Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the dynamics of the largest oil producer in the Gulf of Guinea (Nigeria), and to offer a political–ecological analysis of the recent history of an archetypical petro-state. Nigeria is a poster-child of the so-called resource curse, a ‘fragile and conflicted state’ condemned to embark upon a ‘postconflict transition’. Exclusionary political settlements and extractive institutions of the sort found in Nigeria are associated with high levels of violence and political conflict. However, the inventory of institutional failures of ‘oil development’ must not blind us to the fact that the combination of oil and nation-building has produced a durable and expanded federal system, a democracy of sorts (albeit retaining an authoritarian and often violent cast) and important forms of institution building. I argue that the state has been informalized for particular purposes, vested with certain capabilities and made ‘functional’ while at the same time generating considerable civic and political violence including an insurgency and endemic conflict in the oil-producing Niger Delta region. Oil and its political logics are central to this complex and contradictory picture of uneven state capabilities coupled with spatial fragmentation and conflict.
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Notes
- 1.
In the wake of the ‘rebasing’ of the Nigeria national accounts data, there is a debate over numbers, poverty rates, human development trends, and so on (see World Bank 2014). The fact remains that unemployment is massively underestimated while the aggregate picture of income and HDIs of poverty during the period of oil-led development has been disastrous. The total poverty head count rose from 27.2 % in 1980 to 65.6 % in 1996, and recent figures from the Central Bank of Nigeria show that, between 1980 and 2000, the share of the population subsisting on less than one dollar a day grew from 36 % to more than 70 % (from nineteen million to a staggering ninety million people). In half of Nigeria’s thirty-six states, the estimated poverty head count (and indices of multidimensional poverty) increased between 2004 and 2010; in some northern states, the figure is close to 80 %.
- 2.
By 2005, there was a dizzying, often bewildering, array of militants, militias, and so-called cults: the Grand Alliance, Niger Delta Coastal Guerrillas, South–South Liberation Movement, Movement for the Sovereign State of the Niger Delta, the Meinbutus, the November 1895 Movement, ELIMOTU, the Arogbo Freedom Fighters, Iduwini Volunteer Force, the NDPSF, the Coalition for Militant Action, the Greenlanders, Deebam, Bush Boys, KKK, and Black Braziers, Icelanders, and a raft of other so-called cults. Over fifty operating military camps were dotted around the creeks.
- 3.
Resentment provided an ‘overarching idiom for peoples discussions of what happen to them especially their disappointments but also their hopes for the future’ (McGovern 2012, p. 93). The reference point for dispossession is of course the work instigated by Harvey’s account of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2005).
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Watts, M. (2016). The Political Ecology of Oil and Gas in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea: State, Petroleum, and Conflict in Nigeria. In: Van de Graaf, T., Sovacool, B., Ghosh, A., Kern, F., Klare, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the International Political Economy of Energy. Palgrave Handbooks in IPE. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55631-8_23
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