Between responsibility and rhetoric: some consequences of CSR practice in Nigeria's oil province

Abstract

This article brings together some of the findings of a three-year study of the community dimensions of upstream petroleum operations in Nigeria, Africa's largest oil exporter. It examines the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of transnational petroleum-producing companies, focusing on the immediate and long-term ethnographic and social consequences of such practices on the local communities where oil extraction takes place. The article examines, more importantly, how such practices and the identified consequences intersect with the regulatory/institutional framework governing upstream petroleum operations in Nigeria. By shifting attention away from the dominant, ethnic view of conflict and instability in the country of study, and looking at specific instances of ethnographic and social crisis associated with corporate social responsibility, the article offers some insights into some present-day challenges to sustainable development in Africa, and unveils an important present-day mechanism through which the image of resource-rich African countries as strife-torn is entrenched.

1. Introduction

In 2003, an executive officer of the Africa operations of the Anglo–Dutch oil and gas giant, Shell, confirmed that his company had embarked on a fundamental policy shift in the way the company built social partnerships in the countries hosting its operations. Shell, he said, was now paying ‘proactive’ attention to community development, environmental protection and biodiversity conservation (TVE, 2003). In Nigeria the ‘shift’, which began in 1997 – 42 years after the discovery of oil in the country – allegedly entailed ‘world-class’ standards of ‘community development’ in the oil region (SPDC, 2001: 15).

In the particular case of Nigeria, the reasons for Shell's ‘policy shift’ are not far-fetched. Since the discovery of petroleum in the country in 1956 (exploration activities began much earlier in the 20th century), the adverse impacts of petroleum operations on neighbouring communities and the environment had remained largely unmitigated. Decades of pent-up anger in the host communities exploded in the early 1990s, when local youths rose against Shell and other transnational oil firms, demanding reparations and threatening to literally slash the companies' fingers off ‘their’ land. In 1999 alone, Shell's crude oil production deferments (that is, suspended/unmet crude oil production/supply targets) attributed to ‘community disturbances’ reportedly reached 90 million barrels, up from approximately 50 million barrels in 1998 (SPDC, 2003: 3). Besides a ‘policy shift’ in forging community partnerships, Shell also seems to be pursuing a new ‘policy’ of reducing its (hitherto predominantly) onshore presence in Nigeria in order to, in a manner of speaking, keep out of harm's way. More of the company's resources are now channelled towards developing deep offshore oilfields (Afrol News, 2004). Large-scale community protests and militant confrontations with oil company officials and law enforcement agents continue to characterise Nigeria's oil-producing region, casting a gloom on the country's future as a unified entity.

The announced ‘policy shift’ must be carefully interrogated. In the case of Nigeria, what manner of socio-ecological partnerships did the companies operate prior to the 1990s? How did petroleum operators discharge their ‘responsibility’ towards their ‘host’ communities? How does ‘world-class’ community development operate? How easy is it to challenge notions of CSR as corporate rhetoric? These are questions of practical, policy and theoretical relevance. They highlight, among other things, the inherent contradictions in the very notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) – especially a CSR that goes beyond the holding of end-of-year parties for staff children.

This article is based, mainly, on data obtained in three oil-producing communities in Nigeria's Niger Delta province in 2003. As elaborated later, the communities were chosen mainly on the basis of their relative historical importance and their location in Nigeria's leading oil-producing states. The research was not focused on an overall evaluation of Shell's (or any other oil company's) CSR efforts. Rather, it was an attempt to interrogate Nigerian oil industry CSR practice from the perspectives of ordinary people in the oil-producing communities. The author was interested in the dynamics of CSR practice, beyond scholarly debates and corporate ‘aspirations’, and in privileging the voices of ordinary people so as to highlight an important mechanism through which Nigeria's image as a socio-politically unstable country is sustained. Key informants at Shell Petroleum in Port Harcourt, the Niger Delta's principal city, and at the Department of Petroleum Resources, were interviewed in order to gain some insight into the oil operators' and the regulatory authorities' perspectives on the issue of corporate social responsibility. On the whole, ethnography, in-depth interviews, focus groups and visual sociology were the research methods used.

2. Economic development and the sustainability question

It is important to situate this article within the broader problématique of moving business beyond profit-making. This will serve as a background for understanding the seeming urgency behind the imperative of a so-called ‘world-class’ model of community involvement, and the contradictions that CSR practice throws up in a petro-economy such as Nigeria's.

Business enterprises have conventionally been seen as vital to national wealth creation, and industrialisation as a major driving force of economic development. Historically, the inherent contradictions of the economic accumulation system – the dilemmas that industrialisation introduced – have been largely disguised (de la Court, 1990: 128).

Over the course of the 20th century, however, many rural residents, especially in non-Western societies, began to realise that the penetration of industry was occasioning fundamental changes in their physical environment and their cherished values, and that more industrialisation did not necessarily mean improved community wellbeing. It was becoming evident that profit as the sole raison d'être for business – and economic accumulation as the sole aim of development – was ‘a shaky, and a most precarious basis on which to confront the future’ (Kumar, 1978: 300). In time, deprived people as well as victims of industrial pollution (and activists speaking on their behalf) would bring pressure to bear on businesses, governments and multilateral organisations to find a more humane way of pursuing development. The reasons for the pressures would become particularly pronounced in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

What is important, for the purposes of this discussion, is that the very idea of development that had come to be represented by industrial expansion and the pursuit of economic gain was driven by corporate interests, and that ‘competition and utilitarianism were its cornerstones’ (de la Court, 1990: 128; Bakan, 2004).

