Appropriation of Nigeria’s oil wealth as a recipe for continued violence

It has become a scholarly acceptable thesis that the endowment by nature of resources on many countries in the world today also carries with it a corresponding problem. This thinking has given vent and currency to the theory of “resource curse”, which is also referred to as the “paradox of plenty”. The contention of this paradoxical assumption is the countries like Nigeria, with abundance of natural resources, especially non-renewable resources like crude oil tend to have less economic growth, less democracy, and worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources.

Over the years, many scholars and development workers have come to the conclusion that the possession of resources like oil does not guarantee economic success. Nigeria is a typical example of this paradox essentially because over 90percent of Nigerians have continued to experience low per capita income and low standard of living in comparison to the emerging economies of Eastern Asia like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong etc signposted by rocky islands and virtually no exportable natural resource.

This is one puzzle that has astounded scholars across the board begging the questions: how can richly endowed countries continue to reel under the suffocating grip of poverty? How can a man residing by the bank of a river continue to wash his face with spittle? How can there be so much deprivation, want and frustration in the midst of plenty? Despite the avalanche of explanations so far put forward by scholars, I tend to agree with what my mother once told me.

When I was a child, there was this family of six that was living next to us. I noticed that every night, after supper, the children would fight each other. These children normally ate from one bowl with some pieces of meat. I realized afterwards that each time they finished eating; the eldest would want to appropriate the largest part of the meat to himself. The immediate younger one would raise objection and before you know it fight had ensued. When I related my findings to my mother, she told me that if two persons are eating and there are two pieces of meat in the plate, it automatically means that each person has a piece of meat. If one person wants to take more than his fair share, there would be problem.

Pedestrian as my mother’s explanation may seem, the real problem with countries that possess natural resources, like Nigeria, is the inability to evenly share the piece of meat in the plate. Throughout history, man had always risen against his fellow because of this. When a group of people are confronted with such absurdity, they will always rise in protest. In antiquity, Aristotle tried to offer explanation for why people revolt in society. According to him, inferiors revolt that they may become equals; and equals revolt that they may become superiors. Such is the state of mind that creates social conflicts. Several years later, Tedd Gurr would use this analogy to develop his famed theory of relative deprivation.

As noted by Michael Albert, history has so far been a horrible accumulation of oppression and suffering visited upon man by man. Interestingly, history has also chronicled groups of people discovering their own finer potentials and together mounting heroic offensives to regain their freedom in the face of monarchy, feudalism, slavery, democratic dictatorship and deprivation; and seeking, in their place, equity, justice, and freedom. In truth, the pages of history are littered with examples of man’s inhumanity to man; of the struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, the ruler and the ruled, the lord and the serf.

In East Africa, when it is not the Mau-Mau revolt in Kenya; it is the Maji-Maji uprising in Tanganyika. In Nigeria, when it is not the determination of Ndigbo to assert their freedom in the face of ethnic cleansing; or the Yoruba rising in massive revolt on account of June 12, it will be Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen taking up arms in their quest for the establishment of a pure Islamic state or the Niger-Delta Avengers asserting their determination to control the resources God has endowed them with. In all these, men have had to die so that others would live. As long as Nigerians are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make all the talk of democracy change very limited and frustrating.

Our lives would be worse than dogs in a manger if we keep quiet in the face of tyranny. The gains men have made by standing up for their rights have been steady and plentiful. Even in Nigeria today, there is still the possibility of a major breakthrough in the face of these upheavals. Consistent with past efforts, we can now in the midst of our crisis attain fully liberatory goals, including, I think, participatory economics and also alternative structures for our polity, culture, and kinship. We have only to make the effort. The truth of this stoic resistance to oppression will only make us free in the end and also make us glad. Every outcry by Nigerians against the oppression of some people by other people, or against what is morally and economically hideous is the affirmation of the principle that the liberties and fundamental rights of any group of people are not to be violated.

The extent of violation in Nigeria is simply nauseating. We have been confronted with stark realities of deprivation and denial of self-determination. We have been overwhelmed by political and economic cannibals bent on sectionally appropriating our resources to the detriment of others. We have been subjected to avarice, greed and the proclivity of untoward allocation of national resources reminiscent of medieval aggrandizement. This is a country where the resources from one section are criminally appropriated by one section for themselves without the moral compunction of the impact of brazen act of this criminality on the victims.

It is no longer news that the environments of the South-South and parts of South-East geo-political zones of Nigeria have been devastated through oil exploration. As a matter of fact, oil-related environmental degradation in the Niger-Delta and many parts of Igboland is pervasive and commonly acknowledged. Indeed, the activities of the multi-national oil companies who mine and produce Nigeria’s “black gold” have given rise to intense land degradation, rapid agricultural decline, forest loss; sever biodiversity and fisheries depletion, rampant and destructive oil spillage, continuous gas flaring and toxic water contamination, among others. It is this persistent environmental degradation that perceptive leaders of the affected oil-bearing communities call “ecological warfare”. In this ecological warfare, guns are used; bones are broken and blood is spilled. Men, women and children die. Worse still, plants, animals, fish and even the air die. Finally, the land itself dies. This is a very sophisticated and unconventional war. Everything happens as if they are ordained by nature; but they are not. The world stands askance and ignores it because it is an unusual, deadly war. This war is worse than genocide. Its name is injustice.

