NIGER DELTA
ECONOMIES OF VIOLENCE
WORKING PAPERS
Working Paper No. 4
OIL AND MILITANCY IN THE NIGER DELTA
Terrorist Threat or Another Colombia?
Oronto Douglas
Deputy Director, Environmental Rights Action (ERA), Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Ike Okonta
Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and
Environmental Rights Action (ERA), Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Dimieari Von Kemedi
Environmental Politics Fellow, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and
Our Niger Delta (OND), Port Harcourt, Nigeria
Michael Watts
Director, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA
2004
Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA
The United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC, USA
Our Niger Delta, Port Harcourt, Nigeria
OIL AND MILITANCY IN THE NIGER DELTA: TERRORIST THREAT
OR ANOTHER COLOMBIA?1
By Oronto Douglas, Von Kemedi, Ike Okonta, and Michael Watts2
In the wake of September 11th and the Iraq war, the geo-political significance of Nigeria
to the United States has sharpened. As a major supplier of oil, the conflicts surrounding
the April 2003 elections, and the militancy across the Niger Delta that radically
disrupted oil production in March and April 2003, has reinforced the notion that
Nigeria, and the new West African “Gulf States” in general, are matters of US national
security. Against this backdrop, the recent Centre for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington DC Policy brief (CSIS Africa Notes “Alienation and Militancy in
Nigeria’s Niger Delta” ) by Esther Cesarz, Steve Morrison and Jennifer Cooke is of signal
importance. As they properly say, the recent oil crisis highlights “more profound
national challenges” that are now facing the re-elected President Obasanjo and his
government. In their view, the recent conflicts in the Delta mark a watershed,
distinguished in particular by the prospects of “an upward spiral of violence”. The new
levels of weaponry and criminal activity of a “frustrated and angry youth”, suggest “new
ambitions and capacities” among the Ijaw who are nothing less than an armed militia.
The specter of Colombia is now haunting Nigeria says the CSIS brief. US companies,
they note, will become targets of terrorist activity, and Nigeria’s national stability and
cohesion threatened. We believe that this account is wrong-headed on a number of
accounts. It misdiagnoses the nature of the political crisis in the Delta, fails to
understand the political dynamics of the Ijaw and minority politics in general, makes
unsubstantiated comparisons with the likes of Aceh and Colombia, and rather
astonishingly ignores some of the key actors (the oil companies being a case in point)
and downplay a number of fundamental political problems to be faced. None of this is
to suggest that the issues the CSIS brief mentions in passing – federalism, resource
allocation, minority rights and so on – are not of immediate and unequivocal concern,
but their analysis of how such issues relate to the Niger Delta and the Ijaw in particular
seem to us to be radically wanting.
The Niger Delta and National Security
A year before the events of September 11th 2001, the US Department of State in its
annual encyclopaedia of ‘global terrorism’ identified the Niger Delta – the geographical
heart of oil production in Nigeria – as a breeding ground for militant and “impoverished
1 This brief is in part a response to, and a continuing dialogue with, the CSIS Africa Notes #16 May 2003,
“Alienation and Militancy in Nigeria’s Niger Delta”, The Africa Program, Center for Strategic and
International Studies, Washington DC.
2 Oronto Douglas is associated with Environmental Rights Action in Port Harcourt; Ike Okonta and
Michael Watts respectively Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellow and Director of the Institute of International Studies,
University of California, Berkeley; Von Kemedi is the Director of Our Niger Delta in Port Harcourt.
ethnic groups” for whom terrorist acts (abduction, hostage taking, kidnapping and extrajudicial
killings) were legion (http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000). A CIA report
published a year earlier (2000), warned of the catalytic effects of “environmental
stresses” in the oil-rich southern Delta on deepening “political tensions” at a time when
Nigeria – currently the 6th largest producer of petroleum - was providing almost 14% of
US American petroleum consumption (http://www.eia.gov/emeu/cabs/nigeria.html).
Throughout the last decade or so Nigeria has supplied around 8-10% on average of US
oil imports and within a decade, as the deep-water fields are exploited (and as new
reserves are discovered), Nigeria could be producing annually far in excess of Venezuela
or Kuwait. Nigeria had, of course, become an archetypal “oil nation:” by the 1970’s.
