Fifteen years after the Bakassi peninsula was finally ceded to Cameroon, the paramount ruler of Bakassi local government area of Cross River state, HRM Etinyin Etim Okon Edet, has lamented the loss of the peninsular, saying his people were unjustly uprooted from their ancestral homes to nowhere.
Speaking in an interview with Blueprint in Calabar, HRM Edet, who is also the chairman of Cross River Traditional Rulers Council, said, “I feel bad anytime I remember that ugly experience. My people and I were uprooted like a plant from our ancestral homes just like that. Since then, our lives have not been the same.
“I left behind my fishing trawlers, fishing nets, my palatial homes and assets worth millions of Naira in the peninsular because I did not want to be forced into being a Cameroonian.
“Even the United Nations team who came with former president Olusegun Obasanjo was impressed. Obasanjo told me the government would replicate what they saw there in another place that I would relocate to and that was how I left my home, believing in a fake promise.
“I expected former president Goodluck Jonathan to fulfill that promise, but he did not do it, and I am now calling on President Muhammadu Buhari to do something about our plight as Bakassi Internally Displaced Persons. In fact, I am the number one IDP in the whole of Nigeria, followed by Senator Florence Ita-Giwa and others who no longer have ancestral homes.
“For somebody like me to leave my father’s house in Bakassi, which was a centre of attraction, and sojourn in Calabar, calls for concern. It is God who is keeping us and it takes only God to subdue the psychological trauma of that experience and till today, nobody is talking. Government is behaving as if nothing had happened. My displaced subjects are still suffering.”
He appealed to the federal government to fulfil all the promises it made to the Bakassi natives “so as to give them a sense of belonging.”