As ecologists disseminated knowledge about the interconnectedness of life forms, and about the pressures that industrial activities put on the natural resource base, another impetus was added to the demand for a new yardstick for measuring economic development. This yardstick was sustainability. It was defined as ‘the extent to which … economic and social systems [were] successfully adjusting to changes in the underlying natural resource base’ (Brown, 1985: xv). With pressures building in local communities, and academic disciplines lending the weight of their research, the new imperative for industrial enterprises was to reappraise their business designs to take on board social and ecological objectives (Meadows et al., 1972).

By the 1980s a decisive paradigm shift had become unavoidable. A United Nations Commission chaired by the then Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, produced an aptly entitled report, Our Common Future. It noted, among other things, that ‘many forms of development erode the environmental resources upon which they must be based, and environmental degradation can undermine economic development’ (quoted in de la Court, 1990: 10–12).

The Brundtland Report was, however, not the final word on the sustainability debate. If anything, some have argued, it laid too much emphasis on the physical environment, or at least defined ‘environment’ too narrowly. For the concept of sustainability to be wholesome, de la Court (1990: 136) argues, it should privilege a whole range of issues and their interconnectedness. These include the principles of social equity and local control of resources. Even so, de la Court continues, violence must not be a means to the end of ‘development’. Not to be ignored is the role that government has played in different societies to compel business corporations to temper their pursuit of profit with a concern for the environment and human communities.

All the while, the struggles of local communities, especially those neighbouring large industrial operations (such as mineral extraction firms, dams and power plants) continued to point to the possibility of a disharmony between the developmental promises and potentials of such industrial operations and the actual experiences of ordinary people at the grassroots. Indeed, as shown later in this article, grassroots resistance to these operations continued to draw attention to the possibility that these operations fostered social exploitation and community impoverishment. The concept of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) emerged as a way of resolving some of the contestations around the conventional parameters of development and economic accumulation.

3. CSR–responsibility for what?

Corporate social responsibility overlaps with such other concepts as ‘social accounting’, ‘responsible commerce’, ‘corporate citizenship’ and the ‘triple bottom line’, although this last is more recent, dating back only to the mid-1990s (Norman & MacDonald, 2003: 2). By the late 1990s, Paul Hawken and his colleagues would promote socio-ecologically sensitive industrial capitalism by employing the phrase ‘the next industrial revolution’ as the subtitle of their book Natural Capitalism (Hawken et al., 2000; see also Elkington, 1998: 44).

According to the European Environmental Agency (EEA, 2005), CSR is the largely ‘voluntary process’ whereby companies ‘integrate social and environmental concerns in their business and the way they interact with stakeholders’. A more widely used definition of the term is that offered by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), which defines it as the ‘commitment of business to contribute to sustainable economic development, working with employees, their families, the local community and society at large to improve their quality of life’ (Swanson, 2002).

In line with conventional CSR practice, companies have had to write their own ethical codes and social-environmental report cards. In Nigeria, for example, Chevron employees refer to the company's ‘Policy 530’ as ‘the Bible of our company’, although one manager once emphasised that Chevron does not regard CSR as a law (Haastrup, 1996). Chevron's ‘Bible’ has chapters and verses touching on issues such as community awareness and outreach, compliance assurance, and legislative and regulatory advocacy (CCR, 1996). Before it went bankrupt and collapsed under the weight of what some have called ‘over-ambition and its propensity to cut corners in search of glory’ (Srinivasan, 2001), the American energy giant, Enron, had one of the more popular of such ‘Bibles’, a 64-page Book of Ethics (Enron, 2000).

Shell's ‘world-class’ standards of community development in Nigeria's Niger Delta region, which it ‘started to implement … in 1997’ (SPDC, 2001: 15), supposedly entail catalysing local economic growth, improving communities' quality of life and partnering with relevant social actors. These activities, the company says, are rooted in its ‘core values of honesty, integrity and respect for people’ (Christian Aid, 2004: 1).

When an oil company donates a classroom block to a local school, contributes towards guinea-worm eradication campaigns or HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives, provides water boreholes for a community, is forced to replant a seismic path created in the course petroleum exploration (even if that happens decades after the paths were created) or engages local chiefs and youth groups, such an effort is often regarded as, in a manner of speaking, going beyond the call of duty. As Shell puts it, it is in order to ‘earn their [the community's] support for our business’ (SPDC, 2001: 15). The reader may note the soothing, voluntaristic ambience of the various CSR pronouncements, as the author later examines how they resonate with ordinary people in Nigeria's oil-producing communities. The appeal of the CSR orthodoxy is such that companies now embark on social and environmental audits, alongside their traditional financial audits, as a way of ‘measuring’ their performance on the triple bottom line (Norman & MacDonald, 2003: 5).

One of the major criticisms of CSR as a business practice is that, unlike that on the financial front, performance on the social and environmental front is much more riddled with contradictions. The practice assumes even more fuzziness when corporations attempt to generate what looks like ‘universal criteria’, ‘standards’ or ‘Bibles’ (Norman & MacDonald, 2003: 8). As shown later, it is even trickier to understand a firm's ‘world class’ standards of community development without finding out how its self-defined ‘goods’ resonate with ordinary people.

