The Niger Delta region has become known the world over so much because of the violence pervading it, than for the abundance of natural resources that it holds. Different explanations have been proffered for the existence of the conflict but the present conflict, has a long drawn out history, complicated by the interplay between government officials and multinational oil companies’ attitude and operational modalities.(Abila, 2009) , summarises the conflict as a conflict of values amongst the oil bearing communities of the Niger Delta; multinational oil companies and the Nigerian Government. To put the conflict in perspective, we need to understand the various stages of a conflict. Best et al. (2006) decomposes a conflict into five main stages viz:
Stage One: Pre-Conflict Stage. This is a period when goals between parties are incompatible, which could lead to open conflict. At this stage, the conflict is not well known because parties try to hide it from public view, but communications is undermined between them.
Stage Two: This is the stage of confrontation, when the conflict becomes open or manifest. This is characterised by occasional fighting, low levels of violence, and search for allies by the parties, mobilization of resources, strained relations and polarization of the parties.
Stage Three: This is the peak of the conflict when the conflict becomes very manifest. In violent conflicts, this is the stage of war and intense fighting, leading to killings, and injuries. Large scale population displacements occur and use of small arms and light weapons become used indiscriminately.
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Stage Four: This is the outcome stage. One side to the conflict wins and another loses, or a ceasefire maybe declared; one side may surrender, or the government or the other third party intervening forces stronger than the warring parties intervene to impose a solution and stop the fighting. Violence is decreased to allow room for some discussion to commence, or an alternative means of settling the conflict is explored.
Stage Five: This is the post-conflict stage when violence has either ended or is significantly reduced. At this stage, the underlying cause of the conflict is addressed and where they are not, the conflict may re-occur.
The Niger Delta conflict has now reached the fifth stage but its origin has been variously traced by different schools of thought, beginning from the Historical Scholl, Modern School, Establishment School, Dialectical Materialism to the Reactionary School, (Abila, 2009). A summary of the philosophies of these various schools is as follows:
The Historical School: This group believes that the Niger Delta conflict started during the period the Colonial intervention, when the Minerals Ordinance of 1916 and the Minerals Act 1945 which expropriated the resources of the region by vesting all mineral oils in Nigeria in the Crown (State) was implemented. It is thus argued that the resistance predated Nigeria’s independence. The conflict according to them started from after the slave trade, through the oil palm trade and the infamous Akassa raid, the Trade Treatise that followed the period of amalgamation of the Nigerian nation in 1914.
The terrain of the region has always posed challenges to development and during the independence struggles, the regional leaders had always asked for special protection for the region. Though commitments were made to them, such commitments have never been kept, leading to perpetual neglect of the region’s development needs.
Notable commentators like Okonta, I. and Oronto, D(Okonta and Oronto, 2001)., identify the slave trade as laying the foundation for the present conflict as “the staggering economic cost aside, slavery abruptly and catastrophically disrupted life in the Niger delta and its hinterland, triggered inter-ethnic wars, and led to the displacement of whole communities.” They point at 1444 when the Portuguese adventurer Lancarote De Fetais, came to West African coast and collected 235 persons
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whom he later sold as slaves, triggering off the Trans- Atlantic Slave trade which was replaced in 1840s by the Oil Palm trade.
Elaigwu (1994), says that during the palm oil trade by the British Merchants, under the auspices of the Royal Niger Company, the region was known as the Oil Rivers Protectorate because of the volume of palm oil trade existing in the area.
Tribal leaders who resisted the predatory and oppressive tendencies of the British Merchants, were deposed and some expelled from their Kingdoms. Thus since the slave trade through the oil palm trade till Nigeria’s independence, the Niger Delta region has been ruled by violence.
The Modern School: This school traces the origin of the conflict to the activities of Late Isaac Adaka Jasper Boro, who led the first secession attempt by declaring the “Niger Delta Republic”. Others like James Jephthah who was a member of Nigeria’ Niger Delta Peace and Conflict Resolution Committee, links the conflict to the discovery of oil and the agitations for development following the advent of petroleum wealth in Nigeria. The climax was the visit by some young men to Abuja- Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory and on seeing the developments undertaken by the government with petroleum wealth at the expense of the Niger Delta where the wealth emanated from since 1956 when oil was first drilled at Oloibiri (a town in Bayelsa in the Niger Delta), retuned to resort to militancy to demand developments and a share of the petroleum wealth.
THE Establishment School: This school blames the conflict on the present Federal Structure of Nigeria, multiplicity of ethnic groupings, and the struggle for the petroleum resources of the region. It is argued that because successive governments have tended to be populated by people originating from the majority tribes who are not located in the delta, government policies, including the revenue allocation formula, has been designed to favour the majority tribal areas, to the near neglect of the Niger delta. This practice has increased the poverty in the region, creating anger and conflict in the region. There is now prevalent mutual distrust, hatred, and suspicion amongst inhabitants, and towards the majority tribes and their friends. The divide and rule strategy adopted by both the Federal Government and their multinational collaborators, have further heightened the atmosphere of insecurity in the region.
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The Dialectical Materialism School: Political Scientists like Late Claude Ake, blames the conflict on a class struggle for economic resources of the Niger Delta region, between the Federal Government and its organs, managed by the majority tribes in the country and the minority tribes in the Niger Delta region. They claim that the use of force by the Federal Government in concert with the multinational oil companies, has led to counter-use of arms in the region. They point to the following reasons as catalysts to the struggle:-
I. realisation that development can take place in the Niger delta terrain, as exemplified by the presence of all socio-modern facilities in the Flow Stations of multinational oil companies operating in the area located about a kilometre from oil-bearing communities that lived in squalor; II. the use of multi-billion naira oil revenue for the speedy development of
Abuja Capital Territory within a short period, uncovered by Niger Delta Youths, during the “One-Million –Man March” in support of the late General Sani Abacha’s regime in 1995.