Oil revenues currently provides for 80% of government revenues, 95% of export
receipts, and 90% of foreign exchange earnings. The geo-political significance of
Nigerian oil to the US, particularly against the backdrop of rising prices, tight markets
and political instability in the Gulf, Indonesia and parts of Latin America, is widely
understood. Even before September 11th, the Petroleum Finance Company (PFC)
presented to the US Congressional International Relations Committee Sub-Committee
on Africa a report of the strategic and growing security significance of West African oil
whose high quality reserves and low cost output – coupled with massive new deepwater
discoveries – required, in the view of PFC, serious attention, and substantial foreign
investment. In the wake of the Al-Quaeda attacks and the Guldf War, Nigeria and West
African producers have emerged as “the new Gulf oil states” (Servant, Le Monde
diplomatique, January 13th 2003). By January 2002 the Institute for Advanced Strategic
and Political Studies provided a forum for the Bush administration to declare that
African oil is “a priority for US national security” (http://www.iasps.org). In the last
year, the ugly footprint of Africa’s black gold – in Gabon, Sao Tome, Angola, Equatorial
Guinee – are rarely off the front pages. Oil and blood, as Jon Anderson (2000) put it in
the New Yorker, And all this haunted by the spectre of terror; the “nightmare” as the
New York Times noted (October 14th 2001: III, p.1) of “sympathizers of Osama Bin Laden
sink[ing] three oil tankers in the Straits of Hormuz”.
The mythos of oil and oil-wealth has been of course central to the history of modern
industrial capitalism. But in Nigeria, as elsewhere in, the discovery of oil, and annual oil
revenues of $40 billion currently, has ushered in a miserable, undisciplined, decrepit, and
corrupt form of ‘petro-capitalism’. After a half century of oil production from which
almost $300 billion in oil revenues have flowed directly into the Federal exchequer (and
perhaps fifty billion promptly flowed out only to ‘disappear’ overseas), Nigerian per
capita income stands at $290 per year. For the majority of Nigerians, living standards
are no better now than at independence in 1960. A repugnant culture of excessive
venality and profiteering among the political class - the Department of State has an
entire website devoted to so-called 419 fraud cases - confers upon Nigeria the dubious
honor of sitting atop Transparency International’s ranking of most corrupt states.
Paradoxically, oil-producing states in the federation have benefited the least from oilwealth.
Devastated by the ecological costs of oil spillage and the highest gas flaring rates
in the world, the Niger Delta is a political tinderbox. A generation of militant ‘restive’
youth, deep political frustrations among oil producing communities, and pre-electoral
thuggery all combine to prosper in the rich soil of political marginalization. The massive
election rigging across the Delta in the April 2003 elections simply confirmed the worst
for the millions of Nigerians who have suffered from decades of neglect. It was the great
Polish journalist, Kapucinksi, who noted in his meditation on oil-rich Iran: “Oil creates
the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free, The concept of
oil expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth achieved through lucky
accident, In this sense oil is a fairy tale and like every fairy tale a bit of a lie” (1982: 35).
It is this lie that currently confronts West African oil producers, and the Nigerian Niger
Delta in particular.
It is, then, perhaps no accident that the Middle East historian Robert Vitalis (2001) has
recently suggested that the rapid, complete and irreversible rise of American dominance
in Saudi Arabia can shed much light on why “the Niger Delta is currently in crisis”. And
indeed it is. Since March 12th 2003, mounting communal violence accounting for at least
fifty deaths, and the leveling of eight communities in and around the Warri petroleum
complex , has prompted all the major oil companies to withdraw staff, to close down
operations and reduce output by over 750,000 barrels per day (almost half of national
output). President Obasanjo has dispatched large troop deployments to the oilproducing
creeks prompting Ijaw militants, incensed over illegal oil bunkering in which
the security forces were implicated and indiscriminate military action, to threaten the
detonation of eleven captured oil installations. The strikes on the off-shore oil platforms
– a long festering sore that rarely reaches the media – were quickly resolved but
nobody seriously expects that the deeper problems within the oil sector will go away.