An equally interesting attribute of CSR is that the practice fits a bit too neatly into the image management toolbox of business corporations. It becomes a useful tool when it is used principally to create a favourable image and an atmosphere in which business can sleep peacefully with the enemy (Norman & MacDonald, 2003: 11; see also Enron, 2000: 2). It will be shown later how, in their CSR reports, transnational oil companies operating in Nigeria have passed off non-existent, uncompleted or abandoned community development projects – and even photographs of projects from faraway places (Frynas, 2000: 49) – as having been ‘completed/renovated’ in the Niger Delta.

The inherent contradictions of CSR have led some to advocate jettisoning both the concept and its practice. As Henderson (2001: 32) controversially asserts, it is better to concentrate on perfecting the market, since it is within the context of efficient markets that business can be legitimately expected to contribute to the public good. Some, on the other hand, have advocated a firmer regime of CSR, insisting that it is CSR's voluntarism that predisposes the process to abuse by business corporations – or leads corporations to make so much of a to-do about it in the first place. The point, according to this view, is not about benevolently sponsoring literacy campaigns in a remote village; rather, ‘it is how you earn your money … Here we are talking about what can be called the “stakeholder license to operate”. This is not the formal license given by government’ (Swanson, 2002 – emphasis in the original).

According to Christian Aid the only way to instil honesty and integrity into business practice is to strip CSR of its voluntarism and enact laws that spell out minimum social and environmental standards that companies must meet. Jettison corporate social responsibility: make it corporate social accountability, because for too long CSR has served as ‘merely a branch of PR’ and in some cases as the ‘only spurts of development activity by large companies’ (Christian Aid, 2004: 2).

As the remaining sections of this article show, which way the paradigm shifts will depend in part on what first-hand knowledge is gained from local communities where big corporations operate and where they put their ideas of social responsibility to use.

4. Petroleum in Nigeria

4.1 Exploration history

One cannot fully grasp the intricacies of Shell's (or any other oil company's) CSR practices without first becoming familiar with the Nigerian upstream petroleum industry. Although early initiatives to explore for petroleum in Nigeria date back to 1906, it was not until 1937, when a Royal Dutch/Shell consortium by the name of Shell D'Arcy Petroleum, arrived in Nigeria that exploration for crude oil began in southeastern Nigeria. (Earlier searches had been limited to southwestern Nigeria.) This company was renamed Shell BP Nigeria in 1956, the year it struck oil in the swamp town of Oloibiri in June 1956. The initial output was 5134 barrels per day. Nigeria commenced commercial production of crude oil in 1957 and, a year later, made its first oil export (Abe & Ayodele, 1986). It will be shown later that contemporary living conditions in Oloibiri and other early oil-producing communities (and indeed all subsequent ones) are in themselves a study in the squandering of ‘natural capital’ – to use a phrase made famous by Hawken et al. (2000).

Shell enjoyed almost complete monopoly in Nigeria before Nigeria's independence in 1960, and possesses what for a long time was thought to be the ‘best’ (in terms of being mainly onshore) oilfields in the country. It controls over 50 per cent of Nigeria's crude oil reserves and as of 2001 was producing about 39 per cent of Nigeria's daily crude oil output (SPDC, 2001: 6). Ironically, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, this dominant position has brought the company into direct conflict with the oil-producing communities. At various times since the mid-1990s the youths here have threatened to expel the company from the region.

More foreign companies (mainly from the United States) began to acquire oil exploration concessions in Nigeria from about 1961. In April 1965 Chevron shipped Nigeria's first offshore oil consignment to the international market (Haastrup, 1996). By 1969 Nigeria's Niger Delta had become a crowded site of petroleum operations. Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Agip, Total and Phillips currently dominate the Nigerian upstream petroleum sector.

At least 5284 oil wells have been drilled in over 1500 Niger Delta communities (NDDC, 2004: 22). There were about 120 active oilfields in 2003, of a total of about 280 (UK Trade and Investment, 2003; NBR Services, 2004). Proven reserves were 32,255 billion barrels in 2003 (OPEC, 2003) – about three per cent of the world's total. The country produced 2.25 million barrels per day in 2003, representing about 2,5 per cent of global daily output of 77,9 million barrels (Table 1). This makes Nigeria one of the world's top 13 oil producing (and top eight oil exporting) countries.

Table 1. Leading oil producing and oil exporting countries (2003)

Top world oil producers			Top world oil net exporters
Rank	Country	Total production (million barrels/day)	Rank	Country	Net export (million barrels/day)
1	Saudi Arabia	9,95	1	Saudi Arabia	8,38
2	United States of America	8,84	2	Russia	5,81
3	Russia	8,44	3	Norway	3,02
4	Iran	3,87	4	Iran	2,48
5	Mexico	3,79	5	United Arab Emirates	2,29
6	China	3,54	6	Venezuela	2,23
7	Norway	3,27	7	Kuwait	2,00
8	Canada	3,11	8	Nigeria	1,93
9	United Arab Emirates	2,66	9	Mexico	1,74
10	Venezuela	2,58	10	Algeria	1,64
11	United Kingdom	2,39	11	Libya	1,25
12	Kuwait	2,32
13	Nigeria	2,25
Source: Energy Information Administration (EIA), US Department of Energy, 2003.

