Former Akwa Ibom AG faults Aondoakaa’s claim on Cross River’s littoral Status
• Ntekim & Aondoakaa
Former Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice in Akwa Ibom State, Barr. Ekpeyong Ntekim, has faulted recent comments credited to Mr. Michael Kaase Aondoakaa, SAN, regarding the Supreme Court judgment on the littoral status of Cross River State.
In a statement issued in Uyo, Ntekim described as misleading a report published in ThisDay newspaper of August 20, 2025, where Aondoakaa was quoted as insisting that Cross River remained a littoral state based on “naval data” and “technical reports” allegedly relied upon by the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s administration.
According to Ntekim, it was unfortunate that a former Attorney-General of the Federation who was directly involved as 1st Defendant in SC. 250/2009: Attorney General, Cross River State v Attorney General of the Federation & Attorney General, Akwa Ibom State could make such claims 16 years after the case was filed, 15 years after leaving office, and 13 years after the Supreme Court had conclusively determined the matter.
Quoting past judicial pronouncements, Ntekim recalled that superior courts of record had severely reprimanded Mr. Aondoakaa, SAN, for his professional conduct, particularly his advice to public institutions to disobey subsisting judgments. He cited the 2021 Supreme Court decision in SC. 939/2015: Michael K. Aondoakaa v Emmanuel Bassey Obot, where Justice Kudirat Kekere-Ekun (JSC, as she then was) described his conduct as “highly reprehensible” and concluded that he “ought not to be entrusted with any other public office at all.”
Ntekim maintained that Aondoakaa’s latest intervention was an opportunistic attempt to “revive relevance in the legal community” and to reopen the settled issue of the 76 oil wells between Akwa Ibom and Cross River States. He further dismissed Aondoakaa’s claim that the presence of the Eastern Naval Command in Calabar proved Cross River’s littoral status, stressing that the Nigerian Navy has established strategic operations in non-littoral states such as Kogi, Niger, and Anambra purely for internal security reasons.
“The public must be guided to treat Mr. Aondoakaa’s assertions with caution. By his role in the case, he is most incompetent to advise or take a contrary position to what he defended as Attorney-General of the Federation. The Supreme Court’s judgment remains final and binding,” Ntekim declared.