Relatively new to delta politics, however, are a series of assassinations, the most
shocking being the killing of Chief Marshall Harry, a senior member of the main
opposition party and leading campaigner for greater resource allocation to the oil
producing Niger Delta. Fallout from the Harry assassination has already become a
source of tension in his native oil producing state of Rivers were supporters of the main
opposition party, the ANPP and another opposition grouping of activists and politicians,
the Rivers Democratic Movement, have linked the ruling party to the assassination.
With good reason, the business–as-usual character of the gubernatorial election
victories across the oil-producing states, has led some to believe that the rubicon has
been crossed.
Certainly, the Niger Delta stands at the crossroads of contemporary Nigerian politics.
Even with the growth of oil-revenues to the delta states – now standing at 13% - the
region remains desperately poor, and it is the deepening material and political grievances
that stem from the region’s exclusion that place the Niger delta at the confluence of the
four most pressing political issues in the federation in the wake of the April 2003
elections. First, the efforts led by a number of Delta states for “resource control,”
which in effect means expanded local access to oil and oil revenues. Second, the
struggle for self-determination of minority people and the clamor for a sovereign
national conference to rewrite the federal constitution. Third, a crisis of rule in the
region as a number of state and local governments are rendered helpless by militant
youth movements, growing insecurity and intra-community, inter-ethnic and state
violence. And not least, the emergence of what is called a South-South Alliance linking
the hitherto excluded oil producing states in a bulwark against the ethnic majorities.
A Threshold Crossed?
Does the current crisis in the Niger Delta represent a watershed, some sort of
“threshold crossed” which “departs fundamentally from prior patterns” (of conflict) as
the CSIS brief suggests? Do recent events mark, as they say, “a new point of crisis”?
We think not. This question must be placed on the larger canvas of recent, and
especially post-military, history. Obasanjo’s presidential victory in 1999, in the wake of
the darkest period of military rule in Nigeria’s forty year post-Independence history,
held much promise. An internationally recognized statesman and diplomat imprisoned
during the brutal Abacha years, he inherited the mantle of a massively corrupt state
apparatus, an economy in shambles, and a federation crippled by the longstanding ethnic
enmity. Committed to reforming a corrupt and undisciplined military - the largest in
Africa - and to deepening the process of democratization, Obasanjo was confronted
within months of his inauguration by militant ethnic groups speaking the language of selfdetermination,
local autonomy and resource control (meaning a greater share of the
federally allocated oil revenues). In an incident widely condemned by the human rights
community, some 2000 persons were slaughtered in Odi, Bayelsa State after federal
troops were dispatched in response to clashes between local militants and the police.
Obasanjo has consistently refused to apologize for the murders and there has been no
full inquiry. Last year the military was involved in yet another massacre, this time in the
Middle Belt, in Benue and Taraba States, in what was the most serious communal
conflict since the clashes which preceded the outbreak of the Biafran civil war in 1967.
On President Obasanjo’s watch, over 10,000 have perished in ethnic violence. He has
failed miserably to address the human rights violations by the notoriously corrupt
Nigerian security forces.
In reality a number of glaring democratic deficits compromise the institutions of
democratic rule that are being painstakingly constructed. A broad consensus believes
that the 1999 constitution is deeply flawed. Crafted by the departing soldiers, the
constitution provided no opportunity for ordinary Nigerians to debate what they
consider the central conundrum of the national crisis: the terms of association in a
multi-ethnic polity. The rise of ethnic militias and communal vigilante politics flourished
during the Abacha years (1993-1998) when Nigerians experienced the most severe
political repression and economic hardship in the country’s history. The O’odua
Peoples Congress (OPC) for example was established in the Yoruba-speaking southwest
in 1994 largely to protest the annulment of the 1993 elections in which Moshood
Abiola, a Yoruba Muslim, hasd seemingly won the presidency. Led by disenchanted and
impoverished youth, the organization claimed that a ‘northern cabal’ in the Army had
denied Abiola victory and aggressively pressed for Yoruba political autonomy. Two
vigilante groups, the Bakassi Boys and Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign
State of Biafra (MASSOB), emerged in the Igbo-speaking southeast two years later.
