Niger-Delta Crude Oil Source a la Sonny Odogwu

“Money miss road” is a popular pejorative in Nigeria used to describe those to whom wealth seems to have come undeservedly. In a society that measures the worth of a man by how much wealth he has amassed regardless of the means of acquisition, integrity or substance of his mind, this cliché it seems is out of place. A few days ago, one of these “money miss roads,” Sonny Odogwu, is credited to have made some arcane and ill-informed statements of the source of crude oil in the Niger-Delta. He is said to have proclaimed that the oil reservoirs in the Niger-Delta are fed by underground tributaries with sources in North Africa, and that if Northern Nigerians were greedy that they could stanch this flow since the tributaries run through the Northern part Nigeria as they course southward to fill the reservoirs in the Niger-Delta.

How bizarre, this theory! One wonders how Mr. Odogwu arrived at this convoluted and erroneous theory. It boggles the mind that a man of Mr. Odogwu’s stature can make such an out rightly wrong statement. He definitely has a very creative and vivid imagination and would be better served contriving fictional stories for “Nollywood” rather than making commentaries on issues he is grossly uninformed about. This only goes to show how shallow and unenlightened the so called Nigerian elites of Mr. Odogwu’s ilk are.

Crude oil, as any lay person who bothers to check would find, results from millions of years of marination under pressure of dead organic matter of plant and animal origin, and microscopic marine organisms that have been trapped under the earth's crust. It follows therefore that these reservoirs in the Niger-Delta were in place long before the existence of the entity called Nigeria and certainly long before the very first human settlers in the Niger-Delta. To posit that crude oil flows from North Africa to the Niger-Delta is not only grossly erroneous and misleading but shows the mental substance of Mr. Odogwu. He is well advised to in future do some research before giving interviews, or keep mum on subjects of which he is ignorant.