When corporate citizens ‘second-class’ national citizens: The antinomies of corporate-mediated social provisioning in Nigeria's oil province

Abstract

This article explores the contradictions of corporate-aided social provisioning and shows how such contradictions impact on social existence in three oil- and gas-producing communities in Nigeria. It is based in part on the findings of the author's ethnographic work in the three communities. The analysis extends the growing scholarly debate that when the state abandons its developmental obligations to the citizenry, and business voluntarily steps into the centre stage of social provisioning by way of corporate citizenship, the resulting interventions could have profound counter-developmental consequences, especially at the grassroots.

Keywords:

• petroleum
• corporate citizenship
• social provisioning
• social citizenship
• Niger Delta, Nigeria

Notes

1. A brief socioeconomic and ethnographic profile of the three study communities and the rationale for their choice are provided under ‘Methodological notes’. For a more detailed account, see Akpan (2006a).

2. In this article, ‘distancing discourses’ refer to stories and anecdotes woven by communities (or segments of communities) about their neighbours so as to impugn their status within the nomenclatural map of ‘key’ and ‘non-key’ communities, and thus cast them negatively within the context of corporate-mediated social provisioning.