Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF)
www. f p i f . o r g
A Think Tank Without Walls
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
weighed in on these events in the May 2003 edition of its
publication CSIS Africa Notes. Since it is one of the most
influential Washington think tanks, CSIS analysis matters
in the formation of U.S. foreign policy. The brief article
“Alienation and Militancy in Nigeria’s Niger Delta” by
Esther Cesarz, Steve Morrison, and Jennifer Cooke will
command attention and this merits a serious response.
As the authors properly say, the recent oil crisis highlights
“more profound national challenges” now facing the
reelected President Obasanjo and his government. In their
view, the recent conflicts in the Niger Delta mark a watershed,
distinguished in particular by the prospects of “an
upward spiral of violence.” The new levels of weaponry
and criminal activity on the part of a “frustrated and
angry youth” suggest “new ambitions and capacities”
among the Ijaw, who have taken on the characteristics of
an armed militia. The authors see the specter of Colombia
now haunting Nigeria. U.S. companies, they believe, will
become targets of terrorist activity, and Nigeria’s national
stability and cohesion will be threatened.
We believe that this account is wrong-headed on a number
of accounts. It misdiagnoses the nature of the political
crisis in the Niger Delta, fails to understand the political
dynamics of the Ijaw and minority politics in general, and
makes unsubstantiated comparisons with the likes of Aceh
and Colombia. Rather astonishingly, it also ignores the
role of some key actors, the oil companies foremost
among them. And it downplays a number of fundamental
political problems that need to be faced.
The article does mention several of the key issues in
passing, including federalism, resource allocation, and
minority rights. But it gives these issues short shrift, while
inflating the threat of a new terrorist menace. It thereby
potentially helps to set the stage for an excessive military
response or even a new round of ethnic cleansing. An adequate
response to Nigeria’s problems requires a serious
analysis of the country’s historical and political context,
which we will try to provide below.
The Niger Delta
and U.S. National Security
A year before the events of September 11, 2001, the
U.S. Department of State in its annual encyclopedia of
global terrorism identified the Niger Delta—the geographical
heart of oil production in Nigeria—as a breeding
ground for militant and “impoverished ethnic groups”
involved in numerous terrorist acts (abduction, hostage
taking, kidnapping, and extrajudicial killings).1 A CIA
report published in 2000 warned that “environmental
stresses” in the oil-rich southern delta could deepen “political
tensions” at a time when Nigeria—currently the
world’s sixth largest producer of petroleum—was supplying
almost 14% of U.S. petroleum needs.2 Throughout
the last decade or so, Nigeria has supplied an average of 8-
10% of U.S. oil imports. During the next decade, as its
deep-water fields are exploited (and as new reserves are
discovered), Nigeria’s annual production could exceed that
of Venezuela or Kuwait. Nigeria had, of course, become
an archetypal oil nation by the 1970s. Oil revenues currently
provide 80% of government income, 95% of export
receipts, and 90% of foreign exchange earnings.
African Oil and U.S. National Security
The geopolitical significance of Nigerian oil to the U.S.,
particularly against the global backdrop of rising prices,
tight markets, and political instability in the Persian Gulf,
Indonesia, and parts of Latin America, is widely understood.
Even before the September 11th attacks, the
FPIF Special Report
Alienation and Militancy in the Niger Delta: A Response
to CSIS on Petroleum, Politics, and Democracy in Nigeria
By Oronto Douglas, Von Kemedi, Ike Okonta, and Michael Watts | July 2003
In the wake of the September 11th attack and the Iraq war, Nigeria’s geopolitical significance to the U.S. has come
into sharper relief. In March and April 2003, militancy across the Niger Delta radically disrupted oil production in
this major oil supplier nation. News of these actions, following conflict-ridden national elections, has reinforced
the notion that Nigeria and the new West African “gulf states” in general are matters of U.S. national security.
