Violence and National Development in Nigeria: The Political Economy of Youth Restiveness in the Niger Delta

Abstract

One element in the contradictions underpinning Nigeria's development crisis is the marginalisation of the youth. This article examines the factors that influence youth restiveness in Nigeria's Niger Delta region. It discusses the impact of conservative elite politics and the oil-centric political economy characterised by the impoverishment, neglect and the repression of the oil-producing communities on the youth in the region. The article raises pertinent questions on the violence–development dialectic, drawing upon the context, dynamics, explanations and impact of youth violence in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta. It examines the contradictions and injustices existing against the ethnic minorities of the oil-bearing communities in the region, from the centralisation of oil revenues by the federal centre and how these have generated marginalisation and violent conflict in the region. Detailing the repressive responses by the Nigerian state and the forms of violence that have occurred in the region between 1999 and 2007, the article discusses the implications of youth violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta for national development in Nigeria. It provides a context for understanding the connection between youth involvement in violent conflict and its deleterious impact on Nigeria's development. Tapping into issues of ethnicity and high-stake elite politics, it locates violent youth behaviour in the politics of exclusion and proffers suggestions for restoring the trust of marginalised youth as a necessary step toward development and peace in Nigeria.

Acknowledgements

Between September and November 2008 the author was a Guest Researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden. He would like to thank the Nordic Africa Institute for organising a seminar at the Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, in October 2008, at which an earlier version of this article received helpful discussion. He is especially grateful to Adigun A.B. Agbaje, Cyril I. Obi, Graham Harrison, Niels Kastfelt, Rita Abrahamsen, Sara Dorman, ‘Tunde Zack-Williams and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

For a thought-provoking discussion of national development and the possible role of the Nigerian youth therein, see Olurode (2000). While development is actually a multi-faceted process, here reference is made to economic development. This article raises relevant questions on the violence–development dialectic in the region and assesses the impact of violent conflicts on the prospects for development both in the region and Nigeria at large. In doing this, the connection between violence – measured in terms of the disruptive impact of the volatile activities embarked upon by the youth in the region and development – measured in terms of the difference between the actual and potential access to basic social services, economic growth and human resource development on a sustainable basis, is critical. Attention is focused on the question of access to education and health care services, housing, motorable road networks, and the eradication of gender discrimination, inequalities, poverty and unemployment. For the region, sustainable development is defined in terms of its capacity for absorbing global changes while also seeking to institutionalise development programmes determined by local needs, and which respond to critical questions of long-term considerations that are people-centred, rather than merely catering for the interests of global capital. While not discountenancing the weight of external factors and forces, this article argues that the dimmed prospects for development in the region are fallouts of the cake-sharing psychosis of the elite, the skewed nature of Nigerian federalism, and the perpetual dependence on the global market – a practice which underlines the lack of control over the region's resources by the citizens in the region. This perspective explains the marginalisation and resort to violence by the youth in the region.

The definition and specialisation of the youth as a demographic category are broad, culture-specific and situational. The categorisation here is based on my observation of the age bracket of the youths involved in the violent conflict in Nigeria's Niger Delta. By ‘violence’, it means neither structural violence, which is a property of social institutions and which denies the individual the possibility of self-realisation, nor psychological violence, which seeks to debase the self. Rather, it refers to ‘direct violence’, which, directed against authority, is variously described as rebellion, revolt or even revolution, as modalities of protest against repressive structures of the state. As a modality of action, violence neither enjoys a peculiar logical status, nor a sacrosanct or superior status. It is also not self-justificatory. The resort to its deployment in the particular example in the Niger Delta is understood against the backdrop of the exhaustion of other peaceful avenues of addressing historic and continuing injustices in the region. The fast emerging dialectics in the region is thus one of dissent, protest and change, or, to use Dudley's (1975, p. 15) terms, ‘scepticism, anomaly and paradigm elaboration’. By ‘dialectics’, I do not have in mind a doctrine of logico-historical inevitability. Rather, ‘dialectics’ is used in its older and more ordinary sense in which the word simply means a process of doubt and confirmation, of trial and error, of change and interchange, of anomaly and elaboration.

Recent works, which speak to the differences between the two struggles, include Harneit-Sievers (2006) and Uche (2008).

The construction and nature of the state in Nigeria, rooted in the colonial pedigree, as elsewhere in Africa, tend toward the institutionalisation of ethnic entitlements, rights and privileges, so that rather than providing a common bond for the people through the tie of citizenship – with equal rights, privileges and obligations, both in precept and in practice – the state furthers their bifurcation. For elaboration on this position, see Adejumobi (2001).

Each of the three regions was based on the dominance of one of the three ethnically-dominant groups while other ethnic groups within the regions were treated as minorities, a situation which posed the fear of perpetual domination after independence. Consequently, such minority groups agitated for reforms including the creation of more administrative units in the forms of regions and later states. For an analysis of the protests by the Niger Delta minorities and the responses by the colonial state, see Mustapha (2003) and Osaghae (1991).

Contained in the Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR) in 1990 and its Addendum in 1991, the major demand by the Ogoni was for the right to control and use a fair proportion of Ogoni economic resources for Ogoni development.

For a comprehensive account of the state's responses to the Niger Delta crisis and its failings in that regard, see Obi (2006a) and Ukiwo (2007).

Witness the contradictory securitisation, tension and fragile peace in the region. Several anti-state and anti-oil-company mobilisation groups have emerged. The Egbesu Boys, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), the Martyrs Brigade and the Niger Delta Volunteer Force (NDVF) are examples of the militant groups that have emerged in the region, consequent upon the harsh responses by the Nigerian state, responses which have only steered violence in more dangerous directions rather than furthering the prospects for a peaceful negotiation of conflict.

Boro wanted all the resources in Ijawland to be controlled by his people.

The Ijaw regard themselves as the fourth largest ethnic group in Nigeria (following the Hausa-Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba), a claim sharply dismissed by the Tiv, who also claim to be the fourth largest ethnic group in the country. However, since Nigeria's population censuses contain no information on the demography of ethnic groups, these claims are only matters of conjecture and counter-factual imagination.

Kimse Okoko is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Port Harcourt, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

The Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF) was later transformed into the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which came into prominence in late 2005 after the arrest on treason charges of its leader, Mujahid Asari Dokubo.

For an extensive treatment of the activity profiles, objectives and social bases of these militant groups and their operations see Ikelegbe (2006).

For probing analyses and politically suggestive critiques of the responses by multinational oil-prospecting companies and the Nigerian state to violent conflict and minorities' ferments in this region, see Alemika (2000), Ikelegbe (2006), Obi (2006a) and Omotola (2007).