The Niger Delta: 'Petro Violence'

Review of African Political Economy No.101:401-424 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 2004 The Niger Delta: ‘Petro Violence’ and ‘Partnership Development’1 Anna Zalik This article examines the globalisation of corporate strategic philanthropy as played out in the Niger Delta of Nigeria – a region that has been marked by a history of state and petroleum industry collusion both in social repression and environmental destruction. Social control of the Delta has rested largely on what Watts (2001) conceptualises as ‘petro violence’, the joint security imposed by the Nigerian military and oil companies to police their installations and the environment of social unrest that surrounds petroleum extraction. In examining the extractive industry’s response to social dislocation, this study focuses on the adoption of a model of partnership and participatory development by Shell Nigeria. The implementation of the social stabilisation project promoted by Shell’s partnership model and facilitated by international donors and state institutions (understood in corporate strategy as a ‘leveraged buy in’), exemplifies the reciprocal formation of the corporate social governance projects and development assistance in the Nigerian context. Yet this new model’s attempt to achieve social consent is partially contradicted by the corporate requirement of profit maximisation served by rising prices associated with perceived and real threats to oil supplies. The oil companies’ pursuit of a social ‘licence to operate’ thus rests uneasily with an industry whose underlying logic profits from the upward movement of oil prices, dependent on instability and violence. They wanted me to implement the (major community project) through the CD (community development) model so that I would be responsible for 40 million Naira. I refused, I am a poor man (former CDC Chairman, Niger Delta community). With education the children of the poor will Dine With Princes and Shake Hands with Kings (sign on wall, office of oil industry-funded NGO, Niger Delta). Big business is being misrepresented. There is a great deal of mutual distrust which we have to get over … We believe in good international governance for issues like climate change and trade. It is a myth that we are not in favour of regulation (Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairman of Shell and chairman of the Business Council for Sustainable Development at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, 2002). Until the 1990s Nigerian state control over the population of the Niger Delta region, or the ‘oil minorities’, was largely achieved through political marginalisation. This marginalisation is most apparent in the transfer of locally-derived oil industry profits to the federal level, a marked lack of basic infrastructure connecting popular classes of the region to Lagos, including inadequate roads and insufficient phone lines, as well as ongoing military and police repression of local claims on, and ISSN 0305-6244 Print/1740-1720 Online/04/030401-24 DOI: 10.1080/03056240420005512 402 Review of African Political Economy resistance against, the oil industry (Obi, 2001). In a context of social inequality, ecological destruction and general crisis, social control of the Delta region has rested largely on what Michael Watts conceptualises as ‘petro violence’, the joint security imposed by the Nigerian military and oil companies to police their installations and the environment of social unrest that surrounds petroleum extraction. Since 1999, under the so-called democratising regime of Obasanjo, Nigeria has experienced an almost permanent socio-economic crisis – one that has been characterised as late-capitalism’s/post-modernity’s general condition (Hardt, 2001) and that has been particularly associated with developmentalism in Africa (Hoogvelt, 1997). ‘We now have the freedom to assemble’, some Nigerians say, ‘but people do not have enough to eat’. In this context the construction of an economy based on petroleum is reinforced by a society that increasingly depends on it to fuel the proliferation of motor vehicles in one of Africa’s most urbanised, polluted, and highly mobile, countries. Given the ongoing crises, the Delta region has been singled out by the oil majors and the aid industry for attention, regulation and stabilisation. In response to considerable social unrest and bad press in the mid-1990s, Shell, the main player in the oil industry, adopted a new approach dealing with the Niger Delta in 1998, known as partnership development (Lapin, 2000). This model aims at achieving community consent that is referred to in the corporate world as a company’s ‘social licence to operate’. The construction of a large community development bureaucracy within Shell Nigeria, and the mushrooming of local civil society organisations as sub-contractors for particular community development interventions – youth training, women in development, micro-credit and conflict resolution – have formed part of the programme’s implementation. The partnership approach has also been accompanied by a renewed engagement of international development agencies which had cut ties with the Abacha regime following the 1995 execution of Ken Saro- Wiwa and eight other Ogoni rights leaders. Since 1999, bilateral actors with significant development initiatives in the Delta region include the European Union and USAID.2 Herein, I examine how the turn to ‘partnership development’ and participatory practice is a manifestation of the broader penetration of individualised regulation in flexibilised, or late-capitalism, a form of management and rule associated with post- Fordist economic systems and post-structuralism. This post-structural form of regulation may be understood through the Foucauldian conception of the gradual transition from the ’society of discipline’ – based on social norms and sanctions, to the ‘society of control’ – based on self-discipline and the penetration of norms into citizens’ daily habits (Foucault, 1976).3 This transition accompanies a discursive and material merging of developmental/humanitarian interventions with global security (Duffield, 2001), a project that has deepened in the post-9/11 climate. Within the Niger Delta the move towards post-modern social regulation has accompanied a blurring of development for communities or regions with compensa- tion for individuals or groups, and devolution of responsibility for developmental interventions from state and corporate institutions to non-governmental and community-based organisations. The so-called transition to the society of control, or post-modern governance, is facilitated by technologies of communication and production that are constantly shifting, in a setting in which labour is easily displaced by the movement of industry to new locations. Thus, the ‘globalised’ information economy has been described as The Niger Delta: ‘Petro Violence’ and ‘Partnership Development’ 403 de-territorialising, and has the potential to free capital from social opposition in sites of production. As Zygmunt Bauman explains: capital can always move away to more peaceful sites if the engagement with otherness requires a costly application of force or tiresome negotiations. No need to engage, if avoidance will do (Bauman, 1998:11). Yet as the post-September 11 conjuncture makes clear, the spread of the globalised economy is very much tied to territorially-fixed forms of resource extraction, petroleum being the quintessential example. The territorial rootedness of this resource means there is no simple departure from the violence associated with primary resource extraction; petroleum must be exploited in its geographical/social setting as investments in exploration and productive infrastructure make movement too costly to be viable. This rootedness also produces its own logic of capital accumulation since it contributes importantly to the perception that petroleum supplies are threatened by ‘localised’ territorial disputes, thereby driving up oil prices (Nitzan, 2004).4 In the Niger Delta these are largely constructed as inter-ethnic and inter-community conflicts, increasingly fragmented into disputes between neighbouring clans. These disputes are thus a reflection of how class relations are obscured by identity politics under the post-structural economy. In Nigeria, as elsewhere in Africa, identity politics emerge from colonial policies that hardened fluid ethnic delineations through the granting of communal authority in rural areas (Mamdani, 1996). According to Mamdani, colonial indirect rule in Africa was ‘customary although untraditional’ in its tribal control over rural subjects, and modern and racialised – between Europeans and African elites – in its urban rule over citizens. Given this bifurcated governance structure, post-colonial African states have been largely successful at deracialising rule but have failed to detribalise state politics. Although Mamdani’s position has received some critique for its tendency to encourage a reductive understanding of post-colonial Africa (Ifeka, 2001), his fundamental argument is of considerable relevance to the present conjuncture of partnership development: the colonial legacy contributes to shaping Nigeria’s political fragmentation, deepened through the creation of new states and local government areas that has accompanied neo-liberal decentralisation. By making relationships to authorities more ‘localised’ through participatory strategy involving oil industry agents and contracted development NGOs, the subject relationships of patron-client that Mamdani associates

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