Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T21:02:46.625Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Petro-Insurgency or Criminal Syndicate? Conflict & Violence in the Niger Delta

from Section One - Global Economies, State Collapse & Conflicts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2013

Michael Watts
Affiliation:
University of California
Rita Abrahamsen
Affiliation:
Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, Canada
Get access

Summary

[I]f low income and slow growth make a country prone to civil war … why [?]. … low income means poverty, and low growth means hopelessness. Young men, who are the recruits for rebel armies, come pretty cheap … Life is cheap and joining a rebel movement gives these young men a small chance of riches … [People in the Niger Delta] with a sense of grievance were no more likely to take part in violent protest than those who were not aggrieved. So what did make people more likely to engage in political violence? … well, being young, being uneducated, and being without dependants … [There] was no relationship between social amenities that a district possessed and its propensity to political violence. Instead the violence occurs in the districts with oil wells. … [A]lthough the risk of violence jumps sharply if there is at least one oil well, if there are two oil wells in the district it starts to go down. And with twenty oil wells it is lower still … To my mind this looks more like a protection racket than outrage provoked by environmental damage. In the absence of an oil well there is no scope for extortion and so no violent protest. With an oil well the protection racket is in business. But the more oil wells … the greater the incentive for an oil company to pay up and buy peace. … [O]ver time the situation has evolved. There is now a huge amount of money being directed by the Nigerian federal government to the Delta region and the oil companies are desperately paying protection money ... Within the region local politicians are fighting it out for control of all this money and violent protest has become an orchestrated part of the political rent seeking. Grievance has evolved, over the course of a decade, into greed (Collier 2007:30–31, emphasis added).

Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than both (Anderson 2001:30).
Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×