For many years, the Petroleum Industry Bill became in the National Assembly the battle line across which stood familiar ethnic warriors cheered on by their people who saw in the bill a historic opportunity to look out for their own interests and nothing more.
But it has never been enough that legislations are passed in any society. What has been of even more critical importance is that those laws are obeyed from the highest rungs of a society to its lowest rungs. It Informs the entire idea of the rule of law and its prescription that the law must be supreme at all times and extract supreme subservience from everyone in the society.
Its waters are polluted. Life has been sucked out of its soil. Even the air its people breath is laden with lethal pollutants. The Niger Delta equation in Nigeria`s oil politics has always been a question of justice. There has been a long running concern in Nigeria that while the region that produces most of the resources used to develop the entire country is largely ignored, others feed fat and have resultantly grown lazy and entitled.
These leaders have helped to complicate Nigeria`s extremely delicate situation and set the country on a seemingly irreversible path to retrogression. Nigeria`s oil was only supposed to be an option among other viable options.