The Curse of Black Gold: Power Politics in the Niger Delta

[Music] Greetings and welcome back to the Kogo Pod. I'm Daniel Azar. Thank you so much for tuning in and for showing an interest in comparative government and politics. I'm calling today's talk the Curse of Black Gold, Power Politics and the Niger Delta. And in this talk, I'm going to investigate the impact of oil on the Nigerian environment, the economy, and the fragile political landscape. And after I've done that, I'm working to dive into some of the reactions to the problem of oil in the Niger Delta. And I'll conclude with some thoughts about the international dimensions of this with a particular focus on the United States. When the oil curse began with that first great gusher in 1956 in the Creek Side Village of oil and berry, 50 miles west to Port Heart Court, Nigeria was still a British colony. At independence in 1960, very few observers really expected that Nigeria would one day mature into an oil giant. But five multinational oil giants, Shell, Agib, Total, Exxon Mobil and Chevron, transformed a remote, nearly inaccessible wetland into an industrial dystopia and an oil giant. And so we have these five multinational to blame or to thank for oil in Nigeria. For they made massive investments. In the Niger Delta, you have 4,500 miles of pipelines, about 150 oil fields, hundreds of flow stations, and the gas flares are visible day and night from miles and miles away. And in this fragile environmental landscape, you have a fragile ethno-religious landscape. You have more than 25 ethnic groups that inhabit the Niger Delta. Among them are the Ijah, which are the largest, there's 14 million Ijah in Nigeria, most of whom live in and around the Niger Delta. You also have Igbo, it's a carry in a goany people. And these groups have a long history of fighting over the spoils from the Delta, from slaves to palm oil and now crude oil. So we have some like continuity and some change in the conflicts between the different cultures of the Delta region. About a decade after independence, Nigeria joined OPEC, the organization of petroleum exporting countries. And the Nigeria National Oil Company merged with the Ministry of Petroleum to form the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation. And the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, the NNPC, was kind of a sick giant. Despite its reorganization and despite its best efforts, fuel by corruption, the Nigerian economy teetered from crisis to crisis. So much so that in 1985, Nigeria got a loan from the World Bank, Allah Russia, Allah Mexico, and the parameters of a loan, as we've seen with World Bank loans in this class, demanded a structural adjustment program. And this led to the privatization of the NNPC. So unlike in Mexico and unlike Iran and in effect unlike in Russia, Nigerian oil is not a public good. It is in the hands of private companies and corporations. And those private companies and corporations have much to gain from their investments in oil. The world currently goes through 98 million barrels of oil a day, a barrel is about 160 liters, 98 million barrels a day. The US uses about 20% of that. The US alone goes through 20 million barrels a day. And despite what we might hope we're just getting started, it's projected that the world will be going through about 120 million barrels a day by 2030. So oil use is not going down. Oil use is going up. Now shell oil alone extracts an estimated 200,000 barrels from Nigeria per day. And it's in part because of shell oil that Nigeria is a top 10 oil producer as are all of the comparative government six sons the United Kingdom. But more so than any other of the comparative government six country studies, Nigeria is dependent on oil. Nigerian oil output accounts for 80% of state revenues. Russia is about the same, but really Nigeria takes the cake when it comes to oil dependency. And so in this context Africa's most populous country 200 million people has gone from being self-sufficient to importing more food than it produces. Everything looked possible for the new Nigeria suffused with great oil wealth. But everything went wrong. And that's the title of Tom O'Neill's book which helps to inform this lecture. Everything looked possible but everything went wrong. Let's get into why that is. Let's get into what went wrong. Well if you go down to the Niger Delta you can see with your own eyes what went wrong. 2.5 million barrels of crude oil has been spilled or leaked every decade since the mid 80s resulting in total devastation of the fish stock that most villagers rely on. The Nigerian government documented 6,800 spills between 1976 and 2001. That's like a spill a day for 25 years. But a lot of outside observers suspect that the real number is like 10 times higher than that 6,800 number. You got a lot of old poorly maintained equipment and that causes some leaks. But a lot of the oil operators as we'll see later on they blame sabotage and theft for the oil leaks. They speculate that a lot of the disaffected community members deliberately cause oil spills to collect the compensation money. Do they? Yeah they do and arguably for good reason and we'll get into that. But part of the reason is that the fresh water is so polluted with hydrocarbons from