Resource Curse or Accumulation by Dispossession? Economic Displacement and the Challenges of HIV Infection in a Petroleum Economy

ABSTRACT

This paper documents the deleterious effects of petroleum extractive activities in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, with a special focus on HIV infection. It argues against the hegemonizing claims of the “resource curse” thesis and deploys the framework of “accumulation by dispossession” to explain the crisis of development associated with the country’s petroleum economy. The paper couches the challenges of economic survival in the petroleum resource-rich region on a predatory alliance between the extractive transnational corporations (TNCs) and the domestic compradors. It highlights the implications of extractive activities in the region for HIV infection.

KEYWORDS:

• Niger Delta
• petroleum resources
• resource curse
• accumulation by dispossession
• HIV infection

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission, OMPADEC, was established by the federal government of Nigeria in 1992 to help to facilitate rapid development in the petroleum-producing communities of the Niger Delta region. However, the commission was bedevilled by incompetence, underfunding and corruption, and in 2000, it was replaced with the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC (see Omotola 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ifeanyi Ezeonu

Ifeanyi Ezeonu is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology at Brock University, Ontario, Canada. He has research interests in, and has published on, market criminality, street gangs and violent armed groups, the sociology of energy and natural resources, and the deleterious effects of market rationality on sub-Saharan Africa. His book, Market Criminology: State-Corporate Crime in the Petroleum Extraction Industry (Routledge, 2018) introduces the school of Market Criminology, which expands the criminological imagination to accommodate preventable market-generated harms in variegated forms of capitalism.