III. the fast growing wealth of political office holders through apparent mis- management of public funds in the Nigerian nation.
The school assets that except the material condition of the people are improved, the raging conflict will subsist.
The Reactionary School: To this school, the conflict is a response to the violence meted out to the region by succeeding governments. They believe in (Fanon and . 1963) ideology, “that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable”.
The Frustration-Aggression School: Another possible explanation of the Niger Delta crisis is the Frustration-Aggression Theory which originated from the works of John Dollard (Dollard, 1939) and Leonard Berkowitz (Berkowitz, 1989, ). Frustration is defined by the Cambridge Dictionaries Online as feeling annoyed or less confident because of failure to achieve a desire. The theory postulates that deprivation is a disparity between value expectation and value capabilities. It defines the lack of need satisfaction as a gap between aspiration and achievement. It argues that when there is a gap between the level of value expectation and the level of value attainment, due to lack of capability to establish a congruence between both levels, tension builds up due to the
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pressure of unfulfilled aspiration or an unsatisfied urge or need. When this is not arrested in time it leads to frustration which leads to rising anger which is often directed against the party considered to be the source of deprivation of satisfaction, since the hope and initial excitement in the Niger Delta that they would automatically be entitled to benefits that come with being oil producing communities, was considered legitimate. Oil discovery has brought hope that civilized and modern infrastructure such as electricity, pipe borne water, primary and secondary schools, well-equipped hospitals, better and more modern equipment for exploitation of the region’s fish and fauna will become available. There would at last be roads leading through and linking the communities with the rest of the country. There was also the expectation that as oil companies begin to carry out their operations and implement the ideas embodied in their corporate social responsibility, more people would have the opportunity of gainful employment. But in the context of prolonged denials and frustrations, neither the oil companies nor government seem to have come to terms with these pervasive social expectations. One of the most debilitating disappointments was with human capital development.
In order to get basic education, the youth have to leave their homes in the creeks to live with relatives and friends in communities’ upland, most of who often treat them as servants or even beggars. When they eventually get education to tertiary levels, most of them are unable to return to their homeland except as aggrieved and embittered citizens. They had in the process witnessed how the resources of their ancestral lands are exploited and carted away to develop other communities in the country, while their people bear the brunt of this official theft in the form of environmental degradation, political disenfranchisement, social dislocation and economic despoliation They are forced to witness how oil companies provide state-of-the art facilities for the comfort of their employees, most of whom are foreigners to their land, without adequate consideration for the needs of their hosts, even when doing so is relatively cheap and feasible. They are for instance, only willing to build roads, if such would open up new and lucrative oil fields. They are able to generate electricity to power their numerous sites within the communities, without bothering to link their immediate hosts to the same grid, even when it is cost-effective to do so. Confronted by the stark realities of unemployment in their homelands even after getting education abroad, there seems to be only one choice open to them- take and sell the resources available, directly from the
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pipelines if necessary. Hence the incidence of pipeline vandalisation, illegal bunkering, and their local imperatives of gun running, cult gang building and militancy as defence mechanisms.
The continued neglect of the region and absence of any meaningful developments from the petroleum resources since the discovery of oil in the region, have persistently engaged oil companies and the Nigerian State in a series of protests. These protests have been aimed at demanding resource control and the abrogation of the policies and laws governing land use and mineral resource ownership and to ensure environmental justice in the region. Many civil society groups have now emerged to protest against
environmental degradation and asking for better corporate social responsibility from the oil multinationals. Currently, the issue of environmental degradation have become the anchor for even the militant groups that now continuously cause conflict in the region. At the heart of the Niger Delta struggle, is a protest against criminal neglect, marginalisation, oppression and environmental degradation as well as economic and socio-political hopelessness, and in one word, frustration in the oil bearing and contiguous communities of the Niger Delta (Afinotan and Ojakorotu, 2009).
Idemudia and Ite (2006a),argue that the Niger Delta conflict in its present form, is the result of the cumulative effect of the synergetic interplay among conflict – generating factors that have at various times worked together or individually to tilt state – society relations towards the outbreak of conflict. These are graphically illustrated in Figure 3.2 below and include:-
Political factors (including the control by a coalition of some ethnic majority elites to the neglect of the ethnic minorities whose land the bulk of the oil resources are produced);
Economic factors (low share of oil revenue to oil bearing States, abdication of development activities in the region to IOCs, inefficient institutional capacity to regulate the IOCs, and the combination of the State and IOCs to maximise rent);
Environmental factors (incessant pollution leading to a decrease in fishing and farming yields in the region, and increase in health risks);
Social factors (loss of social esteem, increase in vices, and unfairness of the judicial system which now manifests in the current feeling of
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employments in the IOCs by the majority tribes, non-representation of oil-bearing communities in management positions in the IOCs and non- infrastructural provisions in the oil-bearing communities).
Figure 3.2Causes of Conflict in the Niger Delta
Source: Idemudia & Ite (2006)
These problems causing the conflicts emanate from the exercise of powers of compulsory acquisition and are perceived as part of the corporate social responsibility of the IOCs, so the essence of Compulsory acquisition and the theory of CSR become necessary.