In posing the Niger Delta Region ' as a development question which constitutes the central theme for this discourse, we need to briefly explicate the meaning of the Niger Delta Region. The Niger Delta Region means different things to different people and interests. In terms of natural and human resource characteristics, Professor Onokerhoraye (2000) has defined the Niger Delta Region in terms of its geology, geography and ethnography. There is hardly any controversy over the geological, geographical and the ethnographical meaning of the Niger Delta Region. With the ascendancy of crude oil in the Nigerian economy, the Niger Delta Region is synonymous, in the perception of many Nigerians, with the oil producing areas of Nigeria. The provisions of the recently passed Niger Delta Development Commission Act, 2000/and of its forerunner, the Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Act, 1992 accentuate this perception. The Niger Delta Region has thus increasingly emerged as a distinct socio-economic-political formation, characterized by huge resource extraction from it over the years to the rest of the world and re-cycled for development of the Nigerian people and communities (minus the people and communities of the Niger Delta Region).

In consequence, the Niger Delta Region has been characterized by enormous problems of increasing poverty and impoverisation, backwardness and under-development starkly manifested in increasing rates of unemployment and crime, and marked by enormous problems of growing internal colonialism. In this paper, we seek to demonstrate the hypothesis that the current deepening crisis of under-development and poverty of the Niger Delta Region has been a manifestation of the pattern of petroleum resource exploitation and the resultant distorted and perverse fiscal federalism in Nigeria. To the extent of the demonstration of this hypothesis, we will identify and discuss alternative development options for empowering and developing the Niger Delta Region. The rest of the paper is therefore structuredas follows: petroleum-induced general pattern of Nigerian development, alternative development options, and their implications for the development of the Niger Delta Region.

(I) Petroleum-Induced Pattern of Development The state-dominated pattern of development of the Nigerian economy has largly been crude-petroleum-induced and driven since 1973. The emergence and dominance of crude petroleum has been a major foreign exchange and government revenue earner. Crude petroleum, for example, accounted for 81.1 percent and 96.1 percent respectively, of Government revenue and export earnings in 1980. The proportion of petroleum-sector-derived revenues in total Government revenue fluctuated upward between 60 percent and 87 percent over the period of 1973-1999, whilst the proportion of petroleum-sector-derived foreign exchange earnings in total export earnings fluctuated upward between 85 percent and 97 percent over the same period.

From a position of relative obscurity in the early 1960s, crude petroleum has become the fiscal basis of the Nigerian state, effectively replacing agriculture as the basis of accumulation in the Nigerian economy from the early 1970s. Two different phases of mutual dependence among different tiers of government in the Nigerian federation can be identified. The first was the period before the discovery and intensive exploitation of crude petroleum when agriculture sustained the economy. During the first phase the component regional governments retained the principal ratio of revenue accruable to them from the export of agricultural produce and only surrendered a' little fraction of it for the upkeep of the central government. The second phase was the period of crude petroleum sector dominance of the economy. The crude petroleum era was milked by extreme concentration of fiscal resources in the hands of the Federal Government whilst the component units of government were compelled to depend on the central government for their financing. The replacement of agricultural sector dominance by petroleum mining sector dominance has serious implications for the revenue generation and fiscal plans of the governments.

Two remarkable differences between the two observed phases and some practical development policy issues may be highlighted. First, the tradable commodity, i.e. crude petroleum is currently located in the Niger Delta, whereas, intheprecedingtraderegimetherewas a fair spread of tradable produce across the country. Second, the revenue sharing bases have been reviewed continually to discard the principle of derivation and magnify the principles of equality, access to development opportunities, and minimum standards for national integration. The aim of the Federal political leadership has thus been to use the Revenue Allocation system to ensure that both the poorly-resource-endowed and richly-resource-endowed areas develop at a fairly equal pace. This balanced development objective of revenue allocation has failed to address practical developmentpolicy issues such as incentive for fiscal independence, environmental impact of resource exploitation; intergenerational gap created by present resource exploitation, and balancing present losses (opportunity costs) with gains/benefits to the areas where the revenue generating resources are located. To this extent, the balanced development objective of revenue allocation has, paradoxically, created conditiohs of deepening crisis of underdevelopment and of grinding poverty in the Niger Delta where the mineral oil revenue generating resources are largely located currently. It can thus be argued that existing distorted and perverse fiscal federalism in Nigeria has essentially been a product of the fact that, with the prolonged military rule of the 1966-79 and 1984-99 periods, the 1963 Republican Constitution founded on the principle of democratic governance which provided for fiscal reviews every five ye^rs was jettisoned. Revenue Allocation was based, after 1966, on ad hoc arrangements and influenced by the superordinate-subordinate (master-servant) relationship between the Federal Government and the other units and, consequently. Revenue Allocation was increasingly based on the principle of fiscal unitarism (fiscal centralism) rather than on the principle of fiscal federalism.