MASSOB claimed that the Nigerian state and its functionaries had systematically
oppressed the Igbo since the end of the civil war and sought to secure selfdetermination
by resuscitating the Republic of Biafra, whose bid to secede from the
Federation was crushed by Nigerian troops in 1970. Arewa Peoples Congress (APC)
emerged in the north in 1999 as a reaction to the killing of northern elements in Lagos
and other Yoruba cities and towns by OPC cadres, and as a foil to the new Obasanjo
government which many northerners viewed as a ‘Yoruba regime.’ APC claimed that
the harassment of northerners in the southwest was part of a Yoruba plan to secede
and establish an O’oduwa Republic,’ that President Obasanjo was sympathetic to OPC’s
goals, and that the North would go to war if necessary to prevent national
dismemberment. These and other ethnic forces have come to play a transformative role
in political life largely as party thugs, enforcers, and champions of local interests.
The current crisis in Warri, in which three thousand Nigerian troops have been
deployed to ‘restore law and order’, cannot be grasped outside of these powerful
political forces. The profile of a militant faction of Ijaw youth has been unjustly amplified
to justify the size of deployment. Reports from refugees fleeing the creeks indicate the
military are engaged in scorch earth violence designed, like the Odi massacre, ‘to teach
the Ijaws a lesson’. There have been conflicting accounts of the immediate cause of the
violence one of which is linked to a disagreement between elements of the Nigerian
military and an oil baron over the proceeds of illegal oil bunkering. Central to the
Warri crisis however is poverty amidst unfathomable oil wealth. The oil producing
communities seek to control ‘their oil’ but this legitimate claim is refracted through the
lens of ethnic difference as Urhobo, Ijaw and Itsekiri people struggle over the
delineation of electoral wards (as a precondition to claim state oil revenues) and overlapping
claims on oil-rich land. Warring factions and the army have so far been
responsible for many deaths and the destruction of scores of communities.
In sum, it would be naïve to deny the growing violence in the Delta and the extent to
which democratization has deepened the ethnic spoils politics that has been central to
the political landscape of post-colonial Nigeria. But it is far too apocaltyptic to read into
these troubling trends some sort of historical precipice over which Nigeria is about to
tumble.
Bigger Ambitions, Better Capacities?
What marks the current political moment in the Niger Delta, according to the CSIS
brief, is the enhanced political ambitions and capacities of the Ijaw marked by violence
and criminal leanings, With their eyes firmly on the national prize says CSIS, they are
armed and willing to use them, and transformed from a “loosely organized
…movement” into an “armed ethnic militia”. Is this a plausible argument? In fact, the
focus of Ijaw leaders has always been national even as they work to address pressing
problems in their immediate locality: the Niger Delta. Their 1958 submission to the
Willink Commission, - set up by the British on the eve of formal independence to
enquire into the fears of Nigeria’s ethnic minority groups, for a more inclusive federal
state in which they would enjoy the fruits and also the obligations of full citizenship to
the present - framed their grievances in ways in which the national arena was an
audience and site of struggle.
Such issues as flaws in the electoral process, resentment of Nigeria’s national army and
inequities in the allocation of oil receipts have engaged the attention of Ijaw leaders
since the late 1950s when the politics of the Eastern region was dominated by a single
political party, (the NCNC) which not only had centralizing ambitions but also excluded
significant ethnic
minorities, including the Ijaw, from the regional government which was the source and
distributor of patronage and strategic resources. Indeed, questions concerning Nigeria’s
fundamentally flawed political process, whether in the guise of military rule or electoral
politics, has always been top of the agenda in the Delta since oil became a significant
player in the country’s political economy. These grievances now appear to be ‘new’
because the terrain of struggle has, since May 1999, shifted from a vicious military
dictatorship that sought to stifle all legitimate dissent by clamping down on civil society,
to an elected civilian government still dominated by a single political party but which
offers some room for mobilized communities and interest groups, including Ijaw leaders
and militants, to press their demands on the state.
There is no factual evidence to support the claim that Ijaw militants have displayed
“lethal new capacities” as the CSIS brief states, and a willingness and skill in using them.
The events of March 2003 in the Warri area was merely an escalation of a long-running
grievance, turning on the delineation of electoral wards which Ijaw leaders see as
deliberately skewed in favour of the Itsekiri. Clashes between Ijaw and Itsekiri militants
has been regular since the late 1990s as a result of this perceived injustice The
explosion of violence on the eve of the April 2003 elections was fundamentally, the
handiwork of rival local politicos desperate for success in the polls and mobilising all
available resources, including festering grievances like the electoral ward issue, to
achieve this objective.
