Introduction
Reproducing his keynote address to the ROAPE conference in September 2003, which lamented the constraints imposed on intellectual enquiry by funding trends and the rush for evidence-based policy research, Gavin Williams in 2004 suggested that the desire to ‘understand Africa' and ‘change it’ had perhaps hamstrung radical political economists whom he charged with having sacrificed ‘scientific imperatives’ at the altar of stated end goals (Williams 2004, p. 582). In a plea for more open-ended, contingent-centred historical approaches to political economy which allow for the possibility of complexity, he reiterated his call for the reassertion of radical political economy in the face of public-choice-inspired ‘new political economy’ approaches increasingly popular in policymaking circles.
Since the escalation in the scale, sophistication and coordination of armed attacks on Nigeria's oil industry and the massive expansion of the oil-theft trade, a veritable industry in the study of the political economy of war in the Niger Delta has emerged. Much of this work has drawn heavily on public-choice strands of political economy (Collier and Hoeffler 2001, 2004, Collier, Hoeffler and Rohner 2009) and equally on more structuralist ‘resource curse’ traditions (Ross 2004, Karl 1997). It is not surprising that policymakers are avid consumers of this work (Ross 2003) in which the Niger Delta appears as a stark example of what happens in ‘resource cursed’ nations where the availability of a highly prized global commodity like oil provides the means to finance rebellion.
In collapsing conflict scenarios into one – pitting the oil industry and the Nigerian state against would-be rebels – single issue explanations of rebellion gloss over persistent community conflicts integral to the conflict map in the Delta linked to struggles over oil rents (Nwajiaku 2005) in which the oil industry continues to be specifically targeted, using ‘vigorous’ and ‘violent means’ (Zalik 2004a, Ukeje 2001). Such explanations also tend to underplay the shifting arena of alliances in and around the quest to secure access to a lucrative oil-theft industry, linking the Nigerian military forces, oil-company executives and militant fighters.1
In this article, I explore how ‘insurgency’ in the Niger Delta creates what Asuni calls an ‘enabling environment’ from which the Nigerian state, the oil industry and rebel commanders each benefit (Asuni 2009a). The web of interests involved in the growth industry that is the theft of oil is labyrinthine and not restricted to the activities of so-called rebels, who feature as useful yet bit-part players within a wider semi-officially sanctioned trade. Kate Meagher's observation that deregulation in the 1980s led to the gradual decline in the usefulness of the term ‘informal economy’, making it difficult to separate private from public or formal from informal, has resonances for Nigeria's official and unofficial economy of oil (Meagher 2010). A significant proportion of the losses from stolen oil arise from under-invoicing legally lifted oil by oil multinationals themselves, from the direct sabotage of pipelines and well heads which are illegally lifted and either shipped to tankers waiting in the open seas or refined rudimentarily in the Niger Delta into kerosene and gasoline (in relatively small amounts) for use in local markets (Ghazvinian 2007). The whole trade is said to reap up to £30 million/day, for retired generals, former ministers, current members of the JTF (the Joint Task Force, a combined Army, Navy and Air Force contingent permanently stationed in Warri) and oil-company employees, all working in concert with militant groups (Asuni 2009a, p. 2) or rather ‘ex-militants’ today (since the June 2009 presidential amnesty). Often both legally and illegally lifted oil ends up being sold through legal channels.
Whilst derided for the losses it apparently induces for the state treasury and for the multinationals, in terms of barrels of oil per day lost, the resolve of government and oil multinationals to track stolen oil is unclear, or at least incoherent. The ‘insecurity factor’ associated with the illicit trade could also contribute to keeping global prices high (Zalik 2011), from which both the Nigerian state and the oil industry as a whole benefit. This suggests that that rather than seeing the economy of rebellion as distinct from the rent-seeking official economy, we see both as two sides of the same coin. ‘Rebellion’ does not reap benefits for rebels alone but brings together state and non-state actors into a complicit union that may actually perpetuate war for its own sake.2
Much of the critique of the Collier thesis emanating from scholarship on the Niger Delta (Watts 2004, 2007, Ukeje 2001, Zalik 2004a, Ibeanu and Luckham 2007, Obi and Rustad 2011, Ukiwo 2007) has focused on its omission of the longue durée history and politics out of which rebellion has emerged. The recent ‘grafting’ of criminal elements is said to divert attention away from the intelligibility of societal violence, which is merely a response to ‘petro-violence’ (Watts 1999) meted out by the ‘petro-state’ in league with oil multinationals against peaceful protest that has persistently been crushed militarily. Armed militants from the largest minority group in the Niger Delta, the Ijaw, in recounting their antecedents, similarly tend to emphasise continuity with the struggles of their forebears (Courson 2007). Yet taking history seriously need not necessarily blind us to twists and turns (Ake 2000, p. 95) and ‘critical breaks’ that have dramatically altered trajectories. I argue in line with numerous accounts of ‘the armed struggle’ given by Ijaw nationalist ‘veterans’ (who were active members of Ijaw nationalist youth organisations in the 1990s)3 that in the wake of Nigeria's transition from military to civilian rule, changes in not just the form but arguably the content of Ijaw nationalist formations took place (the motivations of would-be militants and their source of funding and political patronage). This may suggest that what today calls itself ‘the struggle’ may be something quite qualitatively different from that which preceded it.
