Author	Oronto Douglas and Doifie Ola
Publication	Searching for Peace in Africa
Year	1999

Summary

Since that time, however, other peoples of the Niger Delta have also mobilised, both against the state, and, tragically, at times against each other. Conflict in Warri between the Ijaw, Itsekiri, and Urhobo over control of a new local government established by the military regime has been particularly bloody and shows how the Nigerian government has aggravated some of these conflicts.
The basic grievance of the peoples of the region is that most of Nigeria's wealth comes out of their soil, yet they gain no benefits and instead suffer much harm as a result. They blame both the repressive, centralised government and the oil companies for their plight, charging that the two are complicitous. The conflicts in the Niger Delta are thus the most visible and violent manifestations of the conflict between oil-driven centralisation and the society's demand for local control.
The oil companies claim that providing services to the Nigerian population is the responsibility of the Nigerian government, not of oil companies. They note that under the memorandum of agreement that permits foreign companies to operate joint ventures with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, they receive less than US$1 per barrel, with the rest going to the NNPC. Nonetheless, a number of oil companies say they have supported community development programmes. Shell claims to spend about US$30 million per year on such programmes, including building schools and clinics and providing scholarships for youth from the area. Critics of these programmes claim they are little more than disguised bribes for corrupted local chiefs and hardly benefit the people. The oil companies admit to some such problems; Shell, for instance, has proposed implementing such programmes through NGOs.
The companies also argue that the mode of allocating oil revenue between the central government and local populations, as well as the provision of public services, are not decided by oil companies. They have offered, however, to share their experience of revenue sharing in other countries, such as Canada. They also claim that much of the environmental damage is not due directly to their operations but to the sabotage of pipelines by local people who then report the leaks and demand compensation. They have been the targets of some violent attacks, including the kidnapping of their employees, and they have shut down operations in some areas.
Under the military regime, the government executed Ogoni leaders and engaged in massive repression. General Abacha called the protesters 'unpatriotic Nigerians'. The government aggravated conflict in several areas by establishing further subdivisions of local governments. President Obasanjo became the first Nigerian head of state to visit the region, though his statements during his visit there disappointed many. Incidents of violence continue, including violence by the Nigerian army, in which human rights groups charge Chevron with complicity. The dependence of the Nigerian central state on oil revenues makes decentralisation of control over resources demanded by these movements a sensitive issue for any national government. But resolving these conflicts will be the key test of whether Nigeria can create a genuine nation intent on living together and resolving conflicts peacefully, or whether it will remain a framework for violence among competing groups.

Causes of the Conflict
By popular perception, the exploitation of the peoples of the Niger Delta, the despoliation of their environment and the resultant conflicts have their roots in the discovery of oil in the area by Royal Dutch Shell in the late 1950s. Perception is however not reality as Europe's plunder of the resources of the Delta and the organised resistance of the indigenous peoples date back to the era of the slave trade. Countless men and women were simply plucked in their prime from the Delta and its hinterlands as in most other parts of Africa and shipped to work in North America and the West Indies, resulting in grave economic, social and political costs. With the abolition of slavery, there was a change to trade in palm oil in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Like the slave trade, palm oil trade never benefited the peoples of the Niger Delta as they were consciously cheated by the European traders.
Crude oil has since displaced palm oil as the principal resource for trade in the global market but the Niger Delta remains 'poor, backward and neglected' despite being the richest part of Nigeria in terms of natural resource endowment. There are large oil and gas deposits in the area as well as extensive forests, fertile agricultural land and enormous fish resources. The Niger Delta's potential for sustainable development however remains unfulfilled, and is now increasingly threatened by environmental degradation and worsening economic conditions. Particularly threatened is the mangrove forest of Nigeria - the largest in Africa and sixty per cent of which is located in the Niger Delta. Also facing extinction are the fresh water swamp forests of the Delta which at 11,700 km square are the most extensive in West and Central Africa - and the local people and fauna that depend on them for sustenance.
A 1995 World Bank report estimated that some ten per cent of the area's mangroves have been lost to deforestation triggered by the exploration and production activities of big multinational oil companies such as Shell, Chevron, Elf and Agip. The oil companies as well as government agencies have greatly contributed to agricultural land encroachment and environmental degradation by building hundreds of kilometres of roads in the fresh water swamp forests. These roads block streams and flood plains creating stagnant ponds of water, thereby killing hitherto healthy and thriving forests. The oil companies have also opened up hitherto pristine forests to commercial loggers, with the result that mangrove and rainforest trees are now gradually being wiped out.
Since Shell struck the first oil well in Oloibiri in the eastern Niger Delta in 1956, the oil-producing communities have known only poverty, misery and sorrow. Oil spillage which pollutes farmlands, fishing streams and ponds and the indiscriminate flaring of gas which poisons the air they breath is the brutal fact of their daily lives.
More worryingly, the peoples of the Niger Delta do not even receive any share of the oil proceeds obtained from their land, the bulk of which is appropriated by the Nigerian government and Shell and the other multinational oil companies. Now, oil is the mainstay of the Nigerian economy, accounting for 97 per cent of the country's export earnings and over 80 per cent of public revenue. In this circumstance, oil has become the target of state power. It is in this context that students of Nigerian government and politics refer to the country as a 'rentier' state.