While it is true that the parochial objectives of self-serving politicians feeds the wider
strategic goals of Ijaw leaders and militias alike for self-determination by dispensing funds
to the latter, there is nothing to suggest that these developments represent a
fundamental departure from the normal trajectory of political agitation in the area.
Machine guns, satellite phones, and speedboats are standards in the arsenal of military
troops deployed by the Nigerian state to pacify the oil-producing communities. Royal
Dutch/Shell and the other oil companies also supply these weapons, through a variety of
sophisticated fronts, to security operatives and mercenaries they retain in the Niger
delta, including local youth, fallout of the effort of the Nigerian state and the oil
companies to contain the legitimate demands of the Ijaw by militarizing the Niger delta.
There is a widespread presence of arms in the Delta – and this is a subject of much
concern – but at the very least one must appreciate its origins and dynamic links to state
and corporate actors.
Recent media reports drawing attention to a ‘weaponised’ Ijaw‚ and vengeful and
bloodthirsty militants‚ is a classic case of giving the dog a bad name in order to hang it.
The claim that Ijaw militants are now deliberately targeting and killing oil workers is
controversial, to say the least. Some oil workers were caught in the crossfire as Ijaw and
Itsekiri insurgents battled for supremacy in Warri last March. It is, however, significant
that the deceased were killed, not in the oil fields, but within Warri metropolis, a large
urban conurbation. While kidnapping of oil workers for ransom is a favored tactic of the
militants, abuse and killing is rare. Working in isolated flow stations in the dense swamps
which in most cases are poorly guarded, oil company personnel are very vulnerable, and
indeed easy target for these militias were it a new policy to target and kill them. That
there is, as yet, no independent and credible media reports of mass killings of these oil
workers in the Niger delta. Indeed history suggests that these sorts of rumors and
insinuations – oil corporations taking full-page advertisements in the Nigerian dailies
suggesting a descent into terrorism - work to paint to paint picture of a fully armed and
dangerous Ijaw militia out for blood sets the stage for yet another cycle of ethnic
cleansing reminiscent of Odi.
What is most striking, however, is current discussions (including CSIS) of the security
problems in the Niger Delta is the total invisibility of Shell and other powerful corporate
international actors in deepening and sustaining the crisis in the Niger Delta. Several
independent human rights organizations, most notably Human Rights Watch, have linked
the oil company to the spate of killings, rapes, and inter-communal feuds that have
crippled social and economic life in the Niger delta since 1993. Shell’s links to powerful
and corrupt Nigerian state officials is also well-known. The company‚s unrelenting attack
on the human ecosystem on which the local communities rely for sustenance has been
copiously documented by environmental groups. The fact that a case against Chevron
was recently heard in San Francisco Federal Court speaks powerfully to these issues of
corporate practice. Indeed detailed local community studies in Nembe, Peremabiri and
Ke/Bille by the authors (Kemedi 2003) have documented the need for new forms of
corporate accountability. Not a single one of the industrialized countries that makes
use of Shell’s oil has called for sanctions to be imposed on the oil companies operating
in the Niger delta. Any serious attempt to address the problem of alienation and
militancy in the area must focus on the global, not just the local.
A New Colombia?
Amidst the political corruption, the deepening crisis of governance, and the escalating
violence in and around ‘resource control’, does it make sense, as the CSIS brief
suggests, to draw a parallel between a ‘better positioned Ijaw’ and the revolutionary
violence in Colombia. Do the Ijaw “resemble “in an unsettling way the FARC and ELN”
as the CSIS brief states? There are obvious correspondences operating at the level of
what one might call the political economy of extraction. Colombia has emerged since
the mid-1980s as a significant oil producer (oil revenues now account for 35% of legal
exports) and a significant supplier to the US market. Conflicts between indigenous
communities – the U’wa most famously – and the state and multinational oil companies
are legion. And the links between the military, security and resource extraction – what
can best be understood as a militarized oil complex – are structurally analogous to
anyone familiar with Nigeria. Indeed both Colombia and Nigeria have to be grasped
regionally (the Andean oil region, and the West Africa petro-zone) in which, to use the
language of Michael Klare (2001), an “economization of international security affairs” is
at work.
