Resource Control: A Translocation Of The Scramble For Africa

Abstract

The Scramble for Africa, also known as the partition of Africa, was conducted among Europeans sitting at the Berlin Conference of 1885 -85. It was consummated as the colonization of African countries by these powers. The era of colonialism ended about 1980. But the seeds of discord sown in that epoch have since germinated and developed into a tree, of which one of the most notorious and reprehensible fruits is today\'s resource control crisis in Nigeria. Adopting a theoretical framework successfully adapted from the biological and medical sciences, namely; translocation analysis, the paper traces the ancestry of the present resource control problem to the scramble, first, and then, the use of fiscal and revenue allocation commissions during the colonial era, and the miniaturization of solutions to fiscal acrimonies and bad blood in the post-colonial era. The paper acknowledges that the creation of the OMPADEC in 1992, the NDDC in 1999, the concession of 13 percent derivation in 2001 and the abrogation of the onshore-offshore dichotomy in 2003, are measures calculated to reduce the resource control disturbances to manageable proportions. But that armed confrontation and hostage taking have persisted and remain intractable indicate that more fundamental solutions are called for.


Journal of Agriculture and Social Research Vol. 4 (2) 2004: 61-70