Many have pointed out that after Nigeria's transition from military to civilian rule in 1999, many militant groups came to be ‘paradoxically’ bankrolled by governors in the Niger Delta, which benefited from the award of an extra 13% of oil revenues after changes to the revenue allocation formula in 1999 (Watts 2007, p. 652). Perhaps because the grievance case in the Niger Delta is so compelling, there is a tendency to understate the radical rupture that this process of ‘bankrolling’ implied. In this article I also explore whether divesting ourselves of a continuity lens might generate new insights into the nature of ‘insurgency’.
The article is split into three main sections. The first revisits now-classic texts on the political economy of oil in Nigeria and explores the simultaneous development of the official and unofficial or parallel economy of oil. The second explores how oil has shaped the political history of the Ijaw, arguably the fourth largest group in Nigeria, focusing on three critical junctures. The third section discusses whether ‘insurgency’ may also be seen as simply creating an enabling environment for the expansion of the parallel economy that has existed since Nigeria's emergence as an oil-dependent state.
The political economy of oil and the character of the Nigerian state
Nigeria's emergence as an oil economy, its pursuit of policies of fiscal centralisation, the ‘Nigerianisation’ or ‘indigenisation’ of the personnel structure of multinational companies operating in Nigeria and the important equity stake held by the Nigerian state in the mainly joint-venture-led oil production business (some 60%), accentuated, compounded and institutionalised corruption and expanded the scope of patronage (Omeje 2006, p. 48). Rather than seeing the development of oil bunkering – the ‘illicit’ theft and sale of oil that expanded against the backdrop of ‘insurgency’ in the Niger Delta in recent years – as a departure from established norms, we might see it instead as an extension of the ‘parallel economies’ that developed around the production, sale and marketing of oil since the oil boom of the early 1970s.
The Civil War (1967–70) marked the beginning of Nigeria's emergence as a petroleum economy and as a petro-state, as production and export of petroleum soared. At independence in 1960, Nigeria was producing 20,000 barrels a day. This doubled within a year and peaked at two million barrels in the mid 1970s as traditional agricultural exports that had provided the economic foundations for pre-war politics were wiped out in less than a decade and Nigeria became an oil-dependent state. Led by the military, the government established during the civil war was a coalition between the military and the bureaucratic elite, business interests and members of the former political class. Soldiers and the bureaucrats wanted a centralising state to use revenues from oil-producing states to propel development, notably in non-oil-producing states, fuelled by massive expansions in public spending (Apter 2005, Panter-Brick 1978). Yet fiscal centralisation also splintered the national fabric by encouraging the articulation of ever-smaller notions of what it meant to be Nigerian. The mobilisation of (often new) ethnic identities in particular by elite political entrepreneurs served as platforms for arguing for a larger share of the centrally distributed national cake – oil revenues (Bach 1997, p. 334, Watts 2009, p. 27).
Today revenues from the sale of oil and gas and from rents, royalties and taxes constitute some 90% of the national budget and 80% of the state's forex earnings. Oil transformed Nigeria into a non-productive ‘rentier’ state where income is derived mainly from foreign sources and not local taxation (Omeje 2006). Any type of restraint that payers of income tax and indirect taxes could have imposed on government spending was limited (Guyer 1994). Oil rents insulated the Nigerian state from protest which an agricultural cash crop economy may have afforded. On the whole, oil was translated into defence spending, a repressive military machine and a long-lasting military-style political culture.
As the country drifted deeper into debt and fiscal crisis during the 1980s and 1990s, there was a ‘hollowing out’ of the state (Abdulraheem et al. 1986). This encouraged a shift towards the direct distribution of oil revenues through ‘official’ channels as an alternative means of pacifying would-be clients, notably the perpetual creation of states and local government areas, which became the ‘official’ means of disbursing the oil revenues received by the state (Williams 1988, Andrae and Beckman 1985, Beckman 1987, Okogu 1986). Oil dependency generated new less-porous ethnic group identities among aspiring elites, each struggling to have states and local governments created for ‘their’ communities. These units were the main conduits for fiscally centralised revenue distribution which gradually replaced the fiscal autonomy of the former regions prior to independence in 1960, and which according to the ‘derivation principle’ had allowed regions to retain up to 50% of locally generated resources.
Already endemic under the early military administrations and the Shagari civilian government (1979–83), spoils politics and corruption became systemic under Babangida (1986–93) and outright plunder under General Abacha (1993–98). The oil rents and contract culture that emerged became new sources of income for politicians, soldiers and businessmen. Economic liberalisation under military rule initially just restricted access to oil rents to those closely tied into patronage networks (Othman and Williams 1999). Nigeria's transition from military to civilian rule in 1999 once again reconfigured the patronage map, democratised access to patronage, as oil prices rose, to formerly excluded civilians.
Nigeria and the oil industry
The 1969 Petroleum Decree vested ownership of petroleum in the Nigerian state, and sketched out a regulatory framework for the oil industry. The Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree and Indigenisation Decree (Nigerianisation) furthered this tendency. Introduced in 1972 to increase national control of the economy by restricting foreign ownership, it stipulated that 40% equity in all foreign companies had to be owned by Nigerians, and barred foreign companies of a particular size from operating in particular sectors of the economy, notably domestic transport and land ownership (Williams 1976, p. 33). The state-owned oil company, formerly the Nigerian National Oil Corporation (NNOC) created in 1970, and in 1977 the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), was able to subsequently establish joint-venture partnership agreements with foreign oil companies, in which it was to have a 40–60% stake. During the 1980s and 1990s, after the initial assertion of state control, there was a creeping deregulation. Once the fiscal crisis set in, the government's bargaining power was reduced as the state became increasingly unable or unwilling to fund the NNPC to cover its share of joint-venture exploration and production costs. The Petroleum Industry Bill (originally drafted in 2008 and which today is still awaiting passage by the National Assembly) intends to reassert the Nigerian government's bargaining power in the oil and gas sector.