But it is one thing to say that the Ijaw and the U’wa have “raised the stakes” and can
“embarrass government” but quite another to see “Delta ethnic militants” as Maoist
insurgents or terrorists tout court. First, the Colombian situation is a civil war of
longstanding that has been compounded by narcotraffic and by oil. Political violence of
many sorts is legendary in Colombia and long predates the emergence of oil as a
strategic national resource. Second the fundamental role of the Armed Forces in
Colombia cannot be grasped outside of the catalytic role played by the drug economy
and by the massive military assistance provided by the US. During the 1990s Colombia
moved near the top of the list of US foreign military aid, and in July 2000 “Plan
Colombia” committed $1.3 billion as an anti-narcotics counterinsurgency strategy. The
role of the military in Nigeria (and its relation to the oil industry in particular) is
obviously key, but there is no parallel to the external militarization fund in Colombia.
President Clinton did commit foreign assistance to ‘reprofessionalise’ the Nigerian army
in 1999, including the equipping and training of seven battalions at a cost of over
$1billion. During the Bush’s imperium, the presence of 200 special forces in Nigeria,
including on-site training grounds in some of the most sensitive areas of the Muslim
north, has generated enormous suspicion and now vocal opposition. Not unexpectedly,
a number of powerful Nigerian constituencies see a beleaguered and corrupt Obasanjo
regime as simply another miserable US oil colony, but this is in no way comparable to
the Colombian case. Third, the extreme violence of the Colombian case emerges from
the fact that the US in conjunction with the Colombian military has provided direct
support to protect oil installations (most recently $98 million in February 2002 by the
Bush Administration to protect the Canon Limon pipeline), is only part of a complex of
armed insurgencies, right-wing paramilitaries, and so-called legal mercenaries (or
‘contractors’) who operate symbiotically with the likes of Occidental and Ecopetrol.
While certain elements of this mix are present in the Nigerian situation there is a
qualitative difference between them. And finally, to see in the variety of Ijaw (or other
ethnic) movements the seeds of revolutionary Leftism is quite preposterous. To take
the Ijaw case, a number of political organization including the Ijaw Youth Council have
emerged in the last decade, though the histories of these so-called ethnic minorities in
the Delta can be traced back to the post-1945 period and before. The fact that
disenfranchised youth groups have acted in violent ways (especially in conflicted oil
producing communities like Nembe and Peremabiri) is incontestable; the presence of a
secondary arms market has also unequivocally transformed the nature of the violence
itself. To suggest that what passes as Ijaw ethnic militancy as secessionist, or as Left
insurgency, or as a provocation or prelude to massive civil war, is to fail to see that
these and other movements (some ethnic like the Ogoni political movement (MOSOP),
some pan-ethnic like the Kaiama Declaration) are actively engaged in a debate about
access to and control over resources within the federation, and by extension an
engagement with the Nigerian Constitution and what it means to be a full citizen. The
fact that massive poverty, disenfranchisement and a long dark history of military violence
should produce forms of politics that are neither civil nor democratic should surprise no
one. But to see in the seeds of Ijaw mobilization a ‘New Terror’ is a radical misreading
of the current political moment in the Niger Delta.
The Way Out
The strategic significance of Nigeria is incontestable. One of every five Africans is a
Nigerian, Nigeria is the world’s seventh largest exporter of petroleum and a key player
in African regional security, most recently in Sierra Leone. It is also home to a vast
Muslim community. Since the oil boom of the 1970s, political power has shifted from
the conservative Sufi brotherhoods to well-organized modern Islamist groups like the
‘Yan Izala founded in 1978. Sharia’a law, of a dogmatic and literalist sort, has been
adopted and implemented in twelve of the populous northern states, amidst
considerable political acrimony and international censure. At least 350 people were
killed in four days of terrible rioting in northern Nigeria triggered by protests against US
military action in Afghanistan, including particularly bloody clashes between Muslims and
Christians in Kano, Kaduna and Jos. The September 2003 debacle surrounding Miss
World, in which religious controversy and political violence resulted in the competition
being moved from Abuja to London, signaled the extent to which religion has entered
the political arena.