Petroleum Finance Company (PFC), testifying in
Congress before the International Relations Subcommittee
on Africa, reported on the strategic and growing security
significance of West African oil. In the view of the PFC,
West Africa’s high-quality reserves and low-cost output,
coupled with massive new deep-water discoveries, required
serious attention and substantial foreign investment. In
the wake of the Al-Qaeda attacks and the Gulf War,
Nigeria and West African producers have emerged as “the
new Gulf oil states.”3 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 U.S. national security.”4 In the last year, the
ugly footprint of Africa’s black gold in Gabon, São Tomé,
Angola, and Equatorial Guinea has rarely been off the
front pages. It is also haunted by the specter of terror; the
“nightmare” as the New York Times noted of “sympathizers
of Osama bin Laden sink[ing] three oil tankers in the
Straits of Hormuz.”5
Oil Corruption High;
Living Standards Low
The mythos of oil wealth has been central to the history
of modern industrial capitalism. But in Nigeria, as elsewhere,
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, almost $300 billion
in oil revenues has flowed directly into the federal exchequer
(and perhaps $50 billion promptly flowed out, only to
disappear overseas). Yet 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 fraud cases—has
won for Nigeria the dubious honor of #1 in Transparency
International’s ranking of most corrupt states.
Paradoxically, the oil-producing states within federated
Nigeria have benefited the least from oil wealth.
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 prosper in the rich soil
of political marginalization. Massive election rigging across
the Niger 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, Kapucinski, 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.”6 It is
this lie that currently confronts West African oil producers
and the Niger Delta in particular.
Oil Violence
Since March 12, 2003, mounting communal violence
has resulted in at least 50 deaths and the leveling of eight
communities in and around the Warri petroleum complex.
Seven oil company employees have also been killed,
prompting all the major oil companies to withdraw staff,
to close down operations, and to reduce output by over
750,000 barrels per day (almost half of national output).
President Obasanjo has dispatched large troop deployments
to the oil-producing creeks. Ijaw militants, incensed
over illegal oil bunkering (in which the security forces
were implicated) and indiscriminate military action, have
threatened to detonate 11 captured oil installations.
The strikes on the offshore oil platforms—a long-festering
sore that is rarely mentioned in the media—were quickly
resolved. Nobody seriously expects, however, that the deeper
problems within the oil sector will go away. Relatively new
to delta politics, however, is a series of assassinations, most
notably that of Chief Marshall Harry, a senior member of
the main opposition party and a 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. 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.
The Niger Delta stands at the crossroads of contemporary
Nigerian politics. Despite the 13% growth of oil revenues
to the delta states, the region remains desperately
poor. The resultant deepening material and political grievances
place the Niger Delta at the confluence of four
pressing national issues in the wake of the April 2003 elections:
1) the efforts led by a number of delta states for
resource control, which in effect means expanded local
access to oil revenues, 2) the struggle for self-determination
of minority people and the clamor for a sovereign
national conference to rewrite the federal Constitution, 3)
a crisis of rule in the region, as a number of state and local
governments are rendered helpless by militant youth
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movements, growing insecurity, and intracommunity,
interethnic, and state violence, and 4) the emergence of
what is called a South-South Alliance linking Nigeria’s
hitherto-excluded oil-producing states in a bulwark against
the ethnic majorities.
A Threshold Crossed?
The CSIS article suggests that the current crisis in the
Niger Delta represents a threshold increase in violence
that threatens Nigeria’s national government. This contention
must be placed in the larger context of recent history,
especially since the end of military rule. Obasanjo’s
presidential victory in 1999, in the wake of the darkest
period of military dictatorship in Nigeria’s 40-year, postindependence
history, held much promise. An internationally
recognized statesman and diplomat imprisoned
during the brutal Abacha years,
Obasanjo inherited the mantle
of a massively corrupt state
apparatus, an economy in shambles,
and a federation crippled
by longstanding ethnic enmity.
Entrusted with reforming the
corrupt, undisciplined, and
largest military in Africa and
committed to deepening the
process of democratization,
Obasanjo was confronted within
months of his inauguration by militant ethnic groups
speaking the language of self-determination, local autonomy,
and resource control (meaning a greater share of federally
allocated oil revenues). In an incident widely condemned
by the human rights community, some 2,000
persons were slaughtered at Odi in the state of Bayelsa,
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 the states of Benue and Taraba intervening in the
most serious communal conflict since the clashes that preceded
the outbreak of the Biafran civil war in 1967. Thus,
under President Obasanjo’s watch, over 10,000 people
have perished in ethnic violence, and he has failed miserably
to address the human rights violations committed by
the notoriously corrupt Nigerian security forces.
