Row over oil money delivers killer blow to constitutional reform conference

A national conference convened to map out constitutional reforms and ease ethnic and religious tensions has been brought to its knees by disputes over how to share out Nigeria's oil wealth. The National Political Reform Conference reconvened briefly on Monday after a three-week break during which President Olusegun Obasanjo had tried to get the delegates to narrow their differences. But his efforts were to no avail. Delegates from the Niger Delta, which produces the bulk of Nigeria's oil, refused to return to the talks after walking out last month. They were furious at what they regarded as paltry efforts to give their people a greater share of the black gold produced on their doorstep. Nigeria's 11 oil-producing states currently receive 13 percent of the government revenue accruing from oil produced on their own territory. The rest goes to the federal government which spends part of the cash itself and redistributes the remainder in the form of budget allocations to all 36 states. "We came with a mandate from our people to demand 100 percent resource control. We conceded to merely accepting 25 percent in the interim which has been denied," the oil region delegates said in a joint statement on Monday. "Therefore we can no longer participate in the proceedings of this conference." Nigeria is Africa's leading oil producer, and the seventh-biggest exporter of crude worldwide, shipping nearly 2.5 million barrels a day. But it is also the continent's most populous country, with an officially estimated 126 million people. Most ordinary Nigerians derive little benefit from the billions of dollars of foreign exchange that oil generates each year. According to the UN Human Development Index, 90 percent of the population earns less than US $2 a day and one out of three Nigerians is illiterate. Obasanjo, who is due to step down in 2007 after completing two elected terms as president, convened the constitutional conference in February to try to give Nigeria enduring stability following his retirement But chairman Nikki Tobi declared the conference closed after just two hours on Monday, leaving Obasanjo essentially where he started --- without an acceptable mechanism to manage Nigeria's ethnic and religious diversity that results in periodic outbursts of violence. "I don’t think we can consider the conference as successful. I think it was a huge failure," said Adams Oshiomhole, president of the Nigeria Labour Congress and a conference delegate. One thing the conference did do was affirm the centrality of oil to Nigeria's politics. The oil wells in the swampy forests of the southeast and the offshore waters in the Gulf of Guinea produce more than 95 percent of the country's export income and 80 percent of total government revenue . The five-month long meeting of 400 hand-picked delegates also laid bare the divisions between the mainly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south of Nigeria. A report adopted at the conference's final session simply called on the government to set up "an expert commission" to work out within six months the best way of sharing Nigeria's oil wealth among its regions. But oil was not the only contentious issue. Delegates were also split over how long the tenures for the president and regional governors should be. Some wanted to maintain the status quo, which allows the head of state and state governors to serve a maximum of two consecutive four-year terms. But others wanted to allow them a single six-year elected term. This contentious issue will also be handed over to the government to resolve, said Tobi, the retired judge who presided over the conference. The failure of this much-vaunted attempt to agree on constitutional reform may play into the hands of opposition groups who boycotted the conference on the grounds that all the delegates were government nominees. These opposition groups are now planning to stage an alternative conference on constitutional reform, although no date for it has been set. Known as the Pro-National Conference Organisation (PRONACO), this parallel forum brings together several unlikely bed-fellows. They include Nobel Prize winning author Wole Soyinka; former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, who was Obasanjo’s main rival in the 2003 presidential elections; Moujahid Dokubo-Asari, the leader of an Ijaw ethnic militia movement in the Niger Delta, who threatened “all-out” war against the government last year; and dozens of pro-democracy groups.