4.2 Ownership and control – oil fiscal regimes and ‘eminent domain’ controversies

Two contractual fiscal regimes dominate the Nigerian upstream petroleum industry, namely Joint Ventures and Production Sharing Contracts. The former accounted for about 95 per cent of Nigeria's petroleum production in 2004. Until the early 1960s, when Nigeria was an independent country, a system of sole concessions was in operation. This is a system whereby companies apply to the state to purchase petroleum rights in a given territory. If granted the rights, they become private owners of the petroleum resources in the designated concessions and bear the full financial risks of its exploitation. In return, they pay royalties on the value of the oil produced, in addition to paying corporate income taxes to the government (Mulder et al., 2004). The involvement of Nigerian citizens in the industry was not allowed under the concessionary system.

The system of sole concessions was scrapped via Decree no. 51 of 1969, which abrogated the colonial Mineral Oils Ordinance of 1914 on which it was based. It was the 1969 Decree that laid the foundation for a contractual system of joint ventures between the Nigerian government and transnational oil companies. In a joint venture the Nigerian government, through the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC – established in 1977), shares in the risks of upstream oil operations – from exploration to production. Although in terms of existing joint venture agreements the government contributes to the cost of community development, such contributions are part of operating costs which are managed by the transnational oil ‘operators’. Other sensitive aspects of the petroleum business directly under the corporate domains of the transnational companies include the drawing up and implementation of operating budgets, exploration, drilling, laying and maintenance of pipelines, production, operation of crude oil export terminals and custody of crude oil tanks.

The two principal instruments that formalise a joint venture are: (a) a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) between the NNPC and the private firms and (b) a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the joint venture partners and the Nigerian government. In terms of a JOA, the NNPC provides between 55 and 60 per cent of the operating costs of a joint venture while the ‘operator’ of the joint venture (and its partners, if any) contributes the remaining fraction. While not as clear-cut as the cost-sharing equation of joint venture operations, the sharing of petroleum revenues between the Nigerian government (via the NNPC) and the joint venture ‘operators’ essentially follows the same logic – the logic of government taking the bigger share, as the ‘owner’ of the resource [the practicalities of profit-sharing in a joint venture are captured in what is known as ‘split of the barrel’ between the NNPC (i.e. the Nigerian government) and the joint venture partners. For details of how this works, see SPDC (2003: 4)].

In a production-sharing contract, on the other hand, all the financial and operational risks and burdens of prospecting for oil and developing a reserve are entirely the responsibility of the oil companies (contractors). This means the NNPC does not make direct financial contributions towards exploration or production. Through stipulated fractions of the total quantity of oil produced, the contractor is expected to recover its costs and make a profit if exploration proves fruitful, while paying taxes and royalties to the government. Exploration and development costs are recovered in ‘cost oil’, and taxes and royalties are paid in ‘tax oil’ and ‘royalty oil’. Whatever remains after these various obligations have been met is ‘profit oil’, which is split between the NNPC and the contractor.

The Nigerian government's ownership and control powers in the petroleum industry have long been a subject of acrimony between the central government and the oil-producing regions, where people feel the government has abused its power of eminent domain by ‘unjustly’ depriving them of their ‘God-given’ environmental resources. The government's power is defined by and anchored in the constitution, but particularly in several pieces of legislation directly or indirectly related to the petroleum industry. Arguably the most important of these is the 1969 Petroleum Act, which vests petroleum (ownership and control) rights in the federal government.

Generally, the obligations placed on companies vis-à-vis the community as set out in the various laws are weak. The Petroleum Act, for example, requires operators to ‘adopt all practicable precautions’ to prevent land and water pollution. Should such precautions fail, companies are required to ‘take prompt steps’ to contain the effects of pollution. Operators are to perform these duties in a ‘proper and workmanlike manner in accordance with the regulations and practices accepted as “good oilfield practice”’ (Gao, 2003). The Act contains no threat of serious sanctions against polluters, which probably explains the thinking in some circles in Nigeria that oil operators do sometimes preside ‘over the ultimate process of determining the quantum of compensation payable to aggrieved individuals or communities’ when forced through militant community protests to deal with the effects of, for instance, an oil spill. Even so, claims processes do not always take into account the ‘immediate, short-term and long-term damage of oil spills’ (The Guardian, 1998). The implication of this is that, in terms of corporate social involvement in the communities, the entire system relies heavily on the companies' initiative.

It may now be appropriate to draw on some ethnographic and in-depth interview data obtained in three oil-producing communities in Nigeria to illustrate the possible intersections between a weak regulatory environment and corporate social responsibility, especially in the context of an extractive sub-Saharan African economy.

5. A tale of three towns

The Niger Delta, occupying about 70 000 square kilometres in Nigeria's southernmost tip, is reputed to be the third largest wetland in the world (after the Netherlands and the Mississippi deltas). Politically, the region's nine states (Abia, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Imo, Ondo and Rivers) spread over 112 110 square kilometres (NDDC, 2004: 2). The water systems of Nigeria's two most important rivers, the Niger and Benue, flow into the Atlantic Ocean through the intricate network of creeks in this region (Udo, 1970: 55).