In Nigeria several glaring deficits compromise the institutions
of democratic rule. A broad consensus believes
that the 1999 Constitution is deeply flawed. Crafted by
the departing soldiers, the Constitution provides no
opportunity for ordinary Nigerians to debate what they
consider to be the central conundrum of the national crisis:
the terms of association in a multiethnic polity. Ethnic
militias arose and communal vigilante politics flourished
during the Abacha years (1993-98), 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, had seemingly won the presidency.
Led by disenchanted and impoverished youth, the
OPC claimed that a “Northern cabal” in the Army had
denied Abiola victory, and the organization aggressively
pressed for Yoruba political autonomy. Two vigilante
groups, the Bakassi Boys and the 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.
This movement sought to secure
self-determination by resuscitating
the Republic of Biafra,
whose bid to secede from the
federation was crushed by
Nigerian troops in 1970. Then the 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.” The APC
claimed that the harassment of Northerners in the
Southwest was part of a Yoruba plan to secede and establish
an O’odua Republic. It further alleged that President
Obasanjo was sympathetic to the 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, where 3,000 Nigerian troops
have been deployed to “restore law and order,” cannot be
grasped without understanding these powerful ethnic tensions
and political deficits. The profile of a militant faction
of Ijaw youth has been unjustly amplified to justify
the size of the military deployment. Reports from refugees
fleeing the creeks indicate that the military is engaged in
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Nobody seriously expects, however,
that the deeper problems
within the oil sector will go away.
scorched-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 account
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
unimaginable oil wealth. The oil-producing communities
do 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 thus been responsible for
many deaths and the destruction
of scores of communities.
It would be naïve to deny the growing violence in the
Niger Delta and the extent to which democratization has
deepened the ethnic spoils politics that have been central
to the political landscape of post-colonial Nigeria. But it is
far too apocalyptic to read into these troubling trends
some sort of historical precipice over which Nigeria is
about to tumble.
Bigger Ambitions, Better Capacities?
Even as Ijaw leaders have worked to address pressing
problems in their immediate locality—the Niger Delta—
their focus has always been national. In 1958, on the eve
of formal independence, the British set up the Willink
Commission to inquire into the fears of Nigeria’s ethnic
minority groups. The Ijaw leaders’ submission to the commission
called for a more inclusive federal state in which
they would enjoy the fruits and obligations of full citizenship.
Thus they framed their grievances in terms of the
national arena as the 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. The politics of the Eastern region
were then dominated by a single political party (the NCNC).
It 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,
have topped the agenda in the Niger Delta ever 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.
The latter does, however, offer some room for mobilized
communities and interest groups, including Ijaw leaders
and militants, to press their demands on the state.
There is no reliable evidence to
support the claim that Ijaw militants
have displayed new lethal
capacities and a willingness to use
them. The events of March 2003
in the Warri area were merely an
escalation of a longstanding
grievance over the delineation of
electoral wards, which Ijaw leaders
consider deliberately skewed in favor of the Itsekiri.
Clashes between Ijaw and Itsekiri militants have been
ongoing 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 mobilizing
all available resources, including festering grievances
like the electoral ward issue, to achieve their objectives.
The parochial objectives of self-serving politicians
inflame the wider strategic self-determination goals of Ijaw
leaders and militias alike when funds are disbursed to the
militias. Yet, there is nothing to suggest that these developments
represent a fundamental departure from the previous
trajectory of political agitation in the area. Machine
guns, satellite phones, and speedboats are standard items
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
weapons, through a variety of sophisticated fronts, to
security operatives and mercenaries (including local youth)
that they retain in the Niger Delta. The Nigerian state and
the oil companies have thus been colluding to contain the
legitimate demands of the Ijaw by militarizing the Niger
Delta. The glut of arms in the delta, warrants urgent concern,
but one must first appreciate the problem’s origins
and dynamic links to state and corporate actors.
Recent media reports drawing attention to a
“weaponized” Ijaw and to vengeful and bloodthirsty militants
are 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 precarious.
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In Nigeria several glaring deficits
compromise the institutions of democratic rule.
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 in the Warri urban area
itself. Though kidnapping of oil workers for ransom is a
favored tactic of the militants, abuse and killing are rare.
Working in isolated flow stations in the dense delta
swamps, poorly guarded oil company personnel are very
vulnerable and would be easy targets for these militias,
were it a new policy to target and kill them. However,
there are, 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—with oil corporations taking out fullpage
advertisements in the Nigerian dailies suggesting a
descent into terrorism—serve to portray a fully armed and
dangerous Ijaw militia out for blood and set the stage for
yet another cycle of ethnic cleansing reminiscent of Odi.