The indigenisation decrees restructured relations among foreign investors of different sorts, Nigerian public officials, military officers, Nigerian businessmen and some women, leading to decades of mutual backscratching between members of the Nigerian and foreign business class. Numerous examples abound of former high-level employees of multinational companies moving between the state-owned oil company, public office and back to the employ of a foreign oil company (Hutchful 1985, Frynas 1998). Omeje (2005, 2006) argues that far from being ‘comprador’ (Turner 1976, Biersteker 1987, p. 255, Beckman 1981), the Nigerian state and its elites have been in the driving seat in its relationship with oil companies. Oil multinationals have persistently portrayed themselves as reluctant partners (particularly the largest, Shell), unable to exercise restraint on military regimes, particularly in their responses to oil community protest. Soares de Oliveira's more nuanced view sees oil multinational capital and Nigeria's economic elite as conjoined twins, with mutually compatible interests which each eagerly defend, with slight shifts in the balance of power over time (Soares de Oliveira 2007, p. 157). The indigenisation decrees certainly enabled the Nigerian state to carve out a significant niche for itself, through its principle stakeholder status in all joint ventures and through the state-owned oil company which became an extension of its patronage base with all the attendant features – notably the hegemonic control of elites from the country's largest three ethnic groups.
Institutionalising the unofficial oil economy
As early as 1976, Terisa Turner noted that the arrival of oil revenues had created a web of ‘unofficial’ channels of distribution linking members of the political class, the military, civil servants and business people – all of whom are also members of ethnic, kinship, religious and community networks of all kinds – to oil-company personnel via powerful local intermediaries (Turner 1976, p. 64). These channels were constructed around administrative and political offices in government departments and agencies associated with the oil and gas sector in the Niger Delta, including those specifically created to alleviate the negative impact of oil production and exploration. Enquiries into Gowon's regime after it fell showed how public officials collaborated with foreign capital to inflate state contracts and appropriate state funds, placing them as foreign exchange in banks abroad (Forrest 1993, p. 209). The oil boom and successive military regimes expanded the scale and scope of corruption in Nigeria. Corruption in the oil sector fed into a wider syndrome of massive corruption which seeped into the oil multinationals themselves. The former head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Nuhu Ribadu, once likened oil theft – and the Nigerian state as a whole – to ‘organised crime’. He claims that in 2003, 70% of the country's oil wealth was stolen or wasted. This apparently went down to 40% by 2005.4 A culture of diversion of oil revenues became institutionalised within Nigeria. The diversion of ‘special funds’ funded by oil receipts controlled by the president; bribes or ‘taxation’ paid on oil contracts and the extensive smuggling of refined petroleum across Nigeria's borders (facilitated by artificially depressed domestic prices), the illegal lifting of crude oil (bunkering), as well as secret accounts held by the NNPC, were all part of the parallel economy funded by Nigeria's oil sector. As we shall see below, the expansion of illegal oil bunkering particularly in the context of insurgency, was an extension rather than a departure from of an already well-established parallel economy of oil which had structured the character of the Nigerian state since the early 1970s. The same therefore might be said of ‘rebellion’ itself, which public-choice-inspired political economists have been inclined to interpret as an attempted break with established patterns.
Critical junctures
In this section I bring to light three critical junctures that have shaped Ijaw political mobilisations since Nigeria's emergence as an oil economy and which constitute a kind of ‘historical backdrop’ against which more recent Ijaw armed militancy might be read. In contrast with many anti-greed/grievance scholars of the Niger Delta, this backdrop does not presuppose the existence of historical continuity between latter-day armed Ijaw nationalists and their would-be forebears. Although armed militant formations that came to prominence in the mid 2000s have consistently presented themselves as filial descendants of the earlier ‘non-violent’ political currents of the 1990s pushing for ‘resource control’ and Ijaw self-determination, I argue that key events – notably Nigeria's transition to civilian rule in 1999 – substantively altered the content as well as the form of the Ijaw currents that followed.
Critical juncture 1: oil, civil war and state creation: the emergence of an Ijaw political community
The first stirrings of Ijaw ethnic nationalism date back to the decolonisation period of the 1950s when political power was gradually devolved to elites from pan-ethnic groups best able to mobilise the largest numbers in newly established constituent regions of the federation: the Hausa-Fulani in the north, the Yoruba mainly in the west and the Igbo mainly in the east. By the 1930s and 1940s a greater political consciousness of belonging to a distinct cultural community had already begun to emerge amongst residents of Port Harcourt, Warri and Lagos who found themselves competing for jobs and scarce opportunities for social advancement with migrants from larger ethnic groups (Wolpe 1974). Yet by the 1950s, this was a porous identity open to association with other groups all united in their antagonism to regionally dominant Igbo (Tamuno 1972, p. 268).
