Crude talking: radio and the politics of naming, blaming and claiming in oil-age Niger

ABSTRACT

At the beginning of production, the presence of oil in Niger was characterised by talking oil politics. In this talk, political actors invoked the ‘resource curse’ thesis to question the legitimacy of their opponents through the speech acts of naming, blaming and claiming. Analysing two radio debates from late 2011 about the future fuel price and the prospects of Niger’s oil refinery, I situate the actors’ oil talk according to their positions in the political arena, thereby revealing their personal projects. In doing so, I show that oil talk is enacted in a double sense. Firstly, political actors’ agendas shape their talk and secondly, privileged access to radio is essential in becoming a potent political actor in the talk around oil. Using these findings, I discuss the importance of radio in Nigerien politics and try to decode the ‘how’ of Nigerien politics itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Oil
• Niger
• politics
• radio
• significations

Acknowledgments

The research for this article was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) within the project ‘Oil and Social Change in Niger and Chad: An Anthropological Cooperative Research Project on Technologies, Signification and Processes of Creative Adaptation in Relation to African Oil Production’ (2011–17). An earlier version of this article was presented at an internal workshop of the DFG Priority Programme 1448 on “Adaptation and Creativity in Africa” in Saly (Senegal) in October 2014. I would like to thank the participants at the workshop for their helpful comments. Finally, I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this article. All errors are, of course, those of the author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on the contributor

Jannik Schritt is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology, Technical University of Berlin. Trained in social and cultural anthropology, he has published on transnational governmentality, oil politics, resource assemblages and protest movements in Niger. He can be contacted at [email protected]

Notes

1 In an unpublished survey conducted by the GIGA Institute in Hamburg (Germany) in December 2006, 90 per cent of one thousand interviewees were optimistic that Nigerien oil production would contribute positively to the nation’s development. Eighty per cent even stated that future oil production would solve a lot of problems, while only six per cent worried about negative consequences. The survey was conducted in Niger in 2006 within the research project “Political Parties and Party Systems in Francophone Africa” (in German) led by Matthias Basedau and Alexander Stroh and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). My own qualitative findings indicated that the negative attributions to oil were mainly restricted to representatives of civil society and the state as well as to students or intellectuals.

2 Approximately 98 per cent of the population identify as Muslim, with the other two per cent following African religious traditions or Christianity.

3 Focusing on the oil refinery’s inauguration, and the events leading up to, during and following it, I employed the extended case method in the tradition of the Manchester School (Evens and Handelman 2006) to decode the Nigerien political logic in a time of new oil.

4 As specified in the Nigerien Constitution of the 5th Republic, Tandja’s presidency officially ended in 2009, after the maximum of two five-year mandates.

5 MODEN FA Lumana was established by Hama Amadou on 12 May 2009 as a breakaway from MNSD-Nassara. From 2002, Amadou was both president of MNSD-Nassara and the Prime Minister. After a corruption scandal, he was removed from office in a no-confidence vote in 2007. He was imprisoned in June 2008 because he was seeking to become Tandja’s successor, and was thereby a threat to Tazartché.

6 Seen from a pragmatist’s perspective, politics do not exist per se as a stable order of things, but rather ‘politics turn around topics that generate a public around them instead of trying to define politics in the absence of any issue’ (Latour 2007, 4).

7 In Hausa, Dan Dubai means ‘Son of Dubai’. The name can be seen as a celebration of wealth and success.

8 My translation from the original in French

9 It was reported that the religious authorities and the parent teacher association each received one million CFA francs (2002 $US). The USN received 300,000 CFA francs (601 $US). The distribution of envelopes became public due to an internal conflict within the student union USN about how to distribute the money (exchange rates from 8 December 2011).

10 Exchange rates from 13 November 2011.

11 ROTAB is a member of the international transparency network Publish What You Pay (PWYP) and one of the most important associations around resource extraction in Niger. The national coordinator of ROTAB in Niamey, Ali Idrissa, is publicly known to have close ties with the MODEN-FA Lumana party which was part of the government at that time.

12 The reciprocal relationship between changes in media communication and socio-cultural change has been captured with the concept of ‘mediatization’ (Krotz 2007). However, here I focus on the interaction between politics and media.