oil extraction that it's impossible to make a living as a fisherman and it's impossible to drink the water but people still do it and the sicknesses and the cancers are endemic. The flaring of excess natural gas has produced acid rain, communities complaining of corroded roofs, crop failures, deathly respiratory diseases. You know they ordered companies in Nigeria to eliminate flaring by 1984 but the government keeps pushing back the deadline and shell the main offender of flaring in the delta. Announce that despite making considerable progress they just couldn't meet that last date. And while it is the case that the five major oil companies in Nigeria have reduced flaring by like 80% between 2007 and 2020 oil flames dot the landscape of the Niger Delta, a constant reminder of corruption and misrule, a constant reminder of the toxicity of politics and corruption in Nigeria. Reports by the United Nations Development Program and the International Crisis Group identify some questionable strategies employed by the oil companies. They pay off the village chiefs for drilling rights, they build roads and they dredge canals without doing a proper environmental impact study and when they get busted for acting with impropriety, they tie up these compensation cases, cases for resource damage or for land purchases for years and years in court. The companies dispatch their own security forces to violently break up protests. sometimes engaging in mafioso-like behaviors. And to deal with that, the government of Nigeria set up the federal environmental protection agency, the FEPA, right, the Nigerian EPA. But with the population of Nigeria booming and the urban population on the rise, FEPA faces a whole array of challenges. And as we've seen in the previous talk, FEPA, like the INEC and the EFCC, is hamstrung by internal corruption. But FEPA's work is critically important because the environmental impact has a huge economic impact in Nigeria as well. Now, we all recall the so-called resource curse theory, right? This theory that holds that underdeveloped countries with great natural wealth, they fail to diversify their economies or to invest in education, which leads to long-term economic decline. Right, this idea that resource-rich countries get hoisted by their own batard, that they become too dependent on a particular source of revenue, that they fail to diversify, they fail to develop, they fail to invest in their people. The Ejad Chief, Osobiri Enigita, he begged Shell, "Town to help us. Town the train 50 boys and girls here for jobs. If we'd never seen oil, we would have been better off." So first, let's take the first part of that quote. "Tell Shell to train 50 boys and girls here for jobs." Shell has done that. Shell has launched these fast training programs. But as technological development plays more and more of a role, human labor is less and less necessary in the big business of oil extraction. But it's also the case that Shell has had, let's say, some suboptimal experiences with their local hires. There have been innumerable acts of internal sabotage. But Shell does train people, maybe not enough, and I'm hardly an expert on the Shell local training program. But the second part where the chief says, "If we'd never seen oil, we would have been better off." You know, this reminds me of all these people who win the lottery. And then they go tragically broke and they become poppers and they blame the lottery for their problems. In an effort to be empathic, "Okay, I get it." But it wasn't the lottery ticket that ruined you. It was you who ruined you. Lottery winner. This is my message to the lottery winners of the world as if they're listening. I understand where this sentiment comes from. If we'd never seen oil, we would have been better off. Maybe if some chiefs, maybe not chief Enigite, but others hadn't engaged in conspicuous acts of corruption, maybe if the Nigerian government wouldn't have routinely engaged in conspicuous acts of corruption, then maybe they would win better off. And this is me kind of taking issue with the notion of the resource curse. The curse isn't the resource. The curse is the people who steal from other people. The curse is ethical malfeasance. The oil is the opportunity. And you can do with that set of ideas what you like. But it doesn't change the facts on the ground, right? There was Fisherman who was interviewed because he's part of the Environmental Rights Action Group, a civil society organization, in the Delta to protect the environment. He said, "Today, there's not a single person in my community. You could describe as a fisherman. We depend almost totally on frozen fish." Fishing was the economic lifeblood of the Niger Delta. And now Delta residents have nothing to do to sustain themselves. Now according to the World Bank, most of Nigeria's oil wealth gets siphoned off by like 1% of the population, condemning half the population to subsist on less than two bucks a day. And since independence in 1960, it's estimated that almost a trillion dollars of oil revenue has been stolen or misspent by corrupt government officials. That money is pretty close to the amount of money that all of Western Africa has received in international aid in those years. So you have extreme poverty, despite