Corporate citizenship in the Nigerian petroleum industry: a beneficiary perspective

Abstract

Based on ethnographic data from Nigeria's oil-rich and gas-rich Niger Delta region, and relevant secondary data, this article presents a case for a beneficiary-centred approach to analysing and reporting on corporate citizenship, and for a shift from the dominant top-down approach. It addresses one key question: What do the experiences of people who share their socio-ecological and cultural neighbourhoods with petroleum operators say about some specific practices of corporate citizenship? The article does not present an anti-theory of corporate citizenship or of the broader sustainable development debate. Rather, it relates a counter-narrative informed by the new scramble for natural resources in Africa and the experiences and stories of respondents in communities targeted by corporate citizenship initiatives. The paper offers a modest empirical basis for re-examining how corporate citizenship affects local communities and how it can be made a powerful mechanism for empowering them.

1. INTRODUCTION

‘A benefactor’, Aristotle wrote, ‘loves the beneficiary of his kindness more than the beneficiary loves him’. In many developing countries this is true of the relations between business organisations and the impoverished communities who are the targets of their corporate goodwill.

The literature on corporate citizenship (or its aliases – ‘corporate social responsibility’ [CSR], ‘responsible competitiveness’ and ‘responsible commerce’) emphasises the imperative of doing business with a good social and ecological conscience (Moser, 2001; United Nations Global Compact, 2005; Development Southern Africa, 2006; Akpan, 2006a; Hamann, 2007). However, Aristotle's paradox reminds us there is still much to be discovered about the relationship between benefactors and beneficiaries, and, in particular, about how the forms of social assistance offered by operators in, say, the extractive industry are perceived by the communities they target (Global Compact Quarterly, 2007). If the benefits of corporate citizenship are to be properly harnessed and its contradictions kept to a minimum, scholarly focus must be on what business enterprises and big organisations do ‘for’ their host communities by way of corporate citizenship initiatives (Global Compact Quarterly, 2007), what they do ‘to’ them, and what they can do ‘with’ them.

This article addresses the question: How do people who share their socio-ecological and cultural neighbourhoods with big business perceive corporate citizenship, especially those aspects intended to benefit the community and the environment? Specifically, the article looks at how the corporate citizenship practices of operators in the Nigerian upstream petroleum industry resonate with people in the immediate vicinity of such operations. The article relies on the ethnographic and interview data the author collected between March and November 2003 in three Niger Delta communities (see Section 3, below), and from relevant organisations in the Nigerian petroleum industry (such as Shell Petroleum, the Department of Petroleum Resources, and the Niger Delta Development Commission).

It should be noted that this article treats corporate citizenship as a ‘space’ within which there are ongoing, even fierce, contestations. Scholars, businesses, activists, grassroots groups, the state, and multilateral agencies have yet to find common grounds as to what exactly ‘good’ corporate citizenship is, what aspects of this social process lend themselves to measurement and why, and whose perspectives should drive the narrative (Gitsham, 2007). The ‘Ten Principles’ of the United Nations Global Compact are only one formal attempt to reach a consensus on how businesses should conduct themselves in the twenty-first century vis-à-vis human rights, labour practices, the environment and anti-corruption. In other words, in definitional and descriptive terms – and even as a social practice – corporate citizenship is not yet a finished product. For the purposes of the present discussion, therefore, the author leans more towards the ‘social paradigm’, which emphasises what corporate organisations do (whether voluntarily or through legal compulsion) for the direct (and incremental) benefit of the broader community and the environment within which they operate. In this article, the phrase ‘broader community and the environment’ refers specifically to the oil-producing communities in Nigeria's Niger Delta region. (A case is made later in the article for a mechanism through which local communities could actively help to define, rather than remain mere beneficiaries of, corporate citizenship.)

2. CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP: WHY A BOTTOM-UP PERSPECTIVE?

In Africa, what corporations do ‘for’ and ‘to’ communities – and what they can do ‘with’ communities – within the context of corporate citizenship must be viewed as crucial, especially in the light of the new wave of interest in the continent's human and natural resources. Rising global demands for natural resources against a background of dwindling reserves in many countries has in recent decades raised interest in Africa's petroleum, gold, platinum, diamond and forest resources (to mention only a few) to unprecedented levels. The scale of what is popularly termed the ‘new scramble for Africa’ has been such that many resource-rich African countries are in a quandary as to how to prevent such a scramble from further compounding their development problems (Mail & Guardian, 2006; The Guardian, 2006a). There is also the question of ensuring that what companies – and even state agencies – do ‘for’ and ‘with’ resource-endowed communities can improve local socio-economic conditions in the long term, especially since many natural resources are non-renewable.

It may even be argued that contestations over the definition of corporate citizenship, the models (Martin, 2004) for the institutionalisation (Appels et al., 2006) of corporate citizenship, and the roles corporations could or should play in sustainable development persist because the feelings and narratives of beneficiary communities about corporate–community involvement have yet to be sufficiently documented.

Writing about the ‘increasingly important’ developmental role of transnational oil companies in Colombia and Peru, Moser (2001) has noted that such a role is played in at least three corporate citizenship spheres: mitigating the adverse environmental impacts of business operations, optimising the positive socio-economic and environmental impacts of business operations, and ‘giving something back’ to the community by way of corporate social investments. Moser (2001:301) makes the observation, however, that in each of these spheres local subsidiaries of transnational oil corporations are often circumscribed by their headquarters' corporate citizenship policies and attach relatively little importance to community concerns, ‘despite the fact that local communities directly suffer the impacts of hydrocarbon activity’. The insight from this is that a disproportionate focus on the benefactor side of the corporate–community equation could obscure the discontents that beneficiaries might have about specific corporate citizenship initiatives, the true potential of corporate goodwill, and the fact that CSR initiatives often do not address communities' long-term needs.

Distinguishing between corporate–community relations in the industrialised and developing countries, Gulbrandsen and Moe (2005:55) highlight the corporate side of the equation and, in particular, the sponsorship of cultural and knowledge-production institutions (the North) and the funding of school buildings, hospital and other social amenities (the South). They point out that in some countries new initiatives have emerged in which companies seek to unite around the goal of reaching out to the community and re-shaping the way their activities affect ordinary people. Two such countries are Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, where a number of oil companies have sought to stimulate local participation in decision-making about the discharge of corporate citizenship obligations. The desired grassroots impact of the outreach was, however, not achieved since, according to Gulbrandsen and Moe, the target communities appeared to attach limited value to it.

In Nigeria, corporate citizenship is comparatively new, especially as a systematic subject field. One explanation for this, according to Amaeshi et al. (2006), is the conventional association of the concept with big business. As these analysts point out, the term ‘big business’ in Nigeria generally means transnational business, much of it concentrated in the oil and gas, telecommunication and manufacturing sectors. Although a number of locally owned firms in the financial services sector (banks especially) have expanded into other African countries, and become transnationals in their own right, Nigeria's business landscape is characterised by small-scale and medium-scale (mainly family-owned) enterprises. Amaeshi et al. (2006:18) further suggest that transnational corporations have more to lose than small businesses in terms of reputation and investment if they remain impervious to ‘pressures’ from civil society, market forces, globalisation and consumers to operate in a socially responsible manner. They also argue that CSR practices among indigenous Nigerian businesses are driven by a deeply cultivated ‘propensity toward communitarian identity’. In other words, the dominant business ethic among locally owned companies is about ‘doing good’ for the broader community rather than simply focusing on the business owners' narrow financial objectives.

What is noteworthy in Amaeshi et al.'s reasoning, despite the essentialism of their analysis, is their argument that contestations in the corporate citizenship debate in Nigeria revolve around the meanings companies, even the big locally owned Nigerian companies, attach to CSR. Their survey of some of Nigeria's major banks found that although the banks had different CSR initiatives, and even considered such initiatives a ‘necessary’ complement to the government's development programmes, the dominant ‘wave’ of CSR was philanthropy and altruism (Amaeshi et al., 2006:29). The authors wondered why CSR in Nigeria had not been ‘elevated’ from, might one say, mere ‘acts of kindness’, to include economic, legal and ethical responsibilities.

