HARNESSING NIGERIA’S PETROLEUM RESOURCES UNDER CONTEMPORARY LAW OF THE SEA: PROSPECTS AND CHALLENGES FOR NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT.

Abstract

Nigeria as a coastal state party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has great prospects of prosperity and national development through harnessing the nation’s petroleum resources as allowed under international law and relevant municipal legislation. This paper studies the reasons behind the non-optimal utilization of the opportunities offered by the treaty for economic growth and interrogates the link between the peculiar structure of Nigeria federalism and the dismal policy performance of harnessing and utilization of the proceeds from the exploitation of the nation’s petroleum resources for all round national development. In undertaking the studies, content analytical method was adopted as data were generated from mainly secondary sources such as official publications, articles from reputable journals, conference and workshop papers, newspapers, textbooks, internet materials e.t.c The Marxist social-class analysis is the theoretical framework of analysis upon which the study is anchored. The Marxist theory views the national socio-economic formation as essentially class-based, comprising the dominant class and the dominated class. The law is also seen as an instrument of class domination and exploitation. The findings revealed a number of challenges inhibiting optimal harnessing of the nation’s petroleum resources and the use of proceeds derived therefrom for national development and made recommendations on how to correct the anomalies and move the nation forward.