extreme oil wealth, and despite massive Western development aid. And this problem persists because of politics. In an essay he wrote on the matter Michael Watts, who's the director of the African Studies Program at the University of California at Berkeley, he said, "The companies don't consult with villagers. They basically just hand out cash to chiefs. It's not effective at all." End quote. And with top government officials brazenly violating the social contract and the law, everyone downstream inevitably follows suit. Right? The Nigerian constitution stipulates that just under 50% of the national oil revenue has to be distributed to state and local governments. And that an additional 13% must go to the nine oil producing states of the Niger Delta. So that amounts to about 10 billion US dollars annually for the nine Delta states. This is plenty of money to take care of basic social services. The problem is that the money disappears in the governor's office. So is the curse, the oil, or is the curse the governors? The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the EFCC, which I talked about in the previous lecture, they were formed to investigate this type of economic malfeasance. And in 2006, 2007, they investigated all of the country's 36 governors and they wound up accusing all but six of them of corruption and six were removed from office. So this is rampant. And with all that money coming in, the state doesn't really need to tax its citizens. You know, kind of like Russia, there's not a lot of political incentive anymore for the government to invest in Nigeria. They get their money from oil. You know, say what you will about paying taxes. Nobody likes doing it. I can't say I'm a fan of cutting the government a big chunk of my paycheck every month. But when I'm invested in the government, when I'm paying for services, I want to see those services delivered in the case of Nigeria, in the case of Russia, that people aren't paying for services. Whatever services are delivered are paid for by natural resources, oil and gas in the case of Russia and Nigeria, Iran. You know, you never complain at a free dinner, right? The services that Nigerian people get are paid for by oil and that has a profound impact on the politics and political culture of Nigeria. And it has a particularly deleterious effect on the youth. Remember, 45% of Nigerians are under age 15. And forced to give up fishing, the young men and the boys of the village, they put their hope on landing a job in the oil industry. But job offers in the oil industry are scarce. A local fisherman was quoted in Carmier's book saying, quote, "The people get all the outside jobs. We've got diploma holders, but they got nothing to do." You have a lot of well-trained engineers and other scientific thinkers that want to live and work in the Delta. They see the riches around them. They're keenly aware of the oil. They see the Mercedes and the BMWs and the ferrari's on the street. They see the young men and women with their iPhones. They know that there's money to be made and they want the peace that they take. But the multinational corporations and the government aren't investing in the people. And some of the best and brightest Nigerians, they scram. They move to the United Kingdom. They move to the United States. They move to Germany. They get out of there. And the best of them send tons of money back to their families to support them. And the rest of them just go. And what's left is violence. Gun violence, sabotaging a pipeline, kidnapping, foreigners. There are all these individual acts of economic protest, all of which devastate the fragile political landscape. But I want here to take a deeper dive into some of the organized acts of defiance. Because, again, according to Michael Watts, quote, "across Africa, you have a huge number of alienated youths, politically foot loose. We thought they could achieve something with their country's moves to independence and democracy." Those hopes, Watts says, have been almost everywhere violently snuffed out. The youth are pissed off and they're willing to up the ante. So let's talk about some of these pissed off youth. We'll begin with the movement for the survival of the Agony people or Massup. Massup was founded in 1990 by the charismatic writer Ken Seroviwa. He was outraged by the oil spills in his native Agony land. And so he founded Massup. And he and Massup demand control of the oil on Agony lands. And they demand an end to environmental devastation. They demand that citizens from affected areas have seats on the board of directors of the companies. And in the early mid-90s, a quarter million agonies about half the agony population rallied to support the Massup cause. Shell running scared because these protests were particularly big and garnering international attention. They offered a million NIRRUS, so about $2,700 US dollars today to families affected during the 1993 by-affer protests. But Seroviwa denounced this as a cheap bribe. And his radical demands continued, right? We want to control the oil. We want to have seats on the board of directors. And his radicalism was really scaring the companies. So the Nigerian military moved into Agony land. They raised something like 30 villages, arrested hundreds, killed a