5.1 Rationale for the choice of study sites

The fieldwork was conducted in three communities – Oloibiri, Ebubu and Iko – located in Bayelsa, Rivers and Akwa Ibom states, respectively. As indicated earlier, the choice of the sites was not guided by the criteria of conventional statistical representivity, but rather by the need to include: (a) a community in each of the country's leading oil producing states, to accord the data the necessary spread and significance, (b) communities that occupy significant positions within the context of Nigeria's oil production history and (c) communities with strategic relevance to the major transnational oil companies, such as host communities of Shell flow stations. On the whole, however, a major consideration was that the towns must be fairly representative of the upland and riverine human ecologies of oil and gas production in Nigeria. The three towns met this requirement.

5.2 Socio-economic profile of the communities

Commercial oil production began in Oloibiri and Ebubu in 1956, and in Iko around 1974. In Nigerian oil studies, the town of Oloibiri is significant for the simple reason that it is where the first commercial oil reserve was struck in June 1956. Major production continued there until the mid-1970s, and in Iko until the mid-1990s (although in Iko Shell's flow station was still in service in 2003). In Ebubu (an Ogoni town) Shell's flow station was still functional in 2003, although production had been halted owing to the 1990s conflict between the Ogoni and Shell. While there are no major socio-physical differences between any of the three study communities and other rural towns in Nigeria, a researcher seeking to understand what the author terms the ‘community side’ of oil operations in Nigeria, or indeed what Christian Aid (2004) calls ‘the real face of corporate social responsibility’, will find no better starting point than the earliest oil-producing communities (Oloibiri and Ebubu, for instance). It is in these communities that one discovers the deeper significance of Georges Bataille's quip that ‘energy finally can only be wasted’ (quoted in Apter, 2005: 200).

A dominant form of housing in Oloibiri, Ebubu and Iko is the mud-and-thatch hut [known throughout the Delta as ‘thatch house’ or ‘mud house’ (the phrase ‘mud house’ must not be confused with a similar term used by oilfield engineers, which refers to the storehouse of mud additives for drilling operations)]. The basic building materials for a mud-and-thatch house are mud, wood, bamboo and thatch. The walls and floor are made of mud and the roof is constructed from a simple sequence of mats made from raffia palm fronds. The mats are fastened to a supporting structure of wood and bamboo (Kennedy, 1996). The modified versions of this type of shelter have corrugated iron roofs and in some cases cement is used as wall plaster and for the flooring; the basic wall framework is, however, mud rather than concrete blocks.

Drinking water is fetched from streams and the open creeks (Oloibiri and Iko) and poorly completed boreholes (parts of Ebubu). The townscape is characterised by sandy footpaths (Oloibiri), paved and dirt roads (parts of Ebubu and Iko) and rickety boardwalks linking different parts of the community (Iko). Oloibiri is linked to the nearest city by tarred road and inland waterway; Iko and Ebubu by tarred road, which at the time of the study was in serious disrepair. None of the three communities had functional health centres, and the local schools were in a state of dilapidation. All other forms of public infrastructure (such as electricity and telephone) were largely non-existent.

Some of the social infrastructure found in the three communities was ‘sponsored’ by either Shell or the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), an agency created in 1999 by the federal government to ‘make a difference’ in the oil-producing region. However, virtually all the major projects were subjects of community conflict. The basis of this is discussed in some detail in the next section. For instance, an uncompleted concrete landing jetty at the Oloibiri waterfront and an overhead community water tank project – both NNDC-sponsored – were believed by local residents to have been abandoned. Surprisingly, however, the water project was promoted in a full-colour, tabloid-sized NDDC newsletter, with a front-page banner headline, ‘Oloibiri Comes Alive … Salutes NDDC’ (NDDC, 2003: 1). In the same community, a Shell-sponsored electrification project was also, according to local residents, abandoned.

In Iko, a community water borehole sponsored by an oil company had similarly, according to local residents, been abandoned. The stench from the borehole could be perceived from a distance of about 500 metres. The wellhead was ingrained with brownish, slippery substances, possibly an effect of underground water contamination. The community avoided the water ‘because of its horrible smell’ and continued sourcing drinking water from the equally foul-smelling creeks. In the same town, a complex labelled ‘health centre’ stood derelict, the premises overgrown with weeds and creepers. At its entrance was a signpost announcing it as an oil company-sponsored community project. Residential buildings in an entire district of the town had badly damaged walls and their corrugated-iron roofs were corroded and charred. Residents attributed the wall damage to the effects of seismic blasting activities, and the corrosion and charring of the roofs (which allegedly could occur within two years of building a house) to ‘acid rain’ associated with incessant gas flaring in the area.

In Ebubu, where some very narrow streets had, since 2000, been paved with concrete, and a community hall built (courtesy of corporate assistance), there was an abandoned community water project. The local market square was a cluster of shacks. Most markedly, a vast land expanse measuring tens of hectares that was rendered unusable as a result of a 1970 oil spill had not been cleaned up by 2003. Believing oil pollution to be a form of land defilement, the community had long fenced off the site and barred visitors, especially oil company staff, from entering the site. According to a notice scribbled on a huge iron gate leading to the site, any intending entrant, particularly ‘SPDC personnel’ (Shell employees) should first ‘see the community ruler or the land priest for permit’.

Although an expanding latticework of ‘modern’ occupations existed in the communities, most local residents depended on farming (Ebubu) and/or fishing (Oloibiri and Iko) for their everyday sustenance.