Oil Companies Getting a Pass
What is most strikingly missing from current discussions
(including the CSIS brief ) of the security problems in the
Niger Delta is the role of Shell and other powerful corporate
international actors in deepening and sustaining the crisis.
Several independent human rights organizations, most notably
Human Rights Watch, have linked the oil company to the
spate of killings, rapes, and intercommunal feuds that have
crippled social and economic life in the Niger Delta since
1993. These human rights groups have also detailed the
company’s links to powerful and corrupt Nigerian state officials.
Moreover, environmental groups have documented the company’s
unrelenting attack on the human ecosystem on which
the local communities rely for sustenance. 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 have documented the
need for new forms of corporate accountability.7 Yet, not a
single industrialized country consuming 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 Nigeria
must focus globally, not just on the Niger Delta.
A New Colombia?
Amidst the political corruption, the deepening crisis of
governance, and the escalating violence related to resource
control, does it make sense, as the CSIS brief suggests, to
draw a parallel between a “better-positioned Ijaw” and the
revolutionary violence associated with FARC and the ELN
in Colombia? There are parallels between the two countries
regarding 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 U.S. oil
market. Conflicts between indigenous communities—
notably the U’wa—and the state and multinational oil
companies are legion. And the links between the military,
corporate security, and resource extraction—what can best
be understood as a militarized oil complex—are structurally
analogous to the situation in Nigeria. But both
Colombia and Nigeria have to be grasped regionally
(Colombia within the Andean oil region, and Nigeria
within the West African petro-zone).
It is one thing to say that the Ijaw and the U’wa have
“raised the stakes” and can “embarrass government,” but it
is quite another matter to see “Delta ethnic militants” as
Maoist insurgents or terrorists. First, the Colombian situation
is a longstanding civil war compounded by both narcotraffic
and 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 United States. During the 1990s Colombia became
a major recipient of U.S. foreign military aid, and in July
2000 Washington’s “Plan Colombia” committed $1.3 billion
toward an antinarcotics counterinsurgency strategy.
The role of the military in Nigeria (and its relation to
the oil industry in particular) is obviously key, but there is
(thus far) no parallel to the external militarization found
in Colombia. President Clinton did commit foreign assistance
to “reprofessionalize” the Nigerian Army in 1999,
including the equipping and training of seven battalions at
a cost of over $1 billion. During the Bush imperium, the
presence of 200 Special Forces in Nigeria, including onsite
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 U.S.
oil colony. However, this is in no way comparable to the
Colombian case, where the U.S. was directly backing a
war with financial support that was to be used for combat.
Third, the extreme violence of the Colombian case stems
from the fact that Washington, in conjunction with the
Colombian military, has provided direct support to prop.
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tect oil installations (most recently $98 million in
February 2002 by the Bush administration to protect the
Canon Limon pipeline). This protection is only part of a
combination of armed insurgents, right-wing paramilitaries,
and so-called legal mercenaries (known as contractors)
who operate symbiotically with the likes of Occidental Oil
and Ecopetrol. Although certain elements of this mix are
present in the Nigerian situation, there is a qualitative difference
between their roles in the two countries.
And finally, to see in the variety of Ijaw (or other ethnic)
movements the seeds of leftist revolution is quite preposterous.