Isaac Adaka Boro, native of Kaiama in today's Bayelsa state (then part of a province within the Eastern Region) and his Niger Delta Volunteer Force – a small rebel army – pushed for greater Ijaw political self-awareness. Linking oil to insurgency, in February 1966 Boro attempted to create the ‘Niger Delta Republic’, a month after Nigeria's first military coup. Widely interpreted as an Igbo coup, Boro feared the further consolidation of Igbo regional hegemony and linked Ijaw status as ‘landlords’ of the oil fields (production for export began in his birthplace, Oloibiri, in 1958) with demands for self-determination. His republic lasted just 12 days. Charged with treason, Boro was later granted clemency and died on the battlefield defending the integrity of the Nigerian state against Biafra: the secessionist attempt by the Igbo-dominated Eastern Regional Government.5 The civil war linked oil and insurgency together for the second time. By 1966, oil revenues accounted for 32% of export earnings of the federation. Whilst the motivations for secession were varied, the advocates of an independent Biafran state imagined that oil could provide the fiscal base to put the Biafra ideal into practice. Positive forecasts for oil expansion hardened the Eastern Region's commitment to secession and the federal military government's determination to fight it (Othman and Williams 1999, p. 25) whilst swaying the calculations of oil firms and foreign governments alike (Zalik 2004b, p. 407).
On the eve of the outbreak of war, the three largest regions were broken up into smaller units (states) to forestall the likelihood of secession by majority groups in future. Most of the oil-producing areas were brought within the boundaries of a newly created Rivers State. This plus the oil boom gave the Ijaw – the largest minority – political ascendancy over other minority groups, control of the Rivers State bureaucracy and access to considerable wealth and state resources, at a time when the revenue allocation formula still allowed for significant fiscal autonomy. It also facilitated their incorporation at a federal level through recruitment into the army and the navy – a legacy of Isaac Boro's federal military adventure. .The fortunes of the Rivers State Ijaw were not matched by those from today's Delta state, a numerically weak minority amongst other minorities, notably the politically and historically favoured Itsekiri with whom they competed for state- and oil-related goods (Ukiwo 2007).
Critical juncture 2: structural adjustment, Ijaw political decline and ethnic nationalist resurgence
From 1981 onwards the share of oil revenues going to the states of derivation by virtue of their status as ‘oil producers’ were reduced to a token 3.5%. These changes as well as the emergent debt crisis were particularly damaging for Ijaw elites. The return to military rule after 1983, the further erosion of the derivation principle and the adoption of structural adjustment policies in 1986, created a coincidence of interests between urban middle and working classes and under- or unemployed men and women in oil-producing villages and beyond, whose numbers exploded, particularly as the university system, hamstrung by endless strikes, failed to absorb a fast urbanising youth population, increasingly socialised into urban peripheral cultures of violence (Joab-Peterside 2007, pp. 11–12). Many of the latter were already victims of the negative effects of over two decades of oil production and exploration which had destroyed mainly fishing and farming based local economies, and the Land Use Decree of 1978 (later Act 1979) which had alienated many fishermen and women from individually and communally ‘owned’ lands and fishing grounds (Okorobia 1999, p. 398, Omeje 2006, pp. 41–42). Rurally well-connected urban-based Ijaw activists and ambitious, although economically and politically weakened Ijaw elites, vied to ‘transform’ community protests directed against oil companies which had become frequent since 1980s into ‘Ijaw nationalist’ claims for greater inclusion on the Nigerian stage.
The attempted coup by Major Gideon Orkar, from a minority group in the Middle Belt, against military head of state Ibrahim Babangida in April 1990 enjoyed much support among Ijaw officers. Purges of the army followed. The executions of coup plotters, some of whom were Ijaw, forced many Ijaw officers, particularly from the central Delta to leave their posts and return to the Delta. Retired generals who became key figures in village chiefs' councils and important conduits for oil-company patronage and rents, began to play instrumental roles in training and arming gangs of youth to bring pressure to bear on oil companies to deliver direct material benefits or to add weight to their political demands for a greater share of federally distributed oil revenues and the creation of more states (Von Kemedi 2005, p. 7).
Yet Ijaw elites and chiefs alike were also accused (often violently) by increasingly mobilised youth constituencies of having sold out to oil companies and the military regime. By the end of early 1990s, particularly after the emergence of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), the reluctant embrace by members of the Ijaw political elite of ‘Ijaw nationalism’ was as much an attempt to douse fires throughout the Delta that were threatening to consume them. They responded by creating the Ijaw National Congress (INC) in 1991. Their goal was (re)incorporation into Nigeria's political class. They used the INC in much the same way as elites from majority groups, as an ethnic platform to lobby for more state and local government areas (Othman and Williams 1999, p. 48). The creation of Bayelsa State in 1996, the first and only mainly Ijaw state in the country, suggests their strategy was effective.
A younger generation of educated Ijaw men and women who aspired to elite status but whose access had largely been blocked, challenged INC conservatism. They founded the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) in 1998 – the culmination of a decade of ‘grassroots’ mobilisation spearheaded by movements like Chikoko (an Ijaw word for the Niger Delta soil) and in part the Movement for the Survival of Ijaw Ethnic Nationalities in the Niger Delta (MOSIEND), founded in the early 1990s to build links between Ijaw across the Delta. The IYC had a radical agenda of Ijaw self-determination and a ‘non violent’ (i.e. non-armed) approach to the ‘resource control’ struggle – which meant restoring ownership and control rights over land and the waterways and resources beneath them to the people of the Delta, more effective regulation of the oil industry and overturning ‘obnoxious’ legislation that conferred such rights on the state.6
Critical juncture 3: democratic transition and ‘Ijaw armed struggle’
Nigeria's transition from military to civilian rule paradoxically coincided with the intensification of the military's presence in the Niger Delta at levels not seen since the civil war. It was on the eve of transition in December 1998, spurred on by the mobilisation efforts of popular youth organisations, that the IYC was born as 5000 Ijaw men and women met in Kaiama for the All Ijaw Youths Conference and launched the now famous Kaiama Declaration. It gave an ultimatum to oil companies to quit Ijaw lands pending dialogue with youth to address key ‘resource control’ demands. Up to 15,000 soldiers and two warships were sent to Bayelsa by the-then military government of General Abusalami Abubakar and a state of emergency was declared. An estimated 200 people died whilst many more were injured, tortured and raped (Ekine 2001, p. 25). The Kaiama debacle set the tone for civilian regimes to follow, as the razing of the town of Odi to the ground in October 1999, some five months after Nigeria's official transition, attests (Courson 2007).