5.3 Community governance

Politically, the three communities were structured in much the same way. The highest decision-making body was the Council of Chiefs, headed by a king. A king must be appointed from a royal house – although the author learnt from local residents that this did not always happen. Interviewees pointed out that because of the significance of local kings, government, oil companies and powerful interests outside the community often sought to influence the workings of local chieftaincy structures, even to the extent of dictating who should be king. The common pretext, the author learnt, was ‘stakeholder engagement’ – that is, attempts by companies and other role players to work through community structures and align corporate policies and practices to local concerns and sensibilities. In the process, a ‘recalcitrant’ king could be dethroned, have his stipends and privileges suspended or withdrawn, or be cited as the reason a community was denied development projects or government services. These could jeopardise a king's local legitimacy or even split the community along mutually antagonistic lines of allegiance. The author encountered this kind of conflict in Oloibiri, where the king believed he had been undermined and his Council ‘divided’. He attributed such problems to ‘manipulations’ by ‘external interests’ and feared a ‘very real threat’ to his chieftaincy. In Ebubu, a local leader informed the author about what could be likened to a divide-and-rule stakeholder engagement practice:

If Shell finds that I am pressuring them to invest in the community, they'll bypass me and pick someone else – or simply create a contractor in their own image … These are the people Shell feels comfortable with; they are the people who suddenly become ‘the voice’ of the community … Some elders in the community, including myself, are considered a security risk to [oil interests].

Another community governance structure was the ‘Community Development Committee’ (CDC), which was in charge of present-day development issues, especially those involving liaison with oil companies, the government or specific governmental agencies. According to residents, this organ was also open to ‘manipulation’ by ‘external forces’ (notably oil companies and the government), who were keen to ensure that their economic interests were well protected in the communities.

There were two other important structures of community governance, namely the Youth Association and Women's Council. The former, a relatively loose coalition of men aged between 18 and 40 years in each of the study communities, functioned essentially as a vehicle for mobilising youth energies. These energies were often channelled towards community projects requiring voluntary (or paid) local manual labour. Much of the oil-related grassroots mobilisation in the Niger Delta takes place under the aegis of youth associations.

If the foregoing profile of socio-economic underdevelopment serves to underscore the imperative of ‘world class’ standards of community development in Nigeria's oil province, the issue would be to explore, especially by studying the ‘grammar’ of discontent in the communities, how such ‘standards’ were deployed and how they resonated with ordinary people.

6. Corporate social responsibility or corporate social fragmentation?

The author's aim in this section of the article is to show, using empirical data, how corporate social responsibility has been a major source of what some analysts have described as ‘ethnic conflict’, ‘communal instability’ and ‘inter-tribal violence’ (Davies, 2001: 200; Shell, 2004: 17) in the Niger Delta. The intention is also to demonstrate not just how invidious rivalries associated with CSR detract from its commonly eulogised merits but also how such rivalries intersect with a regulatory environment in which private business enterprises (and even state-owned enterprises and the state itself) define their own terms of partnering with communities.

6.1 Local ideas about ‘community development’

The study found, first of all, that for local residents community development meant more than simply ‘projects’ (Table 2). For the three oil-producing communities it meant, as some respondents put it, ‘everything we cherish, everything that gives us a sense of worth as a community’.

Table 2. Respondents' views about community development

Response category		Response particulars
1	Development as social infrastructure	Motorable roads, water, sheltered markets, electricity, health centres, post offices, community halls, schools, drainage, decent housing
2	Development as local empowerment	Cottage industry, educational scholarships and bursaries, employment, skills acquisition, microenterprise loans, agricultural inputs, service contracts in the oil industry, poverty reduction
3	Development as reparation	‘Fair’ compensation for environmental damage, for expropriated land, and for petroleum resources extracted, protection against environmental hazards (for example, shore protection)
4	Development as sustainability	Access to decision-making positions in the oil industry, co-determination (with other stakeholders) of the content, direction and outcomes of community development initiatives, non-oil enterprise development, mineral resource rights, ownership

Equally important, local residents commonly associated community development with oil production. When the question ‘what does the term community development mean to you?’ was put to one respondent at Ebubu, the response was tinged with anger:

Ebubu has 58 oil wells. Look at the sort of houses people live in! Mud houses everywhere. No drinking water… and you ask what development means. Our boys who are graduates are not even [oil company] workers. They're not benefiting. If you go to [a named oil company's] office or location now, you'll not find two Ebubu men who are workers. Do you know how many [oil company] registered contractors we have who hail from this town? None!

6.2 CSR, economic expediency, and the ‘partition-and-label’ approach

The study found that CSR practices in the communities were often driven by extreme economic expediency, and that this was the case even when the effect was community fragmentation and the exacerbation of intra- and intercommunal tension. The following is an illustration.

Since many oil wells in the Delta are located in very remote, thinly populated areas, the oil companies fear that providing social amenities in every oil-producing village or community exposed to oil pollution would be a drain on their finances. Consequently, they adopt what may be termed ‘strategic doubt’. They doubt that a tiny, isolated riverine village could be anyone's ‘permanent’ habitation: the inhabitants must have a permanent home somewhere. Writing on behalf of Chevron, Haastrup (1996) calls them ‘migrant fishermen and women or part-time farmers looking for better land to build their homes and plant some crops’. The companies' inclination is ordinarily to evict the ‘squatters’, since, as Haastrup (1996) reasons, ‘one day the so-called community will come to demand what it terms as its right as an oil producing community’.