Conflict Dynamics

The Niger Delta communities have been protesting against these injustices peacefully for decades. Civil society groups such as the Pan-Niger Delta Resistance Movement CHIKOKO; the Environmental Rights Action; the Ijaw Youth Council; the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), Movement for Reparation to Ogbia (MORETO) and the Movement for the Survival of the Ijo in the Niger Delta (MOSIEND) have emerged in the last few years to campaign for corporate responsibility, environmental sustainability, self-determination and democratic development in the Niger Delta.
In the main, the indigenous peoples and forest-dependent communities, like other resource-dependent communities elsewhere in the world, are simply fighting for sustenance and their cultural rights while transnational oil corporations like Shell, Chevron, Elf, Mobil, Texaco are engaged in the brutal exploitation of the oil resources. The Nigerian central government, which for all but nine and a half of the almost 39 years of independence has been headed by the military, is only interested in increased revenue in the form of taxes and rent and a greater jurisdiction.
The broad response of the Nigerian state to these demands has been violence, terror, rape, arrests, harassment, military occupation of the Delta and even judicial and extra-judicial murders as we saw in the case of the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Iko, Umuechem, Kaiama,Ilaje, Ekeremor-Zion, Uzere, Opia, Ikenya and in some 800 other communities, multinational oil companies backed by the Nigerian State have spread mayhem, blood, sorrow and tears. It is a case of drilling and killing.
Specifically, in 1987, Iko, a peaceful community in Akwa Ibom State was left in ruins when members of the community protested against the Anglo-Dutch multinational oil giant, Shell over neglect and environmental degradation. A Shell Nigeria manager, Mr Udofia, with permission from Shell top managers in Holland wrote to the authorities of the Rivers State government in 1990 about threats of the people of Umuechem to disrupt economic activities. Shell specifically requested for the deployment of 'the mobile police force' to stop the people from protesting peacefully. That November, the community was bombarded by grenades and shell-fire. Eighty people, including the local pastor and the traditional ruler, were killed and almost five hundred houses were destroyed. In 1993 the company's alliance with the military grew to the level of payment to senior military officers to carry out punitive raids and expeditions into Niger Delta communities.
On October 25 Major Paul Okuntimo was paid by Shell to invade Korokoro village in Ogoni. One boy was killed, an old man was shot through the stomach but survived to tell the gory tale of the murderous propensity of the multinational oil giant and its able ally the military dictatorship.
Elsewhere in the Niger Delta, soldiers and mobile policemen have left stories of sorrow, tears and blood in their oil-directed missions. The deprived and impoverished towns of Uzere, Ozoro and Ekeremor-Zion are a few examples. In the Ilaje community of Ondo State, the American oil giant Chevron procured and flew in armed soldiers who came down very heavily on defenceless peaceful demonstrators who had occupied their Parabe oil facility. Two youths were shot dead and several others injured in that operation that was supervised and directed by Chevron. The Chevron public affairs manager admitted to American journalists that they called in the soldiers and that the protesters were peaceful. The same is true of the French 'area of influence' in the Niger Delta. The people of Egi in Ogba have been on the receiving end of Elf-provoked violence.
It has now been firmly established that some of the multinationals are also involved in the importation of arms and ammunition into the Niger Delta for the purpose of 'protecting our staff and facilities'. Shell, confronted with the evidence of gun running said they 'only imported 107 hand guns'. Claude Ake has beautifully described this development as 'the privatisation of the Nigerian State and the militarisation of commerce'. Not too long ago, Chevron was accused by the Ijaws of supplying weapons to the Itsekiri and by the Itsekiri of giving money to the Ijaws to buy weapons. As they trade these accusations, Chevron issued a weak statement saying they were not involved in the oil-inspired violence that has engulfed the region.
But more worrying still is the damage to the peoples' survival strategies: farming, fishing, and trading. As waters, forests and lands are polluted and as the air is fouled by gas flaring, so there has been a downward trend in the quality of life of the people. There is now an agreement that corporate rule has succeeded in condemning the people to penury, destitution and native imperialism.
Convinced that the multinational oil companies are the principal causes of the poverty and misery in the Delta, a new campaign is now been waged locally and internationally, demanding that all the oil companies quit the Delta until the issue of resource ownership and control is democratically resolved in favour of the peoples of the Niger Delta. Under Nigeria's undemocratic laws, oil in the Niger Delta belongs to the central government and the political structure of the country does not allow the people to participate effectively in governance. Hence, the peoples of the Niger Delta are also demanding a fundamental restructuring of the country to enable them to influence and determine the processes that affect their lives.
The most eloquent expression of this position is contained in the Kaiama Declaration issued by Ijaw youths on December 11, 1998. The Declaration proposed resource control and self-government for the Ijaws and other nations, peoples and nationalities in Nigeria as the best way forward to maintain democracy and stability.
Rather than attempt to negotiate this urgent demand, the state, supported by the transnational oil corporations opted to visit violence on Ijawland. As it were, this has merely encouraged the Ijaw to continue their determined struggle for self-determination. When the issue of self-determination is raised, some people say it will lead to secession. These people forget that if an ethnic group is treated justly and democratically, it does not usually contemplate secession.
It has also been the tradition for hegemonic forces and their allies to dismiss the struggle of the Ijaws and other oil-bearing communities for self-determination as merely part of 'oil politics'. Whatever that means, it is on record that prior to independence and before oil became Nigeria's principal revenue earner, the Ijaws were among other minorities who expressed fears of domination. This led to the establishment of the Henry Willinks Minorities Commission in 1957. The commission described the Ijaw country as 'poor, backward and neglected'. It has remained so to date despite various attempts ostensibly aimed at developing the area. For instance, between independence and now, we have had: (I) the Niger Delta Development Board; (ii) the Niger Delta Basin Development Authority; (iii) 1.5 per cent Derivation Fund and (iv) the Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission (OMPADEC).
Let us briefly look at OMPADEC. As an agency set up by the central government to develop the Niger Delta, OMPADEC has been an embarrassing failure primarily because it has remained a temple of corruption. As such what you see are the agency's signposts, not the projects which the signposts advertise! More fundamentally, OMPADEC represents a major subversion of the tenets of federalism. Why do the Ijaws or Isokos, Urhobos or Ogonis need a federal behemoth to stand between them and their resources? It was the late Ogoni nationalist Ken Saro-Wiwa who compared the creation of OMPADEC to the action of a man who stole another man's shirt and turns round to throw three buttons at the owner of the shirt and yet expects him to be grateful to the thief! No other choice of words could be more appropriate.
Mainstream analysts of the conflicts in the Niger Delta seem convinced that the raging conflicts can be resolved simply by putting in place a social infrastructure and alleviating the level of poverty by making more money available. This is however simplistic because 'the communities of the Niger Delta are poor today not because their land is poor, but because the social and political structures in the country today function to disempower them and make it impossible for them to deploy their natural genius to make the land on which they live to yield its abundance'. It is clear to us that social and political structures can only be truly democratised by means of a Sovereign National Conference where all the ethnic nationalities would have to sit down and define their stakes within the federation. A multi-ethnic state like Nigeria cannot survive under a centralised political system. It has not worked. It never will.