By the early 1960s, the pattern of development of the Nigerian economy was essentially dualistic, with a large peasant traditional agricultural-based-rural sector and a small modem industrial urban sector. Most of the manufacturing industries and almost all the modem infrastructure were located in the urban areas. The majority of the people lived and farmed in the rural areas with little or no economic and social infrastructure and services. This dualistic pattern of development has greatly been accentuated by the emergence and dominance of crude petroleum in the Nigerian economy since 1973. The creation of extreme dualism in the economy by the petroleum industry has been a manifestation of the fact that the petroleum industry is typically an export enclave in organizational structure in terms of capital and labour-skills-intensity, finance and management, owned and controlled by trans-national oil firms with little direct impact on the rest of the domestic economy.

But the vigorous pursuit of state economic policy of maximum economic-surplus extraction from the crude petroleum export sector, essentially taking the forin of increased state taxation of the 'rent on the crude petroleum resource, has unprecedentedly expanded the size of the actual economic surplus extracted from this sector since' 1970. The extracted economic surplus has generally been manifested in expanded total payments made by the transnational oil firms consisting of direct revenue paid to the Federal Government. Before 1970, the bulk of oil revenues consisted of rents on concession and oil royalty. But since then the composition of oil revenues has changed and petroleum profits tax has become the most important single item in the oil revenue profile. In addition, the oil policy of increasingly involving the Federal Government in direct and majority equity participation since 1974 in all aspects of the oil industry and its financing, has dramatically improved further government revenue receipts and, therefore, has significantly increased the size of the actual economic surplus extracted from the oil sector. It can thus be argued that it was the complete constitution of the fiscal basis of the Nigerian state by the emergence and dominance of oil industry in the Nigerian economy that accounted for the unique and remarkable transition from the, fiscal federalism of the pre-civil-war period to the fiscal unitarism of the post-civil-war era. It was this state fiscal regime of unitarism that not only largely created the basis for the domestic financing of the dualistic accumulation process, but also enabled the state to dominate the extremely dualistic accumulation process occurring in the post-civil-war Nigerian economy.

The impact of the petroleum sector on the dualistic pattern of accumulation in the post-civil-war Nigerian economy needs to be briefly illustrated in the context of general sectoral pattern of use of resources generated from the oil industry. The petroleum resources were largely used in the provision of urban-based social and economic infrastructure and in urban-based directly productive investment activities, whilst the agricultural and rural sector activities were relatively starved of oil-generated state investible resources. Consequently, there was rapid expansion of the urban economy until the enactment of Economic Stabilization Act of 1982, paralleled by stagnation and decline in the agricultural and rural economy. The petroleum resources were used particularly in prosecuting import-substituting industrialization strategy, indigenisation programme and reconstruction after the civil war. It is significant to note that the Niger Delta did not share much of the urban-based post-civil-war industrialization experience, but, as predominantly rural and agricultural area, the Niger Delta shared much of the experience of the stagnation and decline in its agricultural and rural economy. After more than four decades of petroleum exploitation in the Niger Delta, there has been no visible substantial growth of basic manufacturing industries in the area with the exception of the location of a few petroleum resources-based industries such as refineries and petrochemical plants (which produce a limited range of products), thermal plants, gas production plants. Delta Steel Company at Aladja (which utilizes local gas), and glass factories (which utilize natural gas produce.d in the area). As Ekuerhare (1996, pp. 24-56) has demonstrated from his study of the pattern of growth, accumulation and income distribution, the petroleum-induced dependent dualistic structure of Nigerian economic growth was characterized by a concentration of productive assets in a relatively few urban-based* capital-intensive, import-intensive, monopolistic domestic-firms and transnational-firms-controlled large-scale activity sectors; the economic decline in the early 1980s occasioned by the international oil market price collapse revealed the inherent defects of monocultural product-structure of the economy, the volatile nature of the oil market,,the weak intersectoral linkages between pil and the rest of the economy, and showed that the oil sector is a fragile vehicle of sustained structural change and economic transformation.

