Ayade cries out over Cross River revenue allocation

Cross River Governor, Ben Ayade, yesterday, decried what he described as “injustice” meted on the state by the Federal Government, in terms of revenue allocation over the years.
Ayade lamented the unfair treatment when he received Chairman of Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission, Alhaji Aliyu Ahmed, who led members of the commission on a courtesy call on the governor in Calabar.
He said given deliberate decisions by the federal government and its agencies over the years, the people of the state “feel like captives in a place they call their own.”
Ayade said the state’s loss of 76 oil wells was a direct consequence of the ceding of Bakassi by the federal government and that, rather than find permanent solution to the fiscal challenges which arose from that action, the federal government has inflicted incalculable pain on the people.
“You took our land, took our oil wells, took us out of 13 percent derivation fund and reduced us to a weeping child in the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). The pain is incalculable. We are a captured people by the Federal Government. We practise ethnocracy and so it does not matter how the people of Bakassi and Cross River as a whole are in pains. Today, we have NDDC, whose projects are based on percentage of oil production. So, look at what we have lost from the perspective of NDDC, which keeps us as a crying child who is just in NDDC by geography, not by production as the sharing formula here is by quantum of oil production coupled with the fact that, today also, we no longer benefit from the 13 percent derivation. If not for President Muhammadu Buhari, I am sure that even the superhighway and Bakassi Deep Seaport (being developed by the state) would have been killed by now…”