Among the many frustrations in Nigeria, especially in the South-South and South-East, perhaps none looms larger than the “resource curse.” Perversely, the worst development outcomes measured in poverty, inequality, and deprivation are often found in these geo-political zones, incidentally with the greatest natural resource endowments. Rather than contributing to freedom, broadly shared growth, and social peace, rich deposits of oil and minerals have often brought upon our people tyranny, misery, and insecurity. The impunity with which the Nigerian establishment allocates Nigeria’s oil wealth is galling and a recipe for violence.

Today in Nigeria, out of the 19 highest yielding oil blocks in Nigeria, 12 are owned by the Hausa/Fulani, two by the South-South, two by the South-East and two by the South-West. If you are still in doubt, the table below is illustrative:

* This table is just a brief summary of oil block owners

Note also that Intel, an oil company jointly owned by Atiku, Yarádua and Ado Bayero has substantial stakes in Nigeria’s oil exploration industry both in Nigeria and Principe and Sao Tome.

The above scenario is the perfect setting for conflict because it brings to the fore the contradictory nature of the Nigerian State. Many people have explained this warped character of the Nigerian State from the prism of the manner and nature of her integration into the global capitalist system. There are copious literatures on metropolitan-satellite relationships, which have exhaustively x-rayed the implications of such relations in the two societies. The critical link created through the integration was in the common interests of the metropolitan and the Nigerian bourgeoisie. It created inter-dependence through complementarity by encouraging specialization in the primary production of raw materials such as oil, needed by the metropole while the metropole specializes in manufacture. Thus it is not surprising that after fifty years of political independence from Britain, the Nigerian economy is one that continues to pursue essentially the colonial project of exporting primary products and importing finished ones especially consumer goods. This has become more so with the status of oil in Nigeria’s economy; a country that derives 80 percent of its revenue and 95 percent of its foreign exchange earnings from oil.

Indeed, there is a broad division of labour in this alliance between the metropolitan and the Nigerian comprador bourgeoisie especially in the extraction of oil in Nigeria. While the indigenous bourgeois class ensures the political conditions for capital accumulation, the metropolitan capital attends to production, providing both technology and some of the capital required in the accumulation process. Although the relations between these dominant constitutive social forces in the Nigerian state are both complementary and also ridden with contradictions, there is a lot of compromise between them. This is so because since metropolitan capital gains access to the Nigerian economy only through the consent of the Nigerian ruling class, its entrance already entails accommodation of state power and capital in the manner that compromises autonomy and self-determination.

This relation is crucial for both classes as it enables the metropolitan bourgeois to make super profit with less inhibitions and for the Nigerian comprador ruling bourgeois it gives them leverage to primitive accumulation denied them especially during colonial era. It has been noted by many Nigerian scholars that during the colonial era, the colonialists pursed an economic policy that excluded Nigeria local businessmen from the commanding heights of the economy, and this made it impossible for the Nigerian entrepreneurs to establish themselves in the economy. This explains why the Nigerian ruling class and other elements looked up to the state and also used it as an effective medium through which they could initiate or enhance capital accumulation. Therefore politics and access to state became more attractive than entrepreneurship as a vehicle for accumulation of fund.

It is within the above context that oil exploration and exploitation activities are carried out in Nigeria. Environmental degradation has become so pervasive in the political space of the South-South and South-East as a result of the deliberate or apparent neglect by both oil companies and the Nigerian state in providing adequate measures in minimizing such degradation. This attitude of the dominant social forces in the oil business in our area becomes clear when one recognizes that those who suffer the impacts mostly are the ordinary people. Thus, as has often been noted, public policy in Nigeria has, in a blatant manner, been detrimental to mass interest. The point is that the Nigerian state is constituted in such a way that it reflects mainly the interest of the metropolitan and the Nigerian bourgeoisie.

Of course, the fact again is that the transnational oil corporations, which dominate the production and marketing processes involved in oil, can manipulate the direction of state policies. This is possible because they realize Nigeria’s extensive dependence on the oil sector. The relations of the rentier state with foreign capital often necessitate conditions of alliance or coalition against the people. The principal concern of the state and the multinational oil companies in the oil business is the maximization of profit even at the expense of total degradation of the sources of the livelihood of the peasant farmers.  The slogan seems to be that of “business as usual at all cost”.

It is this nature and character of the Nigerian State, which has perfected and instituted an iniquitous pattern of wealth appropriation that has spurned the Niger-Delta Avengers, a nondescript and amorphous group that is presently wrecking havoc on oil installations in the Niger-Delta. This brings me to the meat of this article. It is virtually impossible for a man to fence off lizards from his compound insofar as he has heaps of faggot-infested fire wood. One basic truth, we have failed to realize is that Nigeria is an abattoir; ridden with lizards because we have not bothered to remove the ant-infested firewood from our compound. A man does not consciously take a dive into a pool of smouldering sulphoric acid. Nigeria has become famous for the absurd. It has become country where intellectual lepers prescribe therapies for resolving our problems; where sycophantic intellectual apprentices dismiss the option of restructuring as “misdiagnosis” of our problems and accusing genuine patriots of standing logic on its head.

What can be truer than the fact that Nigeria is drifting irretrievably into anarchy; that we are consciously watching the denigration of our collective destiny; that the resolution of the Nigeria-type structural inequity cannot be achieved by force but by negotiation? How else does one define injustice? And what is the remedy for injustice? Has it not become obvious to Nigeria’s political leaders that the several options we have tried have failed miserably; that time has come to explore the only option open to us- the option of a negotiated existence? At the risk of being accused of “misdiagnosing” the Nigerian condition, I urge Nigeria to urgently come to a round table for this renegotiation because as our people say, one cannot possibly escape one’s shadow. This is the way forward.