horizon in the price of a barrel of oil. The first and second highest energy consumers, the United States and China are both experiencing flat growth. The Eurozone has slowed down and is currently in fiscal turmoil and the growth estimate for the United Kingdom was just this week downgraded by the IMF to negative figures. So the federal government is right to inject a dose of caution in its estimate for the benchmark price for the oil barrel in its revenue projection for the 2013 federal budget. Raising that benchmark will put the value of the Naira on a route of certain decline if for any reason there is an oil glut and the revenue base of the country begins to evaporate. And lest we forget, Nigeria is still a heavily import-dependent country.

If this government is in error in pegging the benchmark that low, then that error is on the side of caution. Better that than fiscal armageddon 2013.

While no one is praying for increased volatility in the global energy market, economic planners in countries like Nigeria that depend on oil revenue will do well to read these signs and be both optimistic that things turn out for the better and be prepared if they don’t. With Nigeria’s current security challenges generally believed to be occasioned by unemployment and poverty, an oil glut that makes our principal export unattractive is the last thing we need. A glut with catastrophic consequences for Nigeria’s economy has happened before and it could happen again.

This was earlier published in my column 'Oil and Gas Weekly' in Government, 

a publication of Leadership Newspapers, Nigeria - 2012.