How to solve our fiscal problems today: Sell Akwa Ibom State

I saw this on my whatsapp group yesterday. Author is unknown:

Aerial view of some patrs of Akaw Ibom state

In my opinion, the best way out of Nigeria's problem is to sell Akwa Ibom State to a foreign country that doesn't produce oil, like South Africa or France. Or a country that needs more oil like the USA.

Why Akwa Ibom? It is at the edge of Nigeria. Their next door neighbour is Cameroon and the Atlantic Ocean. There will be minimal disruption to the rest of the country. Akwa Ibom has over 50 oil wells and abundant gas reserves. The buyer gets the 50 plus oil wells and four million "overseas citizens". Nigeria still has a few thousand oil wells left from the other NDDC states and new wells from Lagos. This is like selling 10 acres of your farm when you have another 10,000 acres left to farm!

France is a better deal, if you ask me. They have deep pockets and are urgently in need of alternative mineral resources as they are closing a lot of their nuclear plants in the next 10 years. They need a readily available supply of gas and petroleum without the headache of dealing with OPEC and gyrating oil prices.

Map of Akwa Ibom

In return, Nigeria gets billions of dollars to settle all its debts and plough back cash into much needed infrastructure. For Akwa Ibom the workers get paid henceforth in Euro which they spend in the neighbouring states of Cross River and Abia. And the 4 million citizens get EU passports and can move freely to Europe to work and repatriate cash back to buy properties in Lagos and Abuja.

Everyone wins in this deal! Nigeria has one less state to share its allocation with. The state in turn now earns Euro and doesn’t need allocation from Nigeria.

There is precedence of this happening in the past. Alaska was acquired by the US from Russia, Louisiana from France, Texas from Mexico, US Virgin Islands from Denmark.

Presently, the French oversea territories are Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Polynesia, French Guiana, Mayotte, New Caledonia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Wallis and Futuna, Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin. French oversea territories have seats in the French Parliament and can vote in EU elections. Akwa Ibom will be the new oversea territory.

The present Senators and Representatives will move from the Nigerian Senate and House of Representatives to the French Senate and French National Assembly respectively.

We don’t need to sell NLNG or other assets.

This is the winning deal figured out by a home grown historian that doesn't have a Ph.d in economics but has a sound understanding of history.

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