The Obasanjo government, torn between its championing of a strong and united
Nigeria and powerful pro-federal and ethnic autonomy sentiments among key
constituencies, has been unable to articulate a coherent policy to contain the sorts of
claims emerging from the Niger Delta. Even the advent of electoral politics has
deepened the appeal of popular grievances, including the ethnic militia, in the face of
government’s dismal failure to tackle their pressing economic and social problems.
Ethnic militias, inter-communal violence, and the resurgent cries for a sovereign national
conference, true federalism and resource control‚ all speak to a sort of tectonic fissure
now separating state and society. Above all there is a profound sense that the
democratic space of Nigeria is neither large enough nor deep enough to accommodate
the clamor for regional and local autonomy, and new political entitlements. Nigerians
remain, despite the democratic dispensation, subjects not citizens.
CSIS rightly says that “intensive mediation” and “de-escalation” is required, and that the
federal government must “engage in good faith on jurisdictional boundaries, corruption,
allocation of resources, economic revitalization, electoral administration” and so on.
But any “path out”, as they put it, must, in our view, address the citizenship question at
a number of levels.
First, at the national level oil is at the heart of persistent policy failure in Nigeria. From
1970 onwards, the country’s political, economic, and policy elites have put in place an
authoritarian and commandist power structure to enable them centralize control of
strategic resources, including the not insubstantial oil receipts. This rent-seeking
behaviour has not only banished the great majority of ordinary Nigerians from the
policy-making process, it has also led the power elites to pursue social and economic
strategies that are shortsighted and self-serving, strategies that are not driven by the
needs of the people. The consequence has been material scarcity, deepening frustration,
and social unrest, in the Niger Delta as elsewhere.
Focus should now be on a just and sustainable political order and ways in which this can
be brought about, giving due weight to the fears, needs, and aspirations of the various
social and interest groups in the country. There is growing consensus that a unitary
system of government is not suited to a socially diverse country like Nigeria. A federal
democracy, turning on a measured dose of fiscal autonomy for the federating units, not
unlike the provisions of the country’s independence constitution, is recommended. This
will help diversify the revenue base of the country by enhancing domestic taxation as
non-oil producing areas would be forced to find alternative ways to boost the
exchequer.
An economically diversified polity also tends to introduce new non-oil players into the
policy-making process whose interests would serve as a check on the political class‚ and
their rent-seeking, curbing the powerful drive towards political authoritarianism.
Political federalism also throws up new social forces in the regions thus serving as a
countervailing force as they press their own demands on the state. Further, democracy
is more likely to be
enhanced where different sets of actors with diverse social and economic bases are
competing in a level playing field. And because no one group would be powerful enough
to dominate the state and use its organs to pursue its narrow interests, the need of all
for the institutionalization of a disinterested and efficient public service, relatively
corrupt-free public agencies, due process and the rule of law, would be compelling.
Most of all, those running for office, and Nigeria’s government elect, must be willing to
tackle the structural causes of endemic violence and mass poverty in a political economy
in which oil contaminates virtually everything. In the absence of robust democratic
institutions and a meaningful sense of citizenship, another oil boom - secured perhaps
with the heavy artillery of American empire - will only tear Nigeria apart.
Second, in order for Nigeria’s federal democracy to be meaningful to ordinary people
and their social and economic needs, a new compact between state and society, in
which the civic, political and social rights of the people are not only clearly spelled out
but are made justiceable, will have to be worked out. A socially and economicallyempowered
body politic will encourage active citizens, eager to participate in public
affairs. And broad and active participation in public affairs by an enlightened citizenry is
the secret of good policy.
More than forty years after the Willink Commission noted that the Niger Delta is “poor
backward and neglected, and in the wake of several insurrections including a devastating
civil war and nine military coups all linked to the scramble for the oil resource of the
Niger Delta, the communities and the people are no better off than they were in 1958.
To the people of the Niger Delta who have over the years clamored for a space in the
Nigerian sun, resources does not exclusively mean only oil and gas as much of the
clamor for corporate and governmental control tends to suggest. Resources means
primarily land for agriculture, waters for fishing, forests for collecting and air for living
and the other physical and spiritual biota. Resource control is the term used to describe
the desire and determination of the communities and people whose resources and or
sources of survival have been taken away violently and undemocratically and therefore
unjustly. It denotes the need to regain ownership, control, use and management of
resources for the primary benefit of the communities and people on whose land the
resources originate and for good governance and development of the entire country.