Seen from the point of view of Locke's (2002:2–4) four-model analysis of corporate citizenship (‘minimalist’, ‘philanthropic’, ‘encompassing’ and ‘social activist’), Nigeria's act-of-kindness model of CSR would not rank very highly:

Most multinational firms operating in Nigeria … focus on either CSR mandates from their home countries or CSR activities that directly impact on their businesses … while sometimes ignoring local constructions of CSR. (Amaeshi et al., 2006:27)

According to Ashley and Haysom (2006:268), ‘philanthropic’ CSR is typically ‘project specific’. It relates to ‘specific issues relevant to a given organisation’, and hardly goes beyond ‘donations and gifts’. This contrasts sharply with ‘social activist’ CSR, which seeks to bring about broad social change by ‘extending the boundaries of supposed beneficiaries beyond … a restricted number of shareholders and/or stakeholders’ (Locke, 2002:2–3).

There is little doubt that, in Nigeria at least, community-level hostilities (This Day, 2006; The Guardian, 2006b) and international social justice activism directed at transnational corporations in recent years have forced companies to rethink the whole question of CSR, which for many of them was essentially about giving handouts to communities. Corporations such as Shell Petroleum (Nigeria) have reportedly repudiated their long-established ‘community assistance’ model of CSR in favour of a ‘proactive’ approach (Akpan, 2006a:224), besides the fact that many oil operators in Nigeria now search for oil in the deep waters beyond the continental shelf partly as a way of avoiding local communities altogether. The new CSR approach entails, in Shell's words, ‘world class community development’. In some ways it echoes Locke's ‘social activist’ model. Shell regards it as a ‘strategic shift’ in the way it relates to its host communities:

The shift was informed by the need for communities to be in charge of their own development, and to foster greater partnership with development agencies and NGOs [non-governmental organisations] in capacity building within communities. The aim was to promote the application of best practice in community development to boost family incomes and improve community welfare in Nigeria. (Shell Petroleum Development Company [SPDC], 2002:15; see also Shell, 2005:16)

Explaining the intricacies of the new model, an officer in Shell's Community Affairs department in Port Harcourt (the Niger Delta's principal city and one of the company's most important industrial sites in Nigeria – see Section 3, below) disclosed to this author that:

In the past we had a community development model that tended to separate project delivery [in Shell's host communities] from community issues and dynamics. Now the two concerns [projects and community issues] are properly waxed [linked to each other]. We no longer just focus on project delivery; we also talk of community issues. We try to get the community involved, to build local participants so that they take care of the projects when we are gone. This is the sort of discourse that now drives our involvement in community development. (Interview conducted by the author at SPDC, Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 16 May 2003)

Shell's ‘People and the Environment’ reports contain accounts of local people who have become successful through the support they have received as well as community projects that have allegedly brought a taste of modernity to residents of its operational locales. These form part of the company's emerging ‘sustainable community development’ model of CSR (SPDC, 2002:17; Shell, 2005:17), and present a research agenda for researchers who wish to understand beneficiary perceptions and experiences of the new model.

The point must, however, be made that the old, philanthropic model of CSR continues to dominate in Nigeria, mainly because of regulatory lapses. There are no laws stipulating minimum standards of corporate conduct towards communities, and hence violation has no clear consequences. Even so, as one key informant at Shell disclosed to this author, the character of corporate citizenship in the oil industry is also a function of the ‘collapse of government’:

By law it's not the duty of the oil companies to develop any community. The law governing their operations did not mandate them to get into community development. The companies pay tax, royalties, et cetera, and government should use this to develop the community. At all levels we have a collapse of government. Government is absent in these communities. Government gets its share [of petroleum revenues] and disappears. (Interview conducted by the author with a key informant (a responsible officer) at SPDC, Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 16 May 2003)

For a detailed account of the legal/institutional framework for petroleum operations in Nigeria and how petroleum revenues are shared between the Nigerian Government and the transnational oil companies, see Akpan (2005).