11. Alternative Development Policy Options

In the light of the foregoing, we need to sketch the essential elefnents of appropriate alternative development policy options directed at radically accelerating and restructuring the Nigerian economy along the path of self-reliant, people-centred, integrated and poverty-alleviating development. In this context, economic development is conceived as a process that encompasses a progressive advancement from an inferior socio-economic state, characterized by the dominance of low productivity primary production, slow growth or stagnation in employment generation, wide-spread poverty, and low quality of life for the bulk of the population, to a superior state, characterized by high level of living standards that is based on a sustained rise in productivity associated with advancing technology, full employment, and high level of per capital income.

The appropriate alternative development policy options should stress an agriculture-cum-informal (small-scale enterprise) sector-centred development strategy, which offers a better and more socially desirable option -for broad-based and sustainable economic growth and employment generation in Nigeria in the new Millennium. This strategy stresses the need to widen and exploit the economic linkages between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors as the basis for rapid and integrated economic growth and development. The significant and potential income, input-output, and price linkages between the rural and urban sectors need to be effectively developed. Policies and olinkages that would raise agricultural and informal sector incomes on a sustainable basis are of great importance and must be given top priority because of their tremendous impact in solving unemployment and underemployment problems in the development process.

The transition from a monoproduct to a multiproduct-based agricultural export structure should be anchored on substantial processing in domestic agro-based industries to strengthen intersectoral linkages. The development of rural infratructure that includes extension services, adult education, vocation training, roads, and water to boost rural sector productivity cannot be overemphasized in the new strategy of development based on small-scale, rural and informal sector expansion. The establishment of institutional infrastructure would help to diffuse technologically efficient small-scale techniques and improve quality control and product standardization in the small-scale-informal sector. The manufacture of rural sector equipment that embodies newel-technologies that increase productivity in the agricultural sector is an important element in the strategy. This could be a basis for a more vigorous small-scale industrial growth based on light engineering. A small-scale approach to industrialization may set in motion the emergence of the elusive industrial entrepreneurship in Nigeria. Smallholder industrial enterprises may provide a more effective interface between the rural and the informal sector on the one hand and the large-scale formal sector on the other. In any restructuring of the industrial sector, the small-scale industries must therefore be deliberately promoted. There are very good reasons for this. First, the technology used in the small-scale industrial sector is homogeneous and linear. It can therefore be replicated everywhere. Second, and for that same reason, it provides the easiest vehicle for the spread and diffusion of low and middle level technology. Third, it offers the best opportunity for the creation of employment. What is required is the full integration of industry and agriculture in the interest of self-reliance through the encouragement of small-scale enterprises.

The next essential element of the alternative development policy options is the full integration of oil exploitation with manufacturing production processes. Nigeria is currently richly endowed with the raw materials and resources for a robust petrol-chemical industry. Yet, this sector has been exogenous to the rest of the economy. There is no reason why most of the materials used for production in the petroleum sector or even the rigs used in the exploration should not, as in Malaysia, be produced locally. Similarly, the materials required as inputs by manufacturing industry are still being awaited to be made available by the petro-chemical industry. So far, only the first stage in the industrial exploitation of the crude oil and gas has been achieved: even then, it cannot be claimed that Nigerians have mastered the technology after over thirty years of refining experience. The new Millennium must see the intensification of crude oil-and-gas-based industrialization in Nigeria.