The use of overwhelming military force at the slightest suggestion of non-state ‘provocation’ in the Niger Delta had been standard federal practice since the late 1980s (Akin-Ojo 2010, Okonta 2008, Human Rights Watch 1999). Since then, members of the Nigerian police force have been detached to oil companies as ‘supernumerary’ police (locally referred to as ‘spy’ police), where conditions are significantly more favourable than in the police force proper. The state's inability to combat crime and guarantee security (Fayemi 2003, p. 57) has also created a security vacuum increasingly occupied by paramilitary bodies – militia, criminal gangs, vigilante groups and private security companies – whose presence rather compounds collective and individual insecurity problems (Meagher 2007, Ukiwo 2003, Abrahamsen and Williams 2011).
In 2003, a combined navy, army and air force contingent, the joint task force (JTF) code-named ‘Operation Restore Hope’ (the name used by the US to describe its military intervention in Somalia in 1992), was established in Warri, Delta State, close to one of Nigeria's four oil refineries and Shell and Chevron's offloading platforms (Escravos), ostensibly to enforce peace between warring Ijaw, Urhobo and Itsekiri communities which had dented oil production output (Zalik 2004a). The JTF, now a semi-permanent fixture, is viewed by most Niger Deltans as an ‘occupier’ force, inspired by colonial approaches to ‘pacification’ (Ukeje 2011) and ‘peace enforcement’ campaigns in West Africa, under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). The embedding of public security providers within private firms has also now become commonplace. Company facilities are used to move members of the mobile police force and the JTF around. Often the perks and advantages enjoyed by supernumeraries, mobile police and members of the JTF detached to remote oil installation sites may explain the zealousness with which they defend their positions. The presence of the JTF has contributed to rising levels of violence, linked to the now widely documented involvement of JTF operatives in the oil-theft trade (Asuni 2009a).
Politicians and the capture of youth militancy
Before Nigeria's transition, the Kaiama conference demonstrated that a small window of opportunity had emerged for youth-led Ijaw nationalists to redirect mass anger against elite interests.7 Democratisation however opened up new opportunities for the reincorporation of Ijaw conservative elites into the membership of the Nigerian political class and for the co-optation of younger Ijaw activists into the elite political fold. Awash with an extra 13% of oil revenues, newly ‘elected’ state and local government officials were able to financially sponsor youth activists and steer them in the direction they desired. This possibility had not been open to elites prior to transition, because they simply lacked the means to do so and were therefore not taken seriously by increasingly self-confident youth bodies. The appointment in 2003 of Oronto Douglas (civil rights lawyer, MOSOP campaigner, founding member of Chikoko and the IYC) as commissioner for information for the Bayelsa State governor, DSP Alamieyeseigha, epitomised this trend. Whilst Alamieyeseigha donned the title of ‘Governor General of all Ijaw’, his cousin, Onyeinfie Jonjon, became IYC president in 2004. As governors throughout the Niger Delta took up the ‘resource control’ agenda to argue for even higher percentages of oil revenues (‘derivation’) from the centre, ‘Ijaw nationalism’ became a sort of official ideology of state and was simultaneously emptied of its former radical content.