The manifestations of the ‘collapse’ and ‘disappearance’ of government have been documented:

Rivers [State, in the Niger Delta] is the heart of Nigeria's oil industry and its state government is wealthier than that of any other Nigerian state. The contradiction between Rivers' wealth and the material deprivation experienced by many of its people could not be any starker.

In five local governments [the third tier of government in Nigeria, after federal and state] … in Rivers, local administrations have failed to make more than nominal investments into health care and education. Much of the money that could have gone into improving these services has been squandered or outright stolen … [O]ne local government chairman habitually deposited his government's money into his own private bank account. Another has siphoned off money by allocating it towards a ‘football academy’ that he has not built. According to state and federal government officials, civil society activists and other sources, these problems mirror the situation in most of Rivers' local governments. (Human Rights Watch [HRW], 2007:1–2)

Another manifestation is in what business organisations do to the ecology:

Industrial pollution from over 5,000 industrial facilities and perhaps another 10,000 small-scale industries, some operating illegally within residential premises, is a growing problem in Nigeria. In places like Kano, Kaduna, Port Harcourt, Warri and Lagos, colored, hot and heavy metal effluent, especially that from the textile, tannery, petrochemicals and paint industries, is discharged directly into open drainages and channels, constituting severe dangers to water users and downstream. Also disturbing is the practice where some industrial facilities bury their expired chemicals and hazardous wastes in their backyards, threatening the water quality of innocent neighbours who rely on their dug-out wells for drinking water. (United Nations Environment Programme, 2003; see also Adediran et al., 2004)

Of the industrial sectors to which the United Nations Environment Programme makes reference, the upstream petroleum industry – the sector encompassing oil and gas exploration, oilfield development, production and related activities – is perhaps the most crucial for understanding how companies conduct themselves in Nigeria. In the first place, petroleum is Nigeria's most important natural resource: it accounts for about 95 per cent of Nigeria's export revenues and 80 per cent of federal budget funds. Secondly, the oil-producing communities look to the oil companies for social infrastructure, local socio-economic empowerment, and reparation for nearly five decades of ‘lost’ development, besides believing that petroleum ought to give them some socio-political leverage in Nigeria's scheme of things (Akpan, 2006a:233). Thirdly, there is an increasing recognition among the oil companies that the future success of their operations in Nigeria – and in particular the Niger Delta – is in some ways tied to their ability to stimulate local development in their host communities and adequately manage the adverse social and environmental impacts of their activities (SPDC, 2002:15).

An illustration can be made with oil spills and gas flaring. (For a more comprehensive analysis of the social and environmental impacts of petroleum operations in Nigeria, see Akpan, 2006b.) Oil spills affect not just the physical environment, but also indigenous agricultural livelihoods in a region where most residents are subsistence farmers and fishermen. This author found evidence of the livelihood issue in Ebubu (one of the study communities), where a ‘once thriving communal farmland’ (in the words of local residents) had been reduced to a soggy and desolate expanse. The land (measuring several hectares) was the site of a major oil spill in 1970; it had not been rehabilitated as of 2003, when the author visited the community.

Among the factors that have been identified as the main causes of oil spills in the Niger Delta are low pipeline integrity (associated mainly with poor pipeline network maintenance), regulatory weaknesses, the natural moistness, salinity and corrosiveness of the Niger Delta ecology, pipeline fires (often from sabotage), explosions, oil equipment malfunction, tanker leakages and vandalism. Studies have also found a link between the frequency and quantity of oil spills (see Emeseh, present issue) in the Niger Delta and negligent corporate conduct, as well as between spills and regulatory weaknesses (Snowden & Ekweozor, 1987; Akpan, 2006b).

On the occasions during his fieldwork when the author canoed into the creeks with young Oloibiri and Iko fishermen in order to observe them at work (see Section 3, below), the men's persistent complaint was that (subsistence) fishing, their main occupation, had ‘died’ because of oil pollution. The oily and stale creeks – and the local residents' dilapidated dwellings – bore testimony to this claim. The author found no indication of a sustained effort by companies to rehabilitate the oil-polluted creeks.

Gas flaring, another major environmental and public health issue associated with petroleum exploitation in Nigeria, continues to be evident in the many smoky flames and ‘burning-bush’ scenes that identify an oil community, the orange-coloured night-sky, the atmospheric heat, the sooty haze, and the burning sensation one feels when breathing. About 86 per cent of the gas produced in Nigeria is dissipated through flaring. The flaring is done with ‘outdated technology’ (HRW, 1999; Ishisone, 2004; Oguejiofor, 2004; Sonibare & Akeredolu, 2004). While some of the companies have introduced new technologies that make oil drilling easier and more productive, little appears to have been done in the way of modernising the gas flaring technology to minimise the public health effects of gas flaring.

It is against the backdrop of issues such as the above that the questions posed in the special issues of Development Southern Africa (2006) and the Journal of Corporate Citizenship (2007) become crucial. These questions are: ‘Is business coming to the table?’ and ‘Is corporate citizenship making a difference?’ In other words, what does corporate citizenship research tell us about corporate conduct? For Hamann (2007), these questions do not lend themselves to easy answers. If anything, research driving the corporate citizenship discourse is top-down: it is ‘predominantly preoccupied with making the so-called business case’ (Hamann, 2007:17). While the issue ‘is not so much [about] the discrete impacts of particular CSR initiatives’, Hamann further reasons, we are still a long way from knowing the circumstances in which corporate citizenship initiatives help or hinder the broader goals of sustainable development. Norman and MacDonald (2004) had previously argued that much of mainstream corporate citizenship research – and the discourse it feeds – seems to be about helping business to ‘sleep peacefully’ with the ‘enemy’. In the rest of the present article, an attempt is made to bring empirical data to bear on this debate.

3. NOTES ON DATA COLLECTION

Of the approximately 1500 oil-producing and gas-producing communities in Nigeria, the three small communities from which the primary ethnographic and in-depth interview data used in this article were sourced enjoy considerable name recognition among Nigerians. They are Oloibiri, Ebubu and Iko. As pointed out earlier, the study was conducted over a 4-month period in 2003.

A number of historical factors account for the relative popularity of the three towns. Oloibiri (a rural island town in Bayelsa state) and Ebubu (a rural Ogoni town in Rivers state) are among Nigeria's oldest oil communities – Oloibiri being the site of the first oil well, struck in June 1956. They are also among the most impoverished (see Akpan, 2006a). Iko (a rural town in Akwa Ibom state) was one of the first (in the post-Nigerian Civil War era) to attract international media attention to the now endemic conflict between oil communities and the oil companies, and between community groups and the Nigerian state. The specific incident, in 1987, was the burning down by anti-riot policemen of about 40 houses following a protest by local residents against an alleged transnational oil company's failure to curtail the negative impacts of its operations in the town (HRW, 1999). In short, it is the relative historical prominence of the three towns vis-à-vis Nigeria's petroleum economy, the paradox of their deplorable socio-economic conditions amidst their petroleum resource endowment (Akpan, 2006a), and the fact that they were host communities of Shell Petroleum, the biggest and oldest transnational petroleum company in Nigeria, that recommended them as sites for a study of grassroots discontent in Nigeria's oil-producing region.

A salient aspect of the communities' social profile was the dilapidated state of social infrastructure. Even more salient was the fact that existing ‘modern’ amenities, besides church buildings and classroom blocks of primary schools, were those donated by business organisations, notably petroleum operators. These included communal drinking water projects (in Ebubu and Iko), a health centre (in Iko), a concrete waterfront landing jetty and a rural electrification project (in Oloibiri), and paved streets and a community hall (in Ebubu). While Frynas (2005:582) has remarked that corporate citizenship in countries such as Nigeria serves to fill ‘the gap when government falls short’, this author's observation in the three communities supported Okafor's point that corporate citizenship in Nigeria was more an ‘amendment to government failure’ (Okafor, 2003:91; see also HRW, 2007). The three petroleum-rich communities had all the hallmarks of official neglect. (A detailed ethnographic and socio-economic profile of the three communities, the Niger Delta, and the structure of the Nigerian upstream petroleum industry has been provided in Akpan, 2005, 2006a.)

The author conducted 99 semi-structured interviews with a purposively selected sample of local authority figures (such as chiefs), youth leaders, and ordinary men and women in the three communities.

Benefactor and beneficiary accounts of corporate citizenship activities were cross-validated by interviewing key informants at Shell Petroleum's Port Harcourt offices. (Port Harcourt serves as the main centre of Shell's operations in Nigeria, although the national corporate headquarters are in Lagos; key informant interviews were conducted in three departments of the company – namely, Public Affairs, Community Relations, and Lands.) Some of the claims made by both the oil company and community respondents were checked with the Department of Petroleum Resources, which at the time of the research was Nigeria's oil industry regulator. One in-depth interview was conducted with a Department of Petroleum Resources official. Additional interviews were also conducted at the Port Harcourt head office of the Niger Delta Development Commission, a development agency established in 2000 to facilitate the development of the oil province. It should be noted here that because the data gathered in the field were qualitative and only three towns were studied, the analysis in this article is offered only as an indication of grassroots narratives and not as an overall assessment of corporate citizenship in the Nigerian petroleum industry. All verbatim quotes from primary sources are used anonymously in this article, for ethical reasons.

4. A CONSENSUS OF DISCONTENT? VOICES FROM THE GRASSROOTS

As noted earlier, the study revealed that, partly as a result of government neglect, the three communities had great, even excessive, expectations of the oil companies for ‘modern’ social amenities such as roads, water projects, health clinics, community halls and other fruits of development. A feeling of entitlement was evident in all three communities. Local residents felt that, by virtue of their communities' petroleum endowment, they had a right to demand high levels of development delivery. According to one chief in Iko:

I agree that it is the duty of the government to develop the community. At the same time, when a company operates in a community it ought to do something for that community, because that community becomes the host community to that company.

As indicated earlier, while corporate sustainability reports were replete with stories of successful corporate-assisted development interventions, the field work revealed that specific corporate-sponsored community projects in the three communities had become subjects of communal discontent and may have served to exacerbate existing communal divides. While a given project – a rural water supply scheme, for example – might meet corporate criteria of ‘sustainable community development’ (The Punch, 2005), the author learnt that the mode of implementation might have compounded social distrust in the beneficiary community. Interviews with local leaders and ordinary residents in the three study communities revealed that projects were often implemented using ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics. In Iko, one chief made the following allegation:

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

There were rampant allegations of project sponsors ‘bypassing’ and/or ‘manipulating’ ‘legitimate’ community governance structures. In Oloibiri, for example, a newly constructed (although as yet uncompleted) concrete landing jetty and an overhead community water tank served as platforms for the mobilisation of animosities between youths and elders. A youth leader alleged during an interview with the author that the corporate-sponsored landing jetty had, since inception, been a source of personal accumulation for ‘some elders in this town’:

That's where they make their money. They are the contractors, yet they are supposed to be our representatives. They eat at the same table with [the benefactors] and yet claim to represent us. Assuming the jetty has been abandoned, how can the elders fight to have it completed? Of course the companies would never recognise our chiefs as contractors if they did not have ulterior motives themselves. That's our predicament in this town.

When this allegation was brought to the attention of one chief, it elicited a counter-allegation:

The young men who spoke to you are not the genuine youth leaders of this town. We do not currently have a recognised youth group in the town. Those boys you interviewed are a bunch of troublemakers who are bent on making this place ungovernable.

While social divisions are a well-known feature of every culture, the study revealed that in the study communities corporate citizenship was, in some ironic way, both a crucial platform for the articulation of such divisions and an important explanation for the communal conflict. Indeed, much of the Niger Delta has grown increasingly ungovernable as a result of violent protests and other forms of grassroots militancy directly or indirectly associated with petroleum exploitation.