The refusal of successive Nigerian governments to protect the land and people of the
Niger Delta from the hazards of hydrocarbon activities such as oil spillages and
seepages, human rights violations and poverty seemed to have convinced the people
that the oil-military-governmental troika is not good for them and the Country.
Ironically it is a return to the Willink, a colonial report that remains ignored even as the
communities clamor for true federalism, which should give local authorities significant
leverage in holding government and corporations accountable for malfeasances that
affects present and future survival.
The solution to the resource conflict in the Niger Delta does not lie with the
government alone, as the CSIS paper seems to suggest. The government is an interested
party. Avowedly entrenched in the extraction and revenue politics, this present
government and others before it see no other solution but military pacification and
legalism. But the problem is political and it goes as deep as the first coming of Olusegun
Obasanjo as the head of a military junta between 1976 –1979 when he decreed the
seizure and control of land in Nigeria. That decree gave military access to the oil
companies in the Niger Delta and helped to bury true federalism in a multi ethnic and
multi religious country like Nigeria. The issues of environmental security, resource
control and management, corporate liability for environmental damage and human rights
violations, livelihood considerations are matters now about to be buried in the bowels
of alleged “international networks of criminality and violence”. The grave danger, at this
moment in history, is that such a misreading of the politics of the Niger Delta and the
struggle for environmental and social justice will stigmatize Africa’s major oil-producing
region as simply another site in which “terrorism” must be eradicated by any means
possible.
Third, there must be effective mediation at the community level to address the variety
of intra- and inter-community violence. Mediation, de-escalation and intercession are
indeed very central to addressing not only the Warri crisis but also to many other inter
and intra- community conflicts in the Niger Delta. Any effort in this direction however
will obviously have to be facilitated by an impartial party without a vested interest.
Nobody should be under any illusion that the oil companies and the federal government
are not the most important factors in inter-ethnic and inter-community conflicts. The
federal government and the oil companies must be willing to submit to such a process.
If the federal government participates in good faith in the suggested mediation process
and works towards restoring federalism and resource control, it will be superfluous to
suggest further that the federal government “will need to take swift and meaningful
steps to enhance the region’s security”. To make such an inference runs the risk of
wittingly or unwittingly play into the hands of hawks within the federal administration
and the military who seek to continue the rape, looting, mass destruction and genocide
that they started in Umuchem, Ogoni, Kaima, Yenagoa, Odi, and numerous other
communities.
And finally there is the level of the international system. If the current situation in the
Delta does not resemble Colombia, there is no reason to believe, nevertheless, that it
could become such a quagmire. A militarization of the West Africa oil region under the
sign of an American Empire intent on rooting out “terrorism” as outlined in the
September 2002 National Security Strategy, would contribute directly to a
‘Colombianization’ of the Niger Delta. Equally, unless there is serious pressure from
the US and European governments to ensure accountability and responsibility from the
oil companies – many of whom are now anxious to get out of the business of
‘community development’ in Nigeria – the sense of historical grievance that is so
widespread across the Delta will continue to fester.
The annals of oil are an uninterrupted chronicle of naked aggression, exploitation and
the violent laws of the corporate frontier. Iraq was born from this vile trinity. The
current spectacle of oil-men parading through the corridors of the White House, the
rise of militant Islamism across the Q’uran belt, and the carnage on the road to Baghdad,
all bear out the continuing dreadful dialectics of blood and oil. Nigeria bears all the
hallmarks of such petrolic violence. To break with this bloody history will require a
major political commitment on both sides of the Atlantic.
References:
Anderson, J. ‘Blood and Oil’. The New Yorker August 14th 2001, pp.46-59.
V. Kemedi, ‘Oil on troubled waters’, Berkeley: Environmental Politics Working Papers,
Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley (http//:globetrotter.berkeley.edu),
(2002).
M. Klare, Resource wars (Boston: Beacon Press 2001).
R. Vitalis, Black Gold, White Crude. Diplomatic History, 26/2 pp.185-213 (2002).