Official Conflict Management

Multi Track Diplomacy

Prospects

Recommendations

Miscellaneous

More References
Graf, William, The Nigerian State: Political Economy, State Class and Political System in the Post Colonial Era. London. James Currey, 1998 Ijaw Youth Council, The Kaiama Declaration, 1998.
Okonta, Ike, Obasanjo and the Challenge of the Niger Delta. In ERAction, house journal of the Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria, January-March 1999, #2.
Okonta, Ike and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: 40 Years of Shell in the Niger Delta. Benin, Environmental Rights Action, forthcoming.

Service Information

REPORTS:	Amnesty International: Nigeria - Release of Political Prisoners. March 1999; Human Rights Watch: Nigeria - Crackdown in the Niger Delta. June 1999; The Price of Oil - Corporate Responsibility and Human Rights Violations in Nigeria's Niger Delta. Febr. 1999; Transition or travesty - Nigeria's Endless Process of Return to Civilian Rule. October 1997.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS:	Stabilizing Nigeria - Sanctions, Incentives, and the Support for Civil Society, by Peter M. Lewis, Pearl T. Robinson, and Barnett R. Rubin. Center for Preventive Action, New York, 1998.
SELECTED INTERNET SITES:	http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~n.today/mirror.htm (weekly newspaper Abuja Mirror); http://www.kilima.com/mediamonitor/ (weekly publication Nigeria Media Monitor, edited by the Independent Journalism Centre in Lagos); http://www.postexpresswired.com/ (daily newspaper The Post Express); http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~n.today/today.htm (weekly newspaper Today); http://tribeca.ios.com/~n123/nigerldr (Federal Republic); http://www.FreeNigeria.org (Free Nigeria Movement, grassroots based global mass movement); http://www.igc.org/kind/fon5.htm (Friends of Nigeria); http://www.nigeria.net/nigeria.nsf (General news and information); http://www.odili.net/nigeria.html (NigeriaWeb); http://www.cldc.howard.edu/~ndmorg/ndmpage.html (Nigerian Democratic Movement).
RESOURCE CONTACTS:	Judith Burdin Asuni - director Academic Associates PeaceWorks; Barnett R. Rubin - Director Center for Preventive Action. Email BRubin@cfr.org.
ORGANISATIONS:	Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, 13 Agudama Avenue, D-line, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria;E-mail: disera@infoweb.abs.net. Data on the following organisations can be found in the Directory section: Academic Associates PeaceWorks (AAPW); International Women Communication Centre (IWCC); Centre for Conflict Resolution and Peace Advocacy (CCRPA); Committee for the Protection of Peoples Dignity (COPPED).

About the author

Oronto Douglas and Doifie Ola are associated with Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria.