The apex northern sociocultural group, Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), has said the management of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) recent announcement of plans to relocate some of its key departments from Abuja to Lagos has sparked a wave of anxiety and outcry from many Nigerians, especially Northerners who obviously would be most adversely affected by the exercise.
ACF said the CBN’s decision was not an isolated or normal administrative action to fix some logistics problem, but that it rather fits a disturbing pattern of antagonistic actions often taken by certain federal administrations against the interests of the North and other parts of Nigeria.
“The CBN’s announcement was followed by another from the Federal Ministry of Aviation’s Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) of plans to also relocate to Lagos due to shortage of office space and claim of the volume of air traffic handled by Lagos. Still in the Ministry of Aviation, only eight of 40 directors recently appointed are from the North.”
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ACF, in a statement signed by its national publicity secretary, Prof. T. A. Muhammad-Baba, said it viewed such decisions “as if deliberately designed to be made public in drip-drip fashion, a leaked letter to the Minister of Aviation from a contractor, AVSATEL, became public, wherein the company sought permission to relocate the project for refurbishing Airport Rescue and Fire Fighting Vehicles (ARFF) from Katsina to “the south” or Abuja, but sneakily mentioning Lagos, Ibadan or Enugu. AVSATEL sought to rationalise its suggestion on issues that should have been in the scope of the works when the company bided for the job but which it clearly ignored then.
“It is easy to ignore such planned actions by the CBN and FAAN (and AVSATEL), but it is impossible to fail to see in them a clear pattern of thinly disguised marginalisation of the North, nor is the grand strategy entirely new. President Obasanjo’s first action in office in 1999 was to order the relocation of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) from Abuja, the federal capital, to Lagos.
“Today almost all agencies and institutions responsible for the marine economy, and especially the sea ports, are concentrated at Lagos, which retains undisturbed monopoly over port operations and sea traffic in and out of Nigeria, even as Calabar, Uyo and Port Harcourt offer as much if not better facilities.”
The statement noted that it was only the successful discovery and exploration of oil along the Kolmani River, in Gombe State, that discredited the propaganda that oil does not exist in the North.
“Given all of the above and more, the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) remains unconvinced that the government agencies trying to relocate to Lagos will be doing so on any noble grounds”.
ACF called on the federal government and the National Assembly to call on those agencies to retrace their steps and apply other honest means of addressing the alleged over-crowding in offices, adding that, against the situation in Lagos, there is plenty of land in the Federal Capital Territory for expansion of office and other infrastructural facilities and such factors should not be used to obfuscate sinister motives.
“ACF wishes to remind all concerned that decades ago, the seat of the capital of the Federal Republic was moved from Lagos to Abuja for reasons that remain valid, it is constitutional even more so today, constitutionally so, although, of course, a section of the country never liked the decision,” it added.
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