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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 10:39 pm
Time: 10:39 pm
Results for natural resources (nigeria)
3 results foundAuthor: Watts, Michael Title: Petro-Insurgency or Criminal Syndicate? Conflict, Violence and Political Disorder in the Niger Delta Summary: The Niger delta has become the home of an oil insurgency (see Obi 2004): remotely detonated car bombs and highly sophisticated arms and equipment are the tools of the trade; over 250 foreign hostages have been abducted in the last fifteen months and close to 1000 Nigerian workers detained or held hostage on facilities; major and often spectacular attacks on and on and off shore facilities are endemic and can be perpetrated at will. Unlike the 1980s or 1990s, militants are willing and able to directly confront federal and state security forces. The vast cache of sophisticated arms are skillfully deployed in an environment - the mangrove creeks running for hundreds of miles along the Bight of Benin - in which the Nigerian security forces to quote the new Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan “cannot cope with the situation” (Daily Trust, February 27th 2007). According to a World Bank report (Jua 2007), over 600 people have been killed in the course of these conflicts -often engagements between militias and the joint military task forces - since 2000. Pipeline breaks due to vandalization and sabotage have almost doubled between 1999 and 2004 (from 497 to 895); product loss (in metric tons) due to pipeline ruptures have grown steadily from 179,000 to 396,000 metric tons over the same period (a figure roughly equal to four supertankers) [see STATOIL 2006: 25]. The direct assaults on oil installations and infrastructure cost the Nigerian government $6.8 billion losses in revenue between 1999-2004 but in the last three years the figure has increased dramatically (currently the conflicts cost Nigeria $60 million per day, roughly $4.4 billion per annum in damages and lost revenue (www.strategypage.com/qnd/nigeria/20070630.aspx). In May 2007 Nigeria drew upon $2.7 billion from its ‘domestic excess crude’ (a windfall profits account) to plug revenues shortfalls from oil deferment. President Obasanjo ordered the military in mid-2006 to adopt a ‘force for force’ policy in the delta in a vain effort to gain control of the creeks; in early 2007 the Nigerian navy had embarked upon its biggest sea maneuver in two decades deploying 13 warships, four helicopters and four boats to the Bight of Bonny to test ‘operational capability’. Yet the month of May 2007, according to a Norwegian consulting company BergenRiskSolutions (BergenRiskSolutions2007), witnessed the largest monthly tally of attacks since the appearance of a shadowy but militarily wellarmed insurgent group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) eighteen months ago. Many of the oil-producing communities across the delta are torn apart by all manner of internal (for example Nembe or Finima) and inter-community (Ogoni-Andoni) conflicts or both (Soku-Kula-Oluasiri)3. There has certainly been no period since the first oil boom – palm oil in the nearly nineteenth century – in which the delta has been in such turmoil other than the civil war. The conflicts have an organic connection to oil but their genealogies are complex: in some cases communities fight over land and territorial disputes over oil bearing lands (Odiama); in some cases they are successional disputes, often of great historical depth, driven by the prospect of access to oil rents and company cash payments (Okrika) compounded by party politics; in other youth groups struggle among themselves or with elders over access to companies (Nembe); and in other cases they are sectional and communal, as ethnic communities in multi-ethnic settings, rural and urban, struggle over the establishment of electoral wards or local government councils to ensure they too can feed at the oil trough (Warri). The social forces are at once ethnic, generation, gender, class (chiefs, politicians), corporate and of course state (military and security). Conflicted communities across the oilfields entail complex configurations of such forces. They constitute a social field of violence in which the delta is now embroiled is a multi-headed hydra. Details: Berkeley, CA: Department of Geography, University of California, 2008. 36p. Source: Internet Resource: Working Paper No. 16: Accessed August 10, 2012 at: http://oldweb.geog.berkeley.edu/ProjectsResources/ND%20Website/NigerDelta/WP/16-Watts.pdf Year: 2008 Country: Nigeria URL: http://oldweb.geog.berkeley.edu/ProjectsResources/ND%20Website/NigerDelta/WP/16-Watts.pdf Shelf Number: 125958 Keywords: Natural Resources (Nigeria)OilViolenceViolent Conflict |
Author: Watts, Michael Title: Crude Politics: Life and Death on the Nigerian Oil Fields Summary: Nigeria is an oil-rich petro-state but its developmental record in one of catastrophic failure (Ahmad and Singh 2003). According to IMF, the $700 billion in oil revenues since 1960 have added almost nothing to the standard of living of the average Nigerian. Eighty-five per cent percent of oil revenues accrue to one percent of the population and a huge proportion of the country’s wealth – perhaps 40% or more, has been stolen. Over the last decade GDP per capita and life expectancy have, according to World Banks, both fallen. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP 2005), ranks Nigeria in terms of human development - a composite measure of life expectancy, income, and educational attainment – on par with Haiti and Congo. Why has such extraordinary oil wealth – and the developmental opportunities it affords - generated nothing more than violence, rage, disillusionment and catastrophically failed development? Why has the heart of the Nigerian petrostate degenerated into a zone of insurrection and how has the political nerve centre of the country, the Muslim north, come to be a breeding ground for radical Islamists? Both of these questions are related in complex ways to oil, to the fact that oil (and gas) saturates, provides the ether, the political, economic, cultural and ideological realities of contemporary Nigeria. Details: Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 2009. 27p. Source: Internet Resource: Working Paper No. 25: Accessed August 11, 2012 at: http://oldweb.geog.berkeley.edu/ProjectsResources/ND%20Website/NigerDelta/WP/Watts_25.pdf Year: 2009 Country: Nigeria URL: http://oldweb.geog.berkeley.edu/ProjectsResources/ND%20Website/NigerDelta/WP/Watts_25.pdf Shelf Number: 125989 Keywords: Natural Resources (Nigeria)OilViolenceViolent Conflict |
Author: Ojakorotu, Victor Title: Checkmating the Resurgence of Oil Violence in the Niger Delta of Nigeria Summary: This book is a collection of excellent academic materials by experienced and renowned scholars who have critically analyzed the devastating age-long oil violence in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. Beyond examining the origin and nature of the conflict, it also emphasizes the way forward for the Niger Delta, based on the various empirical studies by the contributors on the current developments in the region. Some of the chapters extensively interrogated the peace and development implications of President Yar‘Adua‘s amnesty policy on the Niger Delta since 2009. Although ‗subdued oil violence‘ has been around for several decades, the emergence of organized non-state armed groups in the 1990s has added a new and explosive dimension to the Delta imbroglio. Violent protests and the threat of outright rebellion against the state are now ubiquitous. Clearly, environmental activism and militancy are a direct response to the cumulative years of sustained environmental degradation, despoliation, hazards, impunity, human rights violations, repression, underdevelopment and outright neglect of the region by the Nigerian state and the multinational oil companies. Since the Niger Delta conflict is not a one-sided issue but a complexity of many interrelated problems, this book will not only expose students, researchers, professionals and statesmen/policy makers to the current developments in the region, but it also provide answers to some pertinent contemporary questions concerning the ‗oil gift‘, which has become a curse to the host communities of the Niger Delta in Nigeria. Details: Johannesburg: Monash University, 2010. 168p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed September 5, 2012 at http://www.iags.org/Niger_Delta_book.pdf Year: 2010 Country: Nigeria URL: http://www.iags.org/Niger_Delta_book.pdf Shelf Number: 126278 Keywords: Natural Resources (Nigeria)Oil (Nigeria)Violence (Nigeria)Violent Conflict (Nigeria) |