Throughout Nigeria, as electoral politics hurriedly returned, aspiring politicians either paid and armed organised youth to rig elections in their favour and/or simply infiltrated powerful youth organisations that could create trouble for them. Both Felix Tuodolor, the first IYC president (who today occupies a senior post in the regional development agency, the Niger Delta Development Commission) and Asari Dokubo (from Rivers State), formerly the vice-president of the IYC, received financial support for their campaigns to secure the IYC presidency in 2001 from the-then governor of Rivers State (Argus 2002). Dokubo's much-contested victory splintered the IYC and marked a shift away from the non-violent stance the IYC had hitherto adopted. Claiming to ‘represent’ oil-producing communities, often against their will, Dokubo used the organisation and arms to extort from oil companies.8
In October 2003, after governorship elections which Dokubo helped to rig in favour of the Rivers State governor, Peter Odili, Dokubo broke ties with his former patron, after, he claims, escaping two failed assassination attempts on his life, and left the IYC to found the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF). By 2004, the NDPVF boasted an army of some 1000 recruits,9 composed mainly of unemployed youth and members of cults/street gangs (formerly extra-campus affiliates of once-innocuous university fraternities (Joab-Peterside 2007, p. 12). From 2003 onwards the NDPVF became involved in a series of violent clashes in and around Port Harcourt, with a rival militia group led by another eastern Ijaw from Okrika, Ateke Tom, commander of the Niger Delta Vigilantes and also sponsored by the Odili administration (Asuni 2009b). Increasingly localised conflicts in ‘host communities’ over oil rents became hijacked by hired-out cult members. These cults or ‘fratas’ escalated the scale and ferocity of conflicts throughout the oil-producing Niger Delta because of their willingness to engage in extreme acts of violence. Frata membership also linked paid fighters with politicians who had been members of the same fraternities from their university days (Boas 2011, p. 122). In addition splinter groups and factions sided with enemies of former friends to access arms, whilst inter-cult violence grafted itself onto local chieftaincy succession disputes, connected to access to oil rents, and sponsored by political patrons vying for office and eager to secure stakes in the oil-theft trade. (Asuni 2009a, Human Rights Watch 2005, Watts 2007)
The declaration of ‘all-out war’ against oil companies and the Nigerian government by Mujahid Alhaji Asari Dokubo on 27 September 2004, in the wake of heavy military attacks against Dokubo's base in the eastern Delta (but not that of his rival Ateke Tom), sent global oil prices rocketing to what was then a high of US$50 per barrel at the height of the Iraq war.10 The federal government initially dismissed Dokubo as a criminal, but (under pressure from the US in particular) President Obasanjo later negotiated a ceasefire between Dokubo and Ateke Tom and disarmament which included the award of $US1800 for every weapon handed in (Concannon and Newsom 2006, p. 8). Rather than reining in militants, demobilisation provided them with the means to rearm. Cheap arms were bought and sold back to the federal government at substantially more than cost price. In September 2005 Dokubo was however arrested and arraigned in court on sedition charges for allegedly advocating the break-up of Nigeria. In response, his supporters in the Niger Delta People's Salvation Front (the political wing of the NDPVF) threatened to create mayhem in the Delta if their leader was not released
MEND: armed struggle or simply mending fences?
Although the NDPVF/NDPSF initially went underground, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which emerged in January 2006, called for the release of Asari Dokubo and of Alamieseigha, the former governor of Bayelsa State, impeached and arrested on corruption charges in December 2005. Whilst this suggests continuity between the NDPVF and MEND, the spatial location of MEND's core constituency suggests everything but a filial relationship. Dokubo's constituency was in the eastern Delta, whilst MEND's was in the west, where rounds of inter-ethnic conflict between Ijaw and Itsekiri had resurfaced since 1997 and had been particularly violent in 2003. Like the IYC, MEND's goals were also political, built around notions of ‘fiscal federalism’ (a return to the 1960 constitution which allowed regions to retain 50% of locally generated revenues), resource control and a stinging critique of an unregulated oil industry. Press statements in 2007 called for Shell to make a court-sanctioned US$1.5 billion compensation to local communities in Ijaw territory. MEND expressed widespread disenchantment with Nigeria's flawed transition to democracy, particularly directed against former president Obasanjo and the People's Democratic Party (PDP) (Okonta 2006a). MEND's deft use of the internet to communicate its message suggested cohesion beyond an idea, yet its highly fractured nature (it was an ‘umbrella’ organisation with numerous ‘affiliates’) and the absence of a central command structure, whilst a source of strength militarily, made negotiation difficult (Ikelegbe 2011, Boas 2011, Okonta 2006b).
By March 2009, crude oil exports had fallen to 1.6 million barrels per day, down from 2.6 million in 2006.11 In April 2009 the idea of an amnesty for repentant militants was first mooted by the late president Yar'Adua. After a less than positive response from most militant quarters, it was followed on 15 May 2009 by a full-scale aerial military bombardment of Gbaramatu and Escravos in Delta State, a key militant stronghold and close to the offloading platforms of Shell and Chevron. The attack left many dead (unconfirmed figures speak of hundreds), most of them ordinary civilians, with many more injured or rendered refugees (Watts 2009). On 26 June, a month later, an amnesty for a 60-day period between 6 August and 4 October 2009 was announced for all ‘militants’ who surrendered their arms, ‘renounced militancy’ and registered with the government. They were to be eligible for inclusion in a NGN50 billion ‘amnesty programme’ for rehabilitation and reintegration which included training and monthly allowances for four years (Nwajiaku-Dahou 2010).
After concerns about their personal security were allayed, key militant leaders began one by one to surrender their arms and engage in negotiations via third parties or directly with the Nigerian state. The ceasefire has more or less held for almost three years, the kidnapping of expatriate personnel has declined, and production is back up to 2006 levels. Threats of a resumption of hostilities since January 2010 have not amounted to much, this notwithstanding the 1 October Nigerian Independence Day triple bomb attacks in Abuja in 2010, and persistent localised protests against the non-inclusion of some militant groups. The confirmation of Goodluck Jonathan as president by appointment in May 2010, and by election in May 2011, may have also curbed appetites for armed struggle in the creeks. Integrated ex-militant leaders now increasingly denounce as ‘rogues’ those who insist on prosecuting the armed struggle,12 and in so doing legitimise military strikes against them.
