Peace and security concerns in the Niger Delta: a persisting struggle for autonomy and self-determination

Abstract

This article argues that neither the amnesty granted the militants nor the election of Goodluck Jonathan as President of Nigeria will be sufficient to resolve the conflict in the Niger Delta as the crisis in the Niger Delta is an offshoot of some of the contradictions in the Nigerian federal structure, particularly the regional and power imbalance in the Constitution of 1960. Therefore, no matter how conceived, the Niger Delta crisis remains more fundamentally constitutional and political than socio-economic or environmental. Accordingly, what the paper attempts to address is the deliberate attempt by the Nigerian state to diminish the constitutional and political aspects of the crisis, while it creates the impression that the root of the problem of the Niger Delta is neglect and inequitable distribution of national resources by the federal government. The paper brings to the fore the constitutional and the political aspects which have underpinned the Niger Delta crisis since the 1950s and 1960s and concludes that any resolution of the crisis short of those imperatives will not endure.

Keywords:

• Niger Delta
• amnesty
• militants
• minorities
• autonomy
• self-determination

Notes

1. ‘Son of the soil’ is an emphatic and audacious claim of citizenship by birth.

2. For example, the Land Use Act, Petroleum Act. Land (Title Investing, etc.) Decree (Osborne Land Decree), National Inland Waterways Authority Decree.

3. ‘Ogoni Nine’ refers to nine Ogoni indigenes executed by the Sani Abacha military government in November 1995. One of the Nine was the writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa. The Nine were accused of being the master minds of the death of four Ogoni Traditional Chiefs. The Ogoni militants accused the Chiefs of supporting the federal government, and of complicity with the federal government and the Oil Multinationals in the expropriation of the oil wealth of the Ogoni. The youths, in disdain of the traditional leaders, referred to them as ‘vultures’.

4. The Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) zoning arrangement is only a ‘gentleman agreement’ by members of the party to guide their allocation of high offices in the country in such a way that geographical zone in the country would control such high offices for only a specified period after which another zone would take over. Therefore, zoning is not constitutional and has to do with PDP alone as a political party. However there is a subtle application of zoning by other Nigerian political parties in the sharing of party offices. For example in all the political parties, no one zone may keep two major party offices at the same time: the Chairman and Secretary of a party will not come from the same zone. And after the maximum term of office, the states which produced the Chairman and the Secretary will not keep such offices in the preceding term of office.