However, because eviction could create more problems than it solves, the companies deal with the matter ‘ethnographically’. They adopt conceptual tools – such as the terms ‘community’ and ‘settlement’ – in their CSR administration. In the oil company lexicon, a ‘settlement’ is a little village of assumed ‘settlers’ and ‘squatters’ – people who ought to have a permanent home in some ‘community’, and so should not come to constitute a nuisance in the vicinity of petroleum production activities. The ‘squatters’ must either vacate the land or be exposed to the full, unmitigated hazards of oil operations. A key informant at Shell emphasised that a policy similar to this was in operation in the company's sites of operations.

Oil companies do not expect inhabitants of a ‘settlement’ to ask for any special protection from the hazards of oil production. ‘Settlers’ must seek out their permanent homes (‘communities’) and enjoy whatever social amenities have been provided there. Attention has already been drawn in this article to the condition of some such amenities.

Through prolonged engagement with local residents in and around Iko, the author found that what the oil companies commonly refer to as ‘settlements’ are not ‘squatter camps’ in the urban sense of this phrase. Some of the villages so described are seasonal economic outposts that the local people regard as their ‘traditional’ industrial hubs. A ‘fishing port’ fits this description. It is a seasonal outpost located close to the Atlantic Ocean and used as a fishing settlement continuously for about six months every year. From an ethnographic point of view, a ‘fishing port’ serves the same purpose for local fisherfolk as does the city of Port Harcourt for urban residents – because market-oriented fishing in the Niger Delta takes place not in the creeks and shallow waters but in the open sea.

Seen in the above light, the quandary as to whether a so-called ‘settlement’ (as opposed to a ‘community’) can be protected against the hazards of oil exploitation in its own terms dissolves. As one resident further explained:

Ghanaians, Cameroonians, [and Nigerians alike] are in these [‘settlements’] as fishermen. You can't say you ignore them or that you're only interested in the permanent villages where the fishermen come from. Wouldn't it be absurd to say that you are only interested in the villages which migrants to Port Harcourt city come from?

When asked why Shell, for example, should assist residents of a ‘fishing port’, the same interviewee said:

Oil activities hit [fishing port inhabitants] directly – sometimes more directly than those living in the permanent villages. The ships generate waves; dredging activities destabilise the behaviour of the shoreline … The first thing an oil company should do is shore protection.

Other concepts devised by the oil companies to moderate community spending are ‘oil well community’, ‘pipeline community’ and ‘landlord community’. ‘Oil well communities’ fall under what Shell, for example, refers to as ‘key communities’. In theory, they are a prior target of developmental attention. In reality they fit the socio-economic profiles of the communities described in this article. As a rule, communities whose oil wells have run dry receive as little attention as the oil companies can get away with, because, as a Shell informant the author will call Godwell pointed out, ‘it is the quantity of oil produced in an area that determines what projects go into that area’. Oloibiri – Nigeria's first ‘oil well community’ – falls into this category.

Godwell and other key informants at the Port Harcourt offices of Shell revealed that these various strategies were driven by a desire to keep operating costs down, especially since the Nigerian government itself did not regard community development as a high-priority issue.

6.3 Local cooptation of corporate-imposed parameters of difference

The author found some interesting issues associated with the above gambles. In devising concepts that help them moderate community spending, the oil companies seem to have unwittingly made negative inputs into the communities' everyday discourses and internal/external social relations. For example, ‘othering’ (the constructing and reconstructing of oneself and of others), has become an everyday practice in the communities, and the idioms used (‘settlers’, ‘oil well community’, landlord community', etc.) are generally oil company CSR terminologies. The author found that intercommunity tensions seemed to turn on these usages.

An illustration can be offered using responses obtained from local residents in Iko and a neighbouring community called Okoroette. The rivalry between the two communities draws on the subtle distinctions superimposed on the communities through the operation of the Utapate oilfield. The flow station serving this oilfield is located in Iko. One Okoroette resident remarked that the tension between Iko and his community took a turn for the worse when Shell:

began emphasising that Iko was the only oil producing community in the area, despite the obvious fallacy of such an assertion. The bias affected the delivery of community development projects, and other oil-well communities began to see the bias as being instigated by Iko. This is the genesis of the tension in the area. But such a bias is in line with Shell's history in Nigeria. They fragment communities and devalue the contributions of communities so that they save money by spending less in the provision of amenities. It's a strange kind of corporate responsibility.

To challenge their ‘marginalisation’, Okoroette residents began ‘telling the whole world’ that Iko indigenes were ‘settlers’ on ‘Okoroette land’. According to the Okoroette interviewee quoted above:

This entire area is something of a one-family community – so small, so close-knit. The only people who are different are the Iko – who don't speak the Andoni language that everyone in this area speaks. Iko people speak what they call Iko language. Where Iko presently is, used to be a thick forest – an Okoroette reserve. The early Iko settlers were boat carvers. Fishing is the major occupation of the Andoni communities [of which Okoroette is one]. Up to this day, Iko people are not effective fishermen. They are menial farmers. They no longer carve boats.

However, in Iko, the above remarks were ridiculed:

They always claim that we are settlers – that they gave us the land we inhabit today; in fact, that Iko is a village of immigrants and they are the landlords. Isn't it funny: you claim that you gave us this land; how sensible is it for you to give itak akpa [literally ‘seaward community’], which is so rich in resources – being just by the Atlantic Ocean – to a settler. Common sense dictates that a landowner would hold on to itak akpa, and the settler will be pushed further inland. Even by such logic, it is clear that they are making a ridiculous claim. But then it is probably on account of such a ridiculous claim that many of them get jobs at Shel l… under the pretext of being Iko indigenes. Because of this employment matter, we once had to chase away a Shell Production Manager who came in here some time ago by helicopter.