Towards an explanation of insurgency: orchestration of the parallel oil economy
Much of the focus of research and ‘commentary’ on the Niger Delta takes as given the pre-eminence of the oil company/state versus militant conflict scenario, which pits MEND against the rest. Indeed the historical presentation in the preceding section does not entirely break with this trend, which tends to highlight the ways in which armed violence has escalated in recent years (since 1999) and, in line with Collier, focuses on how ‘greed’ and ‘resource capture’ spur rebellion. Much of this work also invariably cites data on ‘oil-related deaths’ in the Delta as evidence of the conflict escalation. The federally sponsored Technical committee report speaks of 1000 people having been killed in the first nine months of 2008, caught in the crossfire between the military and armed groups.13 The Ijaw People's Association of the UK and Ireland, Ogele Club, claims that between 1999 and 2006 up to 5000 Ijaw people have been killed as part of a systematic attempt to ‘wipe out a people because of the rich natural resources in the area’.14 Amnesty International cites 680 deaths in 2003 and 1000 deaths in 2004. The Small arms survey of 2008 singles out oil-related conflicts as the third most common cause of violent death, behind crime and electoral violence between December 2006 and November 2007 (Hazen and Horner 2008, p. 53). NigeriaWatch highlights the problem of comparing data across time given the mix of different criteria used by different data collection institutions,15 but in 2008 still maintained that because the Niger Delta ‘records a thousand people killed every year … [it] should fall into the category of ‘high intensity conflict’, alongside such better-known hot spots as Chechnya and Colombia'. In Bayelsa, Delta and Rivers, NigeriaWatch gives a death toll of 1158 in 2006, 1451 in 2007 and 915 from January to November 2008; ‘this includes accidents and all types of violence’ (NigeriaWatch 2008, p. 8).
Yet the above profusion of often-contradictory statistics, which are also difficult to verify (Cramer 2006, p. 1), suggests that the picture is far from clear. What they do tell us is that violence in the Delta has multiple causes. Military-style security solutions premised on addressing just one of them (as advocated by Collier et al.) therefore pose problems. Rather than see the Niger Delta conflict as ‘insurgency’ alone, we propose, in line with Keen's study of conflict in Sierra Leone (Keen 2005), an approach which sees insurgency as one amongst a plethora of conflict scenarios and a rehearsed rather than real one at that, but whose victims are nevertheless real enough. Anecdotal evidence of the mobile telephone numbers of JTF commanders being held by key militants and used to forewarn of imminent attack suggests high degrees of complicity or collusion between would-be belligerents.16 The orchestration of conflict scenarios by all three parties has also served as a cover to facilitate access to the oil-theft trade. Indeed, as identified as early as 2003, confrontations often stem from disagreements over access to illegal oil bunkering routes (Zalik 2004a).
The fact that insurgency in the Niger Delta is as much orchestrated as real suggests that we pay closer attention to identifying whose interests might be best served from orchestration on this scale. We argue that the orchestration of violence and insecurity in the Niger Delta has and continues to serve the interests of all those involved in the illicit extraction and sale of oil, which has been an important feature of Nigeria's oil economy since its inception. Far from being a departure from a ‘pre-war’ situation, the emergence of armed militancy is the result of past practices that have backfired; a classic case of chickens coming home to roost (WAC Global Services 2003). In a context of scarcity and high youth unemployment, securing access to ‘security contract’ markets had, by the turn of the century, become critical to the daily survival of growing numbers of young men and women (and the broader communities of which they were part) in the Niger Delta. The increasing willingness of oil companies (and state governments) to ‘deploy’ security responsibility to the Nigerian security forces to guarantee their own security (see Abrahams and Williams 2011, p. 139), particularly from 2004 onwards, clearly upset the apple cart for many youth less able to exert the same pressure on potential oil-company clients, and less able to enjoy unrestricted access to illegal oil-bunkering routes.
At the same time, the insurgency ‘situation’ sharpened and institutionalised these long established heterodox forms of ‘security provision’. Between 2003 and 2009 oil companies became increasingly obliged to pay substantial sums in ‘protection fees’ to different armed groups and the JTF, both also backed by state government sponsorship (Newsom 2011). So even with the JTF present, these strategies failed to sufficiently insulate oil companies from external pressure. One of the initially controversial federal proposals put forward after the amnesty was to oblige oil companies to professionalise security provision locally, by enabling communities to establish security providers, with well-defined responsibilities and transparent contracting arrangements (with uniforms to boot). One private security company working for Shell actually explored with militants the possibility of such an approach. The idea was however shelved in favour of the continuation of informal (secretive) ‘protection money’ style payments to a chosen few militant leaders, much to the dismay of the general population who ultimately bear the cost of these conflict-inducing approaches to security provision.17
Oil companies have not been alone in sustaining the protection/extortion culture that perpetuates insecurity in the Delta. Whilst politicians have sponsored and armed militant groups for electoral and rent-seeking purposes, once in office they have increasingly found themselves obliged to pay protection money to said militants to insulate themselves from extremely well-armed groups. A basic ‘tail-wagging-the-dog’ scenario emerged throughout the Delta at the height of the insurgency in which state governors on the one hand were paying militants not to attack oil installations, and at the same time were paying members of the JTF to refrain from attacking militants. The-then governor of Bayelsa state, Timipre Sylva, had in 2008 spearheaded a Bayelsa-wide ‘cash for peace’ initiative', which involved paying off militants rather than endorsing military strikes against them, as in Delta and Rivers States. The federal amnesty programme essentially replicated the Bayelsa initiative (of the Bayelsa State Conflict Resolution Centre) which ensured that JTF operatives did not engage armed groups in combat, and in turn that the latter did not carry out operations that could attract military reprisals. In turn, militia leaders received cash payments monthly from the state government and also agreed not to carry out operations against state targets (although this did not always work according to plan). Each camp commander is said to have received monthly allowances of up to US$67,000 in so-called protection money as far back as 2005, when Goodluck Jonathan was governor of the state (Africa Confidential 2009).