Disenfranchised youth groups have acted in violent
ways, especially in conflicted oil-producing communities like
Nembe and Peremabiri, and the presence of a secondary
arms market has transformed the nature of the violence
itself. But to suggest that Ijaw ethnic militancy is secessionist,
either as a leftist insurgency or as a provocation
portending massive civil war, is misguided. These Ijaw
activists, like the Ogoni political movement (MOSOP)
and the Chicoco movement, are actively engaged in
debates about access to and control over resources within
the federation. They seek to modify the Nigerian
Constitution, and they wrangle over 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 also the world’s
seventh-largest exporter of petroleum and a key player in
African regional security, most recently in Sierra Leone. And
Nigeria is 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. Shari’a
law, of a dogmatic and literalist sort, has been adopted
and implemented in 12 of the populous Northern states,
amidst considerable political acrimony and international
censure. At least 350 people were killed in four days of
rioting in northern Nigeria triggered by protests against
U.S. military action in Afghanistan. There were particularly
bloody clashes between Muslims and Christians in
Kano, Kaduna, and Jos. The September 2002 debacle surrounding
the Miss World pageant, 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 championing a
united Nigeria and accommodating powerful pro-federal and
ethnic autonomy sentiments among key constituencies, has
been unable to articulate a coherent policy to contain the
conflict raging in the Niger Delta. The advent of electoral
politics has even deepened the appeal of various mouthpieces
for popular grievances, including the ethnic militias,
in the face of the central government’s dismal failure to tackle
pressing economic and social problems. Ethnic militias,
intercommunal 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 in Nigeria is neither large nor deep
enough to accommodate the clamor for regional and local
autonomy or any new political entitlements. Nigerians
remain, despite the democratic dispensation, subjects
rather than citizens. Any way out must, in our view,
address the citizenship question at a number of levels.
Oil Is Key
The first issue to be addressed is how the pursuit of oil
wealth underlies persistent national policy failures in
Nigeria. Since 1970, the country’s political, economic, and
policy elites have established an authoritarian power structure
to enable them to centralize control of strategic
resources, including the country’s substantial oil deposits.
Such avarice has not only banished the great majority of
ordinary Nigerians from the policymaking process, but it
has also led the power elites to pursue social and economic
strategies that are shortsighted, self-serving, and not driven
by the needs of the people. The consequences have been
material scarcity, deepening frustration, and social unrest
in the Niger Delta and elsewhere.
The government focus should instead be on achieving a
just and sustainable political order, giving due weight to
the fears, needs, and aspirations of the various social and
interest groups in the country. There is a growing consensus
that a completely 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 would help diversify Nigeria’s revenue base by
enhancing domestic taxation, as non-oil-producing areas
are forced to find alternative ways to boost the exchequer.
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A Path to Democracy
An economically diversified polity would also tend to
introduce into the policymaking process, non-oil players
whose interests would serve as a check on the political
elites and their cronies, curbing the powerful drive toward
political authoritarianism. Political federalism would
spawn new social forces throughout Nigeria that could
serve as a countervailing force as they press their own
demands on the state. Democracy would be enhanced, as
these different sets of actors with diverse social and economic
bases competed on 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 for the institutionalization
of a disinterested and efficient
public service, corruption-free
public agencies, due process, and
the rule of law would be more
compelling. Those running for
office in Nigeria’s elected government
would need to be willing
to tackle the structural causes of
endemic violence and mass poverty in a political economy
in which oil currently 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 further tear Nigeria apart.
The second issue involves Nigeria’s social contract. In
order for a federal democracy to be meaningful to ordinary
Nigerians and to address their social and economic needs, a
new compact between state and society will have to be worked
out. The civic, political, and social rights of the people will
need to be not only clearly spelled out but also made legally
enforceable. A socially and economically empowered body
politic would eagerly participate in public affairs, and such
broad and active participation by an enlightened citizenry
is the secret of good government policy.
More than 40 years ago, the Willink Commission noted
that the Niger Delta was “poor, backward and neglected.”
In the wake of several insurrections, including a devastating
civil war and nine military coups, all linked to the scramble
for the oil resources 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 over the years have
clamored for a space in the Nigerian sun, resources are not
limited to oil and gas, despite the corporate and governmental
scramble for control over those riches. To the
indigenous people, resources mean primarily land for agriculture,
waters for fishing, forests for harvesting, and air
for breathing, as well as other physical and spiritual biota.
Resource control is the term used to describe decisionmaking
power over a people’s source of livelihood. In the
case of the Niger Delta, these sources of survival have been
taken away violently, undemocratically, and unjustly. The
term denotes the need to regain ownership, control, use, and
management of resources primarily for the benefit of the
communities and people on whose land the resources originate
and secondarily for the 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 extraction—such
as oil spillages and seepages,
human rights violations, and
poverty—seems to have convinced
the people that the oilmilitary-
governmental troika is
not good for them or the country.
Ironically it is the Willink
Commission report—a colonial period document that
remains ignored even as Nigeria’s communities clamor for
true federalism—that could give local authorities significant
leverage in holding government and corporations
accountable for malfeasances that affect present and future
survival.
