Abstract
Natural Resources, Conflict, and Sustainable Development provides a comprehensive account of the adverse impact that oil, Nigeria’s prime natural resource, has had on people in the Niger Delta region. It illustrates intense and perpetual social, political and economic conflicts that impede the nexus between sustainable development and natural resources. This note-worthy edited volume presents evidence-based approaches to illustrate the problems of the Niger Delta region. However, the solutions the authors describe are rather normative, based on a set of development discourses.
This book makes a unique contribution to understanding the growing socio-economic and political quagmires that have engulfed Nigeria for the last 50 years or so. Oil is undoubtedly central to these conflicts. The volume situates the complexities of oil, environment and politics through various development discourses that influence people’s lives in the Niger Delta region. The book argues that tribal conflicts and management ineptitudes, despite the oil revenues, have failed to serve the interests of people in the Niger Delta.
The conflicts of the Niger Delta are charted through these discursive themes, beginning with globalization, a notion that lays the foundation of Nigeria’s problems. In Chapter 2, Obi suggests, with reference to Gramsci’s ‘ambiguity of resistance’ (p. 27), that while various local resistance groups such as Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) are meant to represent people’s ‘power’, ‘rights’ and ‘resources’, they are also forced to build alliances with the foreign traders to serve their economic interests ‘spawned by the oil-led globalization’ (p. 28). This ideological conflict contributes to growing foreign interventions and intense competition to gain access to the region’s resources at the expense of its people, their livelihoods and the environment.
Chapter 3 brings up the issues of sustainable development that are at peril due to the intense battle for control over Niger Delta’s natural resources. Akinola anchors his arguments in prescriptive approaches to democracy and development where various conditions such as power play and collective actions play a critical role in promoting ‘deliberative democracy’ (p. 45) in the Niger Delta. However, Akinola critically acknowledges that in the Niger Delta, the extraordinary divide between the rich and the poor, conceptualized as a ‘structural disconnect’, has contributed to various actors and institutions acting in a ‘parallel mode’ rather than working collaboratively.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the implications of these ideological and social patterns for human development (or lack thereof) in the Niger Delta. In Chapter 4, the authors discuss people’s well-being and attitudes towards socio-economic conditions by drawing on Runciman’s (1972) theory of relative deprivation and its emphasis on the importance of contextualized experiences. They claim that Niger Delta’s socio-economic vulnerabilities stem from the lack of investment in human development, particularly the youth population, and infrastructure. Chapter 5 discusses the discourse of poverty reduction, with the authors arguing that human development is central to alleviating poverty. In their view, Niger Delta region’s economic solvency requires investments in its human resources. This is evident from the authors’ claim in this chapter that the ‘intelligence’ of the people in Niger Delta is more valuable than the ‘abundance of its natural resources’ (p. 92). The discourse of ‘poverty reduction’ (p. 79) is a flawed concept because of its reliance on ‘short-term interventions’ rather than focusing on empowering its ‘productive assets’ such as the people of the Niger Delta.
The link between non-governmental organizations (NGO) and development discourses cannot be underestimated. Chapter 6 highlights the role of NGO as an essential instrument for tackling Niger Delta’s socio-economic problems. In doing so, Etekpe discusses the impact of NGOs on the socio-economic status of Niger Delta by drawing on the relevance of local NGOs in orchestrating the Ogoni peace process in Nigeria. What is significant is that the NGOs have played a wider role in promoting social and political stability.
The final two chapters highlight the challenges of various development discourses on people’s rights to property and gender issues. In Chapter 7, the authors chart land rights issues through the prism of socio-economic and political debates. Land rights issues are not only linked with sustainable development and human rights issues, but also have implications for economic development in the Niger Delta region. Continuing on human rights issues, Chapter 8 focuses on women’s status in the Niger Delta region. Arguing for women’s rights and gender issues, this chapter claims that women remain vulnerable to the subjugation of patriarchal authority and security, which significantly contributed to the sufferings and subjugation of women in the Niger Delta region. But what is absent, however, is a thorough analytical debate on feminist gender arguments that posit adequate and legitimate social systems as a precondition in order for women to claim their citizenship. The chapter portrays women in the Niger Delta as victims, a notion that some feminists would likely to argue against because they believe women have inherent capacities to challenge patriarchal rules in the society (Lister, 2003).
The strength of the book is that the authors deftly move through contested and evolving socio-economic and political issues in oil-rich Niger Delta, situating the disturbing status of livelihoods and communities against the flowing revenues from oil and other natural resources. What is evident from the book is that while the authors discuss the economic motivations of oil business that leads to palpable ‘foreign intervention and the eventual conquest of the Niger Delta’ (p. 28), they remain equally critical about the region’s internal class struggles and institutional failures that have multiplied these problems.
This edited volume is destined to pique the interest of a diverse audience, from development practitioners to policy makers to research students, in exploring and deciphering the complexities of Niger Delta’s socio-economic and political conditions.