When confronted with the itak akpa logic, the Okoroette respondent retorted:

There is no village in Andoni (at least the traditional locations) that is not by the sea. At any rate, men don't fish in creeks; they fish in the ocean. The entire shoreline … is dominated by Andoni fishermen. It is nonsensical to argue that Okoroette is an upland community.

The author encountered similar contestations in Oloibiri – especially in its relations with a neighbouring community called Ogbia.

Communities may have ancestral origins different from where they currently call home, but as Mamdani (2001: 79) has pointed out concerning the Tutsi of Rwanda, they often do not see this as a politically significant fact and no member of the two communities traditionally goes about thinking himself or herself as a foreigner or an immigrant. In the Niger Delta, among the factors that have awakened redundant myths of origin is the manner in which oil communities have been labelled by business enterprises operating in their midst and the developmental consequences of such labelling. While the various communities have been literally forced into the pastime of constructing the other, some interviewees expressed disappointment that community development has become such a divisive issue in the Delta. Imposed parameters of difference (such as ‘community’, ‘settlement’, ‘key community’ and so on) almost always reproduce themselves. This occurs mainly through the cooptation and internalisation of the parameters by the people to whom they refer, and through the mobilisation of the imposed idioms in word and deed. In certain cases, local people complement imposed parameters with existing logics and subjectivities simply in order to be seen as a more legitimate claimant to the barely visible trickles of community development resources. Ultimately, it would seem, CSR takes on a dysfunctional character when the government abandons its developmental responsibilities to its citizens (as has been the case in Nigeria for many decades). Things get worse when business corporations are allowed to define how they should bring development to the people.

The cooptation, internalisation and mobilisation of superimposed parameters of difference in everyday discourse indicated to the author that oil industry CSR practices had affected the lived worlds of people in the oil communities in very profound ways. The study found that besides feeding into the grammar of local resistance against oil companies and the Nigerian government, superimposed parameters of difference could be an important hidden factor in so-called ‘ethnic conflict’ in Nigeria's oil province.

6.4 Community fragmentation by other means?

Beyond the creation of strategic idioms by the oil companies, and the cooptation and mobilisation of artificial parameters of difference by ordinary people, the study also found what seemed like community fragmentation by other means, namely the proliferation of ‘local development intermediaries’. These are individuals and groups acting as links between a community and oil companies, the government, and development agencies such as Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). Although, as stated earlier, each community has a community development committee (CDC), this organ is only one such intermediary – and usually the least used and least effective. Intermediation is about winning ‘contracts’ and ‘projects’ (these are euphemisms) ostensibly for the community. It often entails a rivalrous jostling for local legitimacy by different groups – local kings, ‘youth leaders’, local politicians, militant organisations, influential local elite, urban-based cronies of oil company workers and individuals possibly serving as fronts for government functionaries. The hustling does not always result in contracts or pacification payments. As the author confirmed in Oloibiri, sometimes the intermediaries are bluntly refused such pacifications.

The manipulative milieu seemed to be a strategy by various organs in the development delivery process to do business with as little commitment to community development as possible. The study found little to suggest that ‘world class’ standards of community development had emerged or were taking root in the communities. On the contrary, partly as a result of CSR interventions, or more accurately the absence of effective regulatory control of corporate–community relations, each of the study communities presented the image of a house divided against itself.

Overall, the study found that while oil companies devise specific idioms to facilitate CSR administration, such idioms have ethnographic consequences: they feed into the ways in which communities construct themselves and their neighbours. The strategies of corporate inducement and pacification that complement such idioms have the latent consequence of stoking greed and opportunism, bringing different segments of a given community – or even different communities – into conflict, and thus creating the picture of a divide-and-rule CSR ethos alluded to by some of the respondents. Corporate reports say nothing about divisive CSR practices: their emphasis is typically on corporate spending on community infrastructure, social campaigns and conservation efforts (Shell, 2004).

7. Conclusion

The virtues of CSR are now constantly preached from the pulpits of business corporations, the new orthodoxy being that companies have found both a need and an approach to put something back into the communities in which they make their money. It is becoming a norm for corporate reports to devote ample space to activities undertaken and budgets expended in the name of CSR (Shell, 2004). Some critics, on the other hand, view CSR as good intentions with potentially tragic consequences, while others dismiss it as simply corporate rhetoric. All this could be misleading, even diversionary, without an understanding of how the CSR practices of certain business corporations – and the corporate spendings often recorded under this heading – affect communities. This article has shown how ‘putting something back into the community’ plays out in three oil-producing communities in Nigeria. Attention has been drawn to the social fragmentation arising from corporate labelling and partitioning of communities, manipulation of community structures, and – worst of all – the internalisation, cooptation and mobilisation by local people of the divisive idioms foisted on them by oil companies. It may again be suggested that the social disruptions associated with CSR intersect with the Nigerian government's abandonment of its developmental role in local communities, compromised systems of public governance, and weak legal/regulatory arrangements governing corporate conduct, especially conduct pertaining to community development.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wilson Akpan

Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of Fort Hare, East London Campus, South Africa.