Early interest by Nigeria’s leading oil exploration firms including Lekoil Nigeria Limited in exploring the Dahomey Basin, a combination of inland and coastal offshore fields stretching from Ghana, through Togo and Benin to southwest Nigeria, has yielded a potential 5 billion barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of gas reserves, which could turn the region into the next frontier of commercial oil exploration writes ISAAC ANYAOGU . Two centuries ago, the name Dahomey gained notoriety for the slave trade with Europe and the eventual humiliation the Kingdom suffered when it was forced to pay tribute to the Oyo empire. Today, Dahomey is renowned as an oil patch important enough to earn Lagos State, the classification of an oil-producing state. This happened because oil companies, especially indigenous operators, poured millions of dollars into the dream that the Nigerian sector of the Dahomey Basin covering three different states – Lagos, Ogun, and Ondo – would hold vast deposits...