Delta accounts for about 15 percent of Nigeria’s oil (according to data from The Economic Associates) and is deemed the fourth-highest oil producer in the country. It was therefore news when its former governor, Emmanuel Uduaghan, began to harp on the feasibility of “Delta beyond oil”.
For once, a governor in the oil-rich region was looking away from oil, a resource that has engendered pollution and poverty in a region once known for robust aquaculture, wetlands, palm oil production and rubber.
In the last years of his reign, Uduaghan took some steps at making Delta less dependent on oil. Infrastructure was upgraded, support was given to agriculture and tourism. Also, financial incentives and trainings were offered to SMEs to boost non-oil output. Consequently, Internally Generated Revenues grew from N26.09 billion in 2010 to N45.57 billion by 2013 (though oil companies contributed to the pool).
A chance to push the envelop
Patrick Okowa’s administration has the rare opportunity of taking the Delta beyond oil project several notches higher. The administration has to set specific goals in this direction and commit to achieving them religiously.
The first step at making Delta less oil-dependent is to identify its comparative advantage (apart from oil). The second step would be to gather data on the performance of the areas of comparative advantage. Achievable output targets can then be set for each area. Policies and resources can then be channelled at achieving the targets.
Of course, in one form or the other all or some of these steps may have been tinkered with by the past administration at one point or the other, but there is still mileage to cover. The rest of this article focuses on two fundamental elements that are key to the “Delta beyond oil” project.
A sea of opportunity
The major strength of Delta lies in its people. With a population of 4.5 million as at year-end 2014, Delta compares with Luxembourg, Norway, New Zealand, Ireland and Singapore – albeit its population is much less educated, skilled and sophisticated.
Though five years ago an NBS bulletin put Delta in good light as it estimated that literacy in English in the state was 69.5 percent against a national average of 57.9 percent, while overall literacy rate was put at 88.4 percent as against a national average of 76.3 percent, a firsthand observation of schools in remote locations in the state shows that a good number of rural children are out of school. That is apart from the hundreds of young school leavers (both from tertiary and secondary schools) who have resorted to riding tricycles for a living. Delta is in dire need of quality/functional education and skills acquisition programmes to improve its workforce.
The state can learn from India’s southern Karnataka state which is home to Bangalore. (Bangalore is today home to what is considered India’s Silicon Valley.) In the 1970s the Karnataka state government demarcated a large piece of farming land outside Bangalore for an electronic city.
By 1983, both Infosys and another future tech giant, Wipro, moved to Bangalore and the country’s fledgling IT industry started to grow around the two firms. Encouraged by government policy, in the early 1990s, the industry had grown to global recognition. Today, nearly 40 percent of India’s IT industry is concentrated in Bangalore.
Karnataka’s educational institutions were offering good courses in computer engineering which naturally helped the IT industry in the state. Delta can adopt that model to engage its teeming youth population. Certainly, the development of local manpower was a silver bullet in India’s rise.
Delta needs more doctors of various specializations. It needs more technicians, sailors, engineers, computer programmers, agric economists, nurses, statisticians, agronomists, etc. The state has the option of investing its massive oil and gas earnings on training its people locally and internationally.
But apart from manpower, there are natural resources at the disposal of Delta. It is endowed with marble, glass sand, gypsum, lignite, iron-ore, clay, kaolin and wetlands which have not been fully exploited.
At present, Nigeria spends N90 billion on ceramics ware import from China and Europe. Ceramics ware can be manufactured from materials available in Delta. The “Delta beyond oil” project will involve planning and projection, both of which cannot be effectively done without data.
The primacy of data
In the real world, you can only set goals when you know where you are vis-à-vis where you want to be. Therefore, data on the state’s performance in terms of its comparative advantage areas are key. Based on what is known, realistic targets can be made and pursued.
For instance, data on a previous year’s agric output can help estimate the quantity of arable land, and manpower needed to produce a projected output in the future.
Our research team visited a state in the South-West last year and met with the commissioner for agriculture who told, smiling from ear to ear, that their “ambition is to be the state that meets 30 percent of the food need of Lagos”. I leaned forward and asked him, “What percentage do you currently supply?” The commissioner was unable to answer. Then I said, “So how will you know when you’ve met your target?” He was even quieter. Finally, he said, “You see, my brother, we don’t have the data, the farmers are small and scattered across the state.” But is the task of profiling farmers in a state beyond its government?
A strong statistics office will guide Delta in planning and making projections. This is a sine qua non to building a Delta not dependent on oil. There is no doubt that Delta is great. It ranks among the highest in terms of infrastructural sophistication in Nigeria. But the state can break even without depending on oil if it takes the right steps.
Obodo Ejiro