The solution to the resource conflict in the Niger Delta
does not lie with the government alone. The government is
an interested party. Avowedly entrenched in resource extraction
and revenue politics, the present Nigerian government, like
others before it, sees no other solution but military pacification
and legalism. However, the problem is political and
stems from Olusegun Obasanjo’s first appearance as the head
of a military junta that seized control of land in Nigeria
between 1976 and 1979. That military junta granted
multinational oil companies access to the Niger Delta and
helped bury true federalism in multiethnic, multireligious
Nigeria. In modern-day Nigeria, issues of environmental
security, resource control and management, corporate liability
for environmental damage and human rights violations,
and livelihood erosion are in danger of being buried
beneath the global search for “international networks of
criminality and violence.” The grave danger, then, at this
moment in history, is that such a misreading of the politics
of the Niger Delta and of the struggle for environp.
7 www.fpif.org
A Think Tank Without Walls
Since 1970, the country’s
political, economic, and policy elites
have established an authoritarian power
structure to enable them
to centralize control of strategic resources.
mental and social justice will stigmatize Africa’s major oilproducing
region as simply another site in which terrorism
must be eradicated by any means possible.
The third festering issue in the need for effective mediation
at the community level to address the variety of intraand
intercommunity violence. Mediation, de-escalation,
and intercession are indeed very central to addressing not
only the Warri crisis but also the many other community
conflicts in the Niger Delta. Any effective effort in this
direction must be facilitated by an impartial party with no
vested interest. Because the oil companies and the federal
government are the most important factors driving
interethnic and intercommunity conflicts, these entities
must also be willing to submit to a mediation process.
Urging their good-faith participation in the process and in
efforts to restore federalism and resource control should
take precedence over admonitions that the federal government
“will need to take swift and meaningful steps to
enhance the region’s security.”8 Emphasizing the latter
risks playing into the hands of hawks within the Nigerian
federal government and 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.
The final issue to be addressed is the impact of international
players. Even though the current situation in the
Niger Delta does not resemble Colombia, there is no reason
to believe that it never could. A militarization of the
West African oil region under the aegis of an American
Empire intent on rooting out terrorism, as outlined in
Washington’s September 2002 National Security Strategy,
would contribute directly to a “Colombianization” of the
Niger Delta. Unless there is serious pressure from both
U.S. 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 widespread across the Niger Delta will
continue to fester.
The annals of oil extraction are an uninterrupted chronicle
of naked aggression, exploitation, and the violent mores 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 Islam across
the Q’uran belt, and the carnage on the road to Baghdad
all bear the continuing dreadful dialectics of blood and
oil. Nigeria suffers all the hallmarks of such petro-violence.
Breaking with this bloody history will require a
major political commitment on both sides of the Atlantic.
Oronto Douglas is associated with Environmental Rights
Action in Port Harcourt, Nigeria; Ike Okonta and Michael
Watts <mwatts@socrates.berkeley.edu> are respectively a
Ciriacy-Wantrup fellow and the director of the Institute of
International Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Von
Kemedt is the director of the community group Our Niger
Delta in Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
Notes
1 Available at http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000/.
2 Available at http://www.eia.gov/emeu/cabs/nigeria.html.
3 Jean-Christophe Servant, Le Monde Diplomatique, January 13, 2003.
4 Available at:http://www.iasps.org/.
5 Neela Banerjee, “Fears, Again, of Oil Supplies at Risk,” New York Times,
October 14th, 2001. Business Section III, p.1.
6 R. Kapucinski, Shah of Shahs. (New York: Harcourt. 1982). p.34.
7 V. Kemedi, “Oil on troubled waters,” in Environmental Politics Working
Papers (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley,
2002). Available at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/.
Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) and the
Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). ©2003. All rights reserved.
Foreign Policy In Focus
“A Think Tank Without Walls”
Recommended citation:
Oronto Douglas, Von Kemedi, Ike Okonta, and Michael Watts, “Alienation and Militancy in the Niger Delta: A Response to CSIS on Petroleum,
Politics, and Democracy in Nigeria,” (Silver City, NM & Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, July 2003).
Web location:
http://www.fpif.org/papers/nigeria2003.html
Production Information:
Writer: Oronto Douglas, Von Kemedi, Ike Okonta, and Michael Watts
Editor: Miriam Pemberton, IPS
Layout: Tonya Cannariato, IRC
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