The 2009 amnesty, in paying off militants, intended to take them out the ‘security provision’ equation. Yet by removing them or at least ring-fencing their leadership – quite literally, as evidenced by the state provision of security to one of the formerly most powerful militant leaders, Government Ekpemupolo (Tompolo), who currently relies on a mobile police force escort for 24-hour protection – it tipped the balance in favour of the official enforcers of peace and security, the JTF, and a select number of favoured former-militant commanders, who no longer have to compete with each other over security contracts and oil bunkering.18 By sanctioning the integration of a restricted number of ex-militant leaders as privileged security providers (real or imagined) into the apparatus of the state, it weeded out the others. Some journalists have likened this to the mafia strategy of ‘organising’ criminal activities.19
Conclusions
Most scholarship on the Niger Delta that is critical of Collier's work has tended to focus on its apparent neglect of ‘history’. While useful, these approaches, although critical of ‘commodity determinism’, also tend to take us off in a teleological direction by taking continuity as given. Even if we take issue with the reductionism of Collier's criminalising caricature, it is worthwhile pondering the notion of ‘departure’. I have tried to show that there have indeed been breaks in history. These however are not only ones that have created would-be rebels operating outside the state but rather ones that have caused the state itself to ‘capture’ rebellion, transforming it in its own likeness, a would be mirror at one end of a continuum not too far removed from the official and unofficial economy of oil-related plunder that is political practice in Nigeria. Sympathetic scholarship tends to understate the significance of this rupture by referring to it as simply ‘paradoxical’. We suggest that the wholesale buying up of would-be rebels by politician patrons alters their fundamental character.
Oil theft in Nigeria is nothing new. The systematic smuggling of refined oil products across porous West African borders by state officials responsible for endemic shortages in the downstream sector has been common practice in Nigeria for decades, as has under-invoicing by oil companies, and pipeline tapping by oil-company employees past and present. Terisa Turner's work in 1976 already highlighted how Nigeria's status as an oil-dependent economy expanded opportunities for parallel economies to develop around the sale and marketing of oil in which past and present state officials, clients and intermediaries were deeply entrenched. Similarly oil-bunkering practices in and around Warri were long established during the military era (Asuni 2009b). They fed into and exacerbated inter-ethnic wars over oil rents, oil contracts, and the location of state and local government administrative divisions and headquarters, between and amongst Ijaw and Itsekiri minorities in Delta, which in turn allowed MEND to take hold. Whilst there are indeed therefore continuities, these continuities are not those that official Ijaw nationalist narratives might suggest, the straightforward continuation of the political struggles of old in armed militant guise.
The attempted removal of the fuel subsidy, much cherished by Nigerian households, in one fell swoop in January 2012, and the overnight doubling of the pump price of petrol, provoked mass outrage and a week-long general strike, arousing fears internationally that Nigeria was once again ‘on the verge’ of implosion. The events of January also placed the spotlight on the parallel economies that are at the heart of oil-related plunder in Nigeria, particularly in the sale and marketing of petroleum products. Yet whilst addressing seepage in the downstream sector is the avowed intention of the government's economic reform team, led by the former World Bank vice-president Ngozi Nkonjo-Iweala, the illicit extraction and sale of oil in the upstream sector remains off the radar. International offers of support and ‘fingerprinting’ expertise to label stolen oil and reduce ‘bunkering’, the key arena in which rebel and state-centred interests coincide as much as collide, continue to receive lukewarm or little government support (Asuni 2009b).
By adopting a political-economy approach which is sensitive to history and contingency whilst not being hostage to either, I have tried to show that single issue explanations of rebellion can only take us so far. A critical juncture / radical breaks approach helps us to identify which questions from the preceding period remain unanswered and why. The question posed by the founding fathers of the Ijaw Youth Council – notably whether elite privilege and the spoils-sharing politics which left the majority in the Niger Delta impoverished should continue unchecked in the 1990s – remains unanswered today. Whilst the masses of unemployed, socially alienated and disintegrated youth with little to lose, mobilised en masse to join militia armies, in a context where borders are porous and arms trafficking easy, their willingness to lay down their arms still does not suggest that the question posed by radical Ijaw nationalists in the mid 1990s has been answered. Political elites, ‘chiefs’, governors and indeed oil multinationals, who have sponsored rebellion, are still playing the ‘ethnic incorporation’ game. The appointment of Goodluck Jonathan, an Ijawman from Ogbia, may sound the death knell of ‘the struggle’– the ultimate act of settlement – and the amnesty may have checkmated MEND. But as long as the militarisation continues, poverty remains constant, the oil industry remains largely unregulated and urban cultures of violence go unchecked, new MEND aficionados will resurface.
At a time when another serious ‘development’ initiative is being considered in the Niger Delta as part of the post-amnesty plan, the need to focus on the ‘fundamental causes’ of discontent in the Niger Delta is regularly cited as being vital to finding a ‘lasting solution’ to ‘the Niger Delta problem’.20 Yet it seems unlikely that policies based on addressing the so-called fundamentals (development inputs), even if backed up militarily, will bring an ultimate end to insecurity and violence given the multiple interests that are invested in sustaining it, both domestically and internationally. Insecurity, however well orchestrated, keeps global prices of oil high, as attested to by the record oil-company profits at the height of the insecurity (Zalik 2004a). At the heart of the Niger Delta troubles is the Nigerian state itself, a complex assemblage of domestic and foreign interests heavily invested in the production, sale and marketing of oil, by fair means or foul.