The final essential element of the alternative development policy options is the rapid development of the knowledge industry, which links all the sectors in the economy. The primary input is brainpower. The most significant change expected in the new Millennium, as Dr. Pius Okigbo of richly blessed memory has argued, is a move from goods producing society to an information or knowledge society. It is no longer enough to have workers using their knowledge in their various occupations, the engineer building roads and bridges or the physician in the hospital. This is clearly different from the 'knowledge worker's engaged in th'e production and dis semination of knowledge. The investment in the 'knowledge worker' offers the best guarantee that the forthcoming generation of Nigerians in the new Millennium will be part of the increasingly knowledge-conscious world community. That investment will have to go all the ways from the primary to the tertiary educational system. It is not enough to invest in education, we must make it interesting enough for those in the knowledge industry to find their employment fulfilling. In the industrialized Western world, the average proportion of the gross domestic product dedicated to science and technology is about 2.3 percent per annum. Some third world countries have accepted the challenge to bridge the gap: India with 1.9 percent, Philippines 1.5 percent, Brazil 2 percent, Thailand 2 percent. South Korea 2.1 to 3 percent and even Bangladesh 1.1 percent. Even Cameroon and Egypt have achieved more than 0.5 percent while Nigeria Brings up the rear 'with only 0.3. The greatest challenge confronting the Nigerian economy in the new Millennium is how to greatly raise the proportion of the gross domestic product dedicated to the development of the knowledge industry in all its ramifications.

II. Implications For The Niger Delta Development

The alternation development policies identified and explicated in the preceding section have varying degrees of applicability to the resolution of the Niger Delta development problem. As a prerequisite for the applicability of the various development options in the Niger Delta, an institutional revolution must be brought about in Nigeria, encapsulating a fundamental change in the attitudes and perceptions of Federal Government leaders as well as in the attitudes and perceptions of the leaders of the Nigerian majority nationalities over the role of the Niger Delta Region in the politico-economic power distribution in the Nigerian political economy. Another aspect of the institutional revolution is the current sustainable transition-to-democratic experiment which should be characterized by restructuring and forging of new alliances and relationships among various groups of people in the Nigerian society, consistent with genuine democratic and humanist ethos, thereby liberating their productive powers by having unlimited opportunities for realizing their full human potentials. The postulated change in attitudes and perceptions must come to terms with two current realities in the Nigeria Delta Region vis-a-vis the rest of the Nigerian Federation.

The first reality is that the Niger Delta Region is the major source, through petroleum resources, of Nigeria's wealth, accounting for over 90 percent of export and foreign exchange earnings and over 70 percent of total federally-collected revenue. The balanced development objective of the current Revenue Allocation system has,
paradoxically, created conditions of deepening crisis of underdevelopment and of grinding poverty in the Niger Delta Region because that objective has failed to address practical development policy issues such as environmental impact of resource exploitation, intergenerational gap created by present resource exploitation, and balancing present losses (opportunity costs) with gains/benefits to the areas where the revenue generating resources are located. This reality has increasingly been brought to national and international audiences by the daily anguish of the Niger Delta people in an age of instant communication technology, graphically describing how the Niger Delta Region is saddled with a destroyed. through the activities of the oil industry, ecosystem, topography and surface vegetation, and how many lives are currently being lost and farmlands, fishponds and homes are being devastated by oil pollution and burstages of oil pipelines. A winter of discontent has, in consequence, increasingly descended on the Niger Delta people with disastrous social and economic consequences for the region and the Nigerian nation.

The second reality is that the Niger Delta Region has been the main provider of the fiscal resources in the hands of the Federal Government, creating as observed earlier, fiscal unitaristic state over which the various factions of the national governing elite struggle to control. It can be argued from the available empirical evidence that the factions of the national governing elite that constituted the military oligarchs together with their Nigerian civilian militicians and foreign collaborators \vho governed Nigeria under the prolonged military rule of the 1970-79 and 1984-99 periods used the fiscal unitaristic Nigerian state to encourage an extremely low degree of the realization of economic surplus extracted from the petroleum export sector through productive accumulation, implying that unproductive accumulation substantially characterized the Nigerian economy during the prolonged military rule. This phenomenon formed the major structural source of economic decline, especially of 1988s and 1990s, manifested in the incidence of widespread poverty and deprivation of the majority of the population whilst the military oligarchs together with their Nigerian militicians indulged in conspicuous consumption and economic surplus expatriation from the Nigerian economy.