couple thousand, four Agony chiefs were murdered during the melee, possibly by the government, possibly by government sympathizers, possibly by shell-funded mobs. And Nigeria's military government charged Kens Seroviwa and the Massup elite leaders with murder. And then the sham tribunal to which I should say, oil did not object. Kens Seroviwa and eight others were found guilty and hanged on the 10th of November 1995. Seroviwa's last words were "Lord, take my soul." But the struggle continues. And the struggle did continue, my friends. It continued through various means by any means necessary, as they say. In 2004, the movement for the emancipation of the Niger Delta or MEND was established. In 2006, MEND gained national and some international fame when several boatloads of MENDS heavily armed, e-john militants overran a shell oil facility in the Niger Delta. And they took hostage for Western oil workers. Now, MEND released the hostages a couple weeks later. And then they demanded a release of two of their leaders, two e-john leaders. They demanded 1.5 billion in restitution for environmental damages. They demanded a 50% claim on the oil revenues. And they demanded help. They demanded aid to the poor Delta villages that shell oil was destroying. The presumed leader of MEND is called Henry Oka. And he was all over Africa in the early arts. He was in and out of jail on the run. And he's denied being the leader of MEND. But Nigerian and African police were seeking to hunt him down. And in 2013, the South African justice system, if we can call what we have in South Africa, a justice system, tracked him down and convicted him of terrorism for his alleged participation in the 2010 Nigerian Independence Day attacks. So he's serving 25 years in South Africa right now. But there's this fascinating character who serves as one of MEND's spokespeople. He's like this kind of mysterious online entity. He trades emails with foreign journalists who show up in the Delta to cover the oil wars. And no one really seems to know his real name or even like where he lives. The Wall Street Journal says his emails are sent from a computer in South Africa. But his message to Shell and the other multinationals who are wreaking such havoc in the Delta is clear. He says, leave our land while you can or die in it. Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil. Pretty direct, right? He goes on to say the Nigerian government has been marginalizing the people who have the resources of this country. We are deprived of our rights. This time around, we're not even going to wait for them to attack. When the order is given, we can go ahead and crumble whoever we can crumble because we don't die. We live by the grace of God. If one man remains, that man can win the cause. That is my belief. So, Joe Obama was committed to deploying political violence, what you might call terrorism, to obstruct or crush the capacity of the Nigerian government and the multinational corporations to extract oil. Men has launched dozens of tax per year over the decades. They attack and they kidnap western oil workers. They rob banks. They attack the Nigerian navy. They blow up oil tankers. They pirate ships. They kill the police. They kill army officers. They sabotage the pipelines. They bomb western hotels and bars. Doon Astie work. Their power depends on their ability to cause terror. It caused terror at home. And they seek to cause economic pain in other countries until shell and the other multinationals get out of the Delta. But with every men's assault, the Nigerian military answers with devastation. Remember, the Nigerian military is one of the strongest militaries in Africa. Bought and paid for by the United States government and oil revenue. Within hours of the kidnapping of one particular Italian construction worker, troops swept into this shanty town and burned down every structure in the village except a bank. Days later, stunned residents were photographed wandering through the charred ruins, like ghosts. 3,000 people had lost their homes. So the Nigerian military in an effort to send a message, they display obscenely disproportionate violence. But Joe Obama and men remain committed to using violence and to using the grace of God to combating oil companies. But Joe Obama and men, I should note, have diversified their mission in recent years. In the last couple of years, since the rise of Boko Haram, men has promised to quote, "Save Christianity in Nigeria." And they do that by bombing mosques, hodge camps, other Islamic institutions, they kill clergy. And so what you have here with Joe Obama and a lot of men followers is what you might call Christian infused extremism. Deploying the language of religious liberation, the language of Moses, the language of Exodus, to justify the killing of enemies, be they oil company workers or Muslims praying in a mosque in territory deemed to be Christian territory. I've long wanted to write a lecture about the uniqueness, the peculiarities, if you will, of religious expression in Nigeria. Christian Muslim, tribal and otherwise. I haven't gotten around to it, but you can't really fully understand the charismatic authority of the Kansero we was, or the Jomo-Bomos, or the Henry Okas, or or the phalacutis, for that matter, without