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Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

The Governor of Bauchi state, Bala Mohammed, yesterday insinuated that the Kolmani Integrated Development Project in the North-east, a multi-billion naira oil exploration project located between Gombe and Bauchi communities, had been abandoned.

Although many Nigerians had posited that the project which former President Muhammadu Buhari vigorously pursued, was politically motivated, rather than for its economic viability, the government at the time had maintained that the oil find was real and viable.

In November 2022, Buhari  flagged off the project, stressing that the oil exploration in the area had  already attracted over $3 billion foreign direct investment and will boost Nigeria’s earnings, with discovery of over 1 billion barrels of oil reserves and 500 billion Cubic Feet of gas.

At the event attended at the time by then Senate President, Ahmad Lawan; the then presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu; Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva; and the Group Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited, Mele Kyari, Buhari said the project was expected to start with a daily production of about 50,000 barrels of crude oil.

Others included Bala Mohammed (Bauchi), Inuwa Yahaya (Gombe), Simon Lalong (Plateau), among others. It was meant to be funded by the Frontier Exploration Fund (FEF) with the allocation of 30 per cent of the profit from NNPC’s upstream oil and gas contracts.

But speaking  yesterday on a national television, Mohammed said that not much activity was going on around the area, stressing however that the government was no longer serious about the project.

“After the expiration of the last regime, since then we have not seen much activity. But recently, we saw some bulldozers, as if to deceive and delude us. As far as we are concerned, we are leveraging other resources I told you about. We have coal.

“There is not much activity going on in Kolmani River located between Gombe and Bauchi states, maybe due to the huge capital involved. But I spoke to some NNPC officials, and they said they are coming back.

“But for a long time, they have disappeared, and it will appear they are not very serious about it. I am trying to get an appointment with the president to appeal to him on our behalf because it will be an astute development for oil and gas potential.

“That means we are going to have power generation, a refinery, and a petrochemical industry. We will have so much, and since we don’t have pipes to take oil to Europe, it will be a double-edged advantage for us if we get developers with the capacity. It will also serve the whole northern part of the country,” Bala Mohammed said.

Besides, the governor, who is the Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Governors Forum, disclosed that the North-east governors were collaborating to capitalise on the deregulated electricity sector and tackle the power challenges in the region.

“Fortunately, we have the North East Development Commission (NEDC) and we decided as six governors that we are going to do something uniformly. The huge capital required to provide power is not for states like us that don’t have the benefit of derivation or extra resources. We have to start somewhere.

“The inside knowledge will give us a better understanding of where we are and where we want to go. We have a comparative advantage in terms of green energy. In Bauchi and Gombe, we have hydrocarbons and gas, and the presence is so huge.

“In my own state, we are working with the private sector, and we are going to establish a N1.5 billion cement factory to produce 10 metric tonnes of cement annually,” he added.