The discussion in the preceding paragraphs of the two realities currently confronting the Nigel Delta Region vis-a-vis the rest of the Nigerian Federation has implications for a fundamental restructuring of resource availability to, and resource utilization by different tiers of government in the Nigerian Federation in the direction of the principle of true fiscal federalism. It is in this context that the applicability of the various development options identified and explicated in Section II above has real meaning and relevance in the Niger Delta Development.

The first step in the direction of the principle of true fiscal federalism is to resuscitate section 40 of the 1963 Republican Constitution founded on the principle of democratic governance, which states that the control of resources should be such that it is "the sum equal to 50 percent of the proceeds of any royalty or rent extracted from that region..." (quoted in Okoh and Egbon, 1999, p. 418). The remaining 50 percent could be shared among different tiers of government on the bases of the principles of equality of states, access to development opportunities, minimum standards for national integration, population and any other principles that the National Assembly may legislate upon. It is in the context of Section 40 of the 1963 Republican Constitution that some citizens of the Niger Delta Region have been calling on the Federal Government to bequeath to them private oil mineral rights to be part-owners with the Federal Government as well as oil lifting rights and oil distribution rights.

The issue of control of natural resources is the most critical of all the issues concerning the prospects of implementing the various development options discussed earlier. The issue of control of natural resources is implied by the provision of Section 162(2) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 which states:.. "Provided that the principle of derivation shall be constantly reflected in any approved formula as being not less than thirteen percent of the revenue accruing to the Federation Account directly from any natural resources". Vesting the control of petroleum resources m the governments of oil producing states in the Niger Delta Region will dramatically transform the Niger Delta development prospects. Such an achievement requires an exercise of enormous political power engineering by the Government, the understanding of the Nigerian majority nationalities, and all the other political power blocks in the Nigerian Federation, all of which must be committed to the politico-economic enterprise of preserving and consolidating our nascent democratic experiment.

The foregoing should be the development agenda for the Niger Delta Region and not the establishment of the Niger Delta Development Commission. Indeed, it can be argued that the establishment of this Commission represents a monumental deception and a diversion from waging the much needed struggle by the Niger Delta Region to engender a fundamental restructuring of the existing fiscal unitaristic arrangement in the direction of true fiscal federalism, anchored on the principle of derivation in natural-resource-revenue sharing and on resource-control powers vested, in the State Governments of the Nigerian Federation. This is because the establishment of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) is nothing new. There has long been in existence the Niger Delta Development Board) (NDDC)' Act of 1961. A careful scrutiny of the NDDC Act of 2000 will reveal that it is mutatis mutandis with the 1961 NDDB Act. Similarly, the NDDC Act of 2000 is mutatis mutandis with the 1992 Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC)) Act. All that has been done with respect to the NDDC Act of 2000 is some infinitesimal amendments, which do not deviate from the philosophy of the 1961 and 1992 Acts. That philosophy has been anchored on the adoption by successive Federal Government Leadership over the years of "defensive radicalism", to borrow late Professor Claude Ake's telling phrase, to starve off reformist and revolutionary pressures in the Niger Delta Region. The time has come for ihe governments. Communities and People of the Niger Delta Region to take their developmental destiny into their own hands by intensifying rheir struggles for the genuine people-and-comm unity-oriented transformation of their Region within a drastically reconstituted and restructured Nigerian Federalism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• ALELE-WILLIAMS, G. ET AL (ED) Niger Delta Environmental Survey Proceedings of the Stakeholders Seminar. Port-Harcourt, 24-251'1 October 1995 and the Effurun, November 1995. Consultative meeting with Stakeholders.
• ASIODU, P.C. (1979), Nigeria and the Oil Question, Ibadan, Nigeria Economic Society.
• DUDLEY SEERS (1981), The Life Cycle of a Petroleum Economy. Research for Development, Vol. 1, No. 1.. January.
• EKUERHARE, B.U. AND C.O. ORUBU (1996). Niger Delta Environmental Survey: Economics of the Niger Delta - Report of the Economics Specialist.
• EKUERHARE, B.U. (1996) Studies in Pattern and Problems of Indust r i a I Accumulation in Nigeria, Lagos, Van Hurst Nigeria Limited.
• EKUERHARE, B.U. (1997), Economic Structure and Development Policy: First Inaugural Lecture Delivered at the Delta State University. Delta State University.