understanding the curious ways in which religion plays a central role in the lives of so many Nigerian people. And that's also evident in Operation Push, which I won't dive too far into, but Operation Push is an acronym for Pray Until Something Happens. And there are deeply committed Christian agonies and e-jaws whose humble reaction to the environmental, and economic, and political, and ethical problems that oil poses is to pray to hope. But too many Delta Nigerians can't wait for their prayers to be answered, so they take to bunkering. Living is in short stealing oil. And there's two ways to do it. One way is to use the heavy instrument or a gun and to shoot or bang a hole into an oil pipeline under the darkness of night. And the other way to do it, which is decidedly safer, is to just bribe the people who are paid to protect the pipeline to let you steal it. The thing is most Nigerian soldiers are paid around 1,500 Naira a month, it's like $40 a month. So you go up to a military man and you say, "Hey, I want to make your richer." And they say, "Hey, I like the sound of that." And you give them money and they go walk away and stare at their phone for a half hour, and then you have a truck full of barrels of oil. But sometimes, if the person to whom you offer the bribe isn't that friendly, you deploy force in order to surmount that obstacle. Look, bunkering wouldn't be possible without guns. Militant groups are constantly fighting one another over access. And of course, those guns are bought with oil money. And the bunkers are not so likely to be caught because a lot of them work for someone who is connected. And these are often political figures and military officers. And look, everyone knows who the oil bunkers are. It is, shall we say, an open secret. And it's a huge business. By some estimates, 10% of the oil exported from Nigeria, that's several billion dollars with the oil, is actually bunker oil that's sold on the black market. The problem, of course, other than the culture of constant intimidation and violence, is that bunkering is not a clean or neat process. A lot of the bunker oil ends up polluting the creeks and further destroying the fragile environment of the Niger Delta. Brian Anderson, who's the Shell Oil Managing Director, said, quote, "Sabotage remains a significant problem. Despite the widespread awareness that no compensation is paid in such cases, the usual motive for sabotage is to press claims for large sums of money and/or to attract temporary employment in this subsequent cleanup exercise." So what Anderson is claiming is that people come in, they destroy the pipelines, and hopes that they and their families could get jobs cleaning up the oil that has been spilled as a result of that sabotage. Does that happen? Yeah. Do people sabotage and then sue Shell Oil? Yeah. Anderson went on to say, and I quote, "We've never denied that there are some environmental problems, concerned with our operations, and we're committed to dealing with them." However, we totally reject accusations of devastating a Goni land of the Niger Delta. This has been dramatized all out of proportion. The total land we've acquired for operations and to build our facilities, flow lines, pipelines and roads, comes just 0.3% of the Niger Delta. In the Goni land, we've acquired 0.7 of that land area. So what does Anderson Fella is trying to argue that because they have a small proportion of the land, a small percentage of the land, they can only cause a small amount of damage. That, my friends, is some weak argumentation. And perhaps it was in part because of that kind of frail argumentation that in early 2021, a Dutch court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell needs to pay out 100,000 euros per day until they install leak detection systems on the pipelines. In this court case, Shell blamed the saboteur. They say that 95% of the leaks are due to sabotage. But for 30 years, Shell has had the technology to install these leak detection systems. And though they might be expensive and owners to install, they've not installed them. They basically argue that even if we install them, the people are going to bunker oil anyway. And at long last, they were taken to court in Europe because the court cases in Nigeria end, shall we say, predictably. And this actually set a really important precedent that cases can be heard in the home countries of the oil companies instead of those where the pollution and the mismanagement and the environmental devastation is taking place. So it could be that this January 2021 Royal Dutch Shell court case sets the precedent to change the nature of the relationship between the multinationals and the people of the Niger Delta. And perhaps that can be some reason for hope. But it's just so vexed in part because of the international dimensions of the problem and because the world runs on oil. You know, bunkering gangs and men and mass up like a bunch of Nigerian militants and speedboats could bring about a global economic downturn. The global economy depends on cheap oil. We the consumers depend on cheap oil to bring goods to our tables. You know, not only do our economies rely on cheap oil, but our militaries literally run on oil. And the US military in particular is dependent on Nigerian