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OIL AND
MILITANCY IN THE NIGER DELTA
Terrorist Threat
or Another Colombia?
Oronto
Douglas, Von Kemedi,
Ike Okonta, and Michael Watts
continued from last edition
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
economically-empowered 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).
concluded
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