The Federal Government of Nigeria, through its ministry of petroleum resources, plans to continue to engage in the building of capacity and economic empowerment programme for the grassroots in Niger Delta, says Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu
Lamenting the drain of $40bn he claimed previous governments had spent in the region over the past 15years to no avail, the minister revealed that the present administration was bent on working together with other ministries and agencies to bring about meaning full development in the region.
Speaking in a podcast, Kachikwu said, “The area where I think we have done a lot of work is in capacity building and economic empowerment. The greatest problem with the Niger Delta has been that. It is not because money has not gone in. Inter-agency researches that we have done showed that over $40bn has gone into the Niger Delta in a period of over 15 years.
“So, what we are trying to do is working under the office of the Vice-President, we are working in conjunction with the Ministry of Niger Delta, Ministry of Environment, Niger Delta Development Commission, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, oil companies and everybody.”
He said, “This (podcast) edition would focus strictly on the Niger Delta security issue. The sheer amount of problems we inherited from the Niger Delta means that literally nothing was done. The country was getting crippled; no money for investment; no money for infrastructure, and no money to run the budget. We had to move in very rapidly with the support of the President.
“We dealt with three fundamental issues. We decided to deal first with the environment and security issues. What are we going to do with the environment? The first thing we realised was that the one-on-one engagement would not take us to the promised land and we embarked on wider interventions.”
These interventions in the region, he stated, had created sanity in Nigeria’s oil sector, a development that led to increased capital spending by the government and increased foreign exchange reserves.
“What we have done is to take a very difficult environment and bring some sort of sanity into it. Today, when we celebrate over two million barrels of oil, over $75-$77 price of oil, enhanced and increasing reserve size for this country, the highest capital budget that this country has seen in decades, it is all because we have found a way to bring sanity into this very difficult environment,’’ he said.