oil. You know, according to a US government oil shockwave panel, near simultaneous attacks on oil infrastructures around the world could send oil prices skyrocketing. And those oil prices, if they were sustained for more than a few weeks, could cascade disastrously through the American economy and thus the global economy. And so it could be really scary stuff. You know, in 2004 there was this egeol leader, Namuja Hidokubu Asari, and he retreated into the creeks of the Niger Delta to wage an all-out war against the government and the oil companies. Asari is an interesting character. He was born, malphred, good head, and he converted to Islam. And he expressed, rather openly, his admiration for Osama bin Laden, who he thought was giving the United States a run for its money. Doku Bu-A-Sari was committed to the Nigerian people controlling their resources by any means necessary. You know, he ended up getting imprisoned for treason. But in a twist, he got paid off by the Yara dua government. He actually got paid $10 million in the Yara dua government's effort to eliminate terrorism in the South. Basically he's paying off terrorists to go away. And he did. He moved to Benin and he lives like a king there. He's divested all of his funds from the Niger Delta. He's an ogre in Benin. He's helped to build schools and hospitals, real pillar of his community. And it's because of the shock waves that attacks on oil infrastructure can send through the global economy that global leaders like the United States feel obliged to act. And that's why the United States has contract with companies like Haliburton. Haliburton has admitted that its then subsidiary KBR paid $2.4 million in bribes to the Nigerian government. And Haliburton was investigated for its role in a number of other bribes totaling some like $180 million. You know, the US has donated dozens of warships to the Nigerian Navy in an effort to quell political violence against oil infrastructure. You know, the United States has been deeply involved in this. I mean the most. What can speak to his example is when the United States House of Representatives, member from Louisiana, a guy called William Jefferson, he was convicted for accepting bribes from the Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abu Bakar. The FBI found 90,000 bucks in cash in his freezer, and he pled not guilty, but in 2012 he began a 13-year sentence. This is the longest sentence ever handed down to a sitting U.S. Congressperson. He ended up doing five and a half years he got out on an appeal and got time-served. But both by consumers going to the pump and filling up their SUVs with cheap oil, and through U.S. congressmen taking bribes from the Nigerian government, and through the United States government funding the Nigerian military, the U.S. is all wrapped up in this problem. I mean maybe this is just an aside, but if we really want to understand the Keystone XL pipeline, it's very much born out of the fear that the countries from which the Western world imports oil can be terribly unstable. We the consumer can feign stability in the oil markets, but the people who make real decisions about how oil markets operate, they know that the oil markets aren't stable, that Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, the UAE. These aren't stable regimes per se, and to the extent to which they are stable, they're stable because of engaging in acts of political repression that nobody here could rightfully celebrate. Look, microwatts may be said at best, right? For shell to conduct business as usual would be a public relations disaster. Yeah, these are his words. Folks say, look, oil companies are making billions taking out this black stuff from our territory. They should have some ethical and social responsibilities. Right? And I think we can all agree with Watts. What those responsibilities are exactly is worthy of some consideration, and I would urge you to consider that. But as Aranto Douglas, the deputy director of Environmental Rights Action Group in Nigeria says, quote, it's going to be tough. No one who has privilege surrenders it easily. The struggle is to get people to give up power who got it illegally. A former hostage said quote, the grievances are legitimate. There's no water in these communities, no education, no medical facilities whatsoever. To be put out into the swamp without any electricity or drinking water, of course they're upset. End quote. So there's this uneasy truce that holds between the politicians and the warring factions. Each watches the other carefully. All are armed to the teeth. And they patrol the streets with machine guns. The vigilantes say that the police are partisan. The police say that the vigilantes are criminals and terrorists. But I, for my part, would like to give the last words to Chief Servo Wewa, the father of the martyr, Ken Servo Wewa. And he said in an interview with Karl Meier in his book, This House Is Fallen, it's a surprise that so many people come here and ask me these things. They do not say what they see with their eyes. And so I ask you my friends to consider the economic, environmental, and political consequences of this problem. I ask you to consider the reactions of the Nigerian people. And I ask you to say what you see with your eyes.