An oil company-sponsored community water project in Iko also revealed how a corporate benefactor's good intentions resonated differently with beneficiaries. The town traditionally depends on water from nearby creeks and streams for cooking, drinking and other domestic uses. The provision of a modern borehole in the middle of the town would ordinarily have been a welcome intervention, yet it was not. Water from the borehole seemed unsafe for human consumption as it was not properly treated. Local residents avoided the project for the obvious reason of the poor water quality. However, the researcher picked up a local narrative that pointed to other rationalisations for the non-acceptance of this resource. A number of interviewees suggested that even if the project had been of a tolerable quality, it still would not have qualified as a ‘corporate social investment’ in the town, ‘considering how much money the [oil] companies have made out of this town’. Besides, one respondent asked rhetorically, ‘isn't it because they polluted our normal drinking water sources that a borehole became necessary? Why must we thank them for this useless project?’

The researcher also observed a CSR practice that can be equated with what Shober (2006:3) calls ‘identity rape’. Local socio-cultural and ecological heritages (as represented by tombstones, shrines and sacred groves) seemed to have very little significance for the companies. Village communities seemed like mere ‘functions’ (were they oil-producing or not – and how much oil?), the natural environment little more than ‘economic’ spaces (an abode of ‘cash’ or ‘food’ crops), and socio-culturally significant indigenous trees and crops little more than ‘vegetation’ that could be converted to cash (Akpan, 2005).

Communities seemed to have become a sum of their parts – deemed useful or useless to local oil interests depending on how they were labelled and what ‘contributions’ they were making to the local oil economy. For instance, if a community's oil wells had run dry, the town suddenly lost its significance and its neglected status became accentuated. Industry-related nomenclatures seemed very evident in the local socio-linguistic landscape – they produced or reinforced discourses that had the effect of exacerbating enmity within and between communities. For instance, the author found that while the Niger Delta was nomenclaturally mapped with terms like ‘oil well community’, ‘pipeline community’, ‘landlord community’, ‘host families’, ‘settlers’, ‘key community’, and ‘non-key community’, these were not just phrases. They had real consequences for social existence in the communities. Each term described a community's ‘function’, its relative contribution to the oil economy and, from a corporate citizenship point of view, the relative developmental benefit it could legitimately lay claim to. Embodied in each term was a notion of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. As one respondent told this author during the fieldwork:

They [the oil companies] 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. Why have they not managed to make these communities genuine partners in their operations, considering how long they have been doing business here and what the resources in these communities mean for their economic projections? (See also Akpan, 2006a:236.)

Table 1 presents a summary of some of the more common corporate citizenship pronouncements in the Nigerian oil and gas industry, and how these pronouncements appeared to resonate with respondents in the three study communities. The purpose of the table is to further highlight the disconnection between benefactor goodwill and beneficiary experiences and perceptions in the corporate citizenship arena.

Table 1: Corporate citizenship: views from ‘above’ and ‘below’

Number	Benefactor perspective	Beneficiary experience
1	‘Our community development programme is for all’ (The Punch, 2005)	In Ebubu a network of corporate-sponsored town streets and a community hall bore out this claim. However, the present study found that in a number of other respects project delivery strategies involved inducements and pacifications that sowed communal distrust and conflict, or exacerbated it where it existed
2	Community ruler ‘salutes’ a corporate benefactor for providing a long overdue community water project. Photograph of the water project is displayed on the front page of the agency's newsletter	In reality the community project in question had not been completed at the time of the publication; some local residents believed the project had been abandoned
		The project was subject of bitter intra-communal squabbles and polarisation
		Some interviewees dismissed published claims of community gratitude as a scam
		One respondent's comment: ‘They [the development agency in question] con an important person in the community [especially a local chief] into singing their praises so that they would have something [with which to] cover up their non-performance. With such words [alleged community gratitude], Abuja will believe the job has been satisfactorily done. But, of course, our chiefs should also be blamed for not properly representing the people’ (Interview conducted by the author in Oloibiri, Nigeria, 20 March 2003)
3	Full-colour photographs – and positive grassroots ‘testimonials’ about community projects – appearing in corporate manuals	A number of ‘modern’ social amenities had indeed been provided by corporate benefactors in the three study communities (see entry 1 above). In some instances, however, corporate reports of ‘completed’ and ‘functioning’ projects were overstated (see entry 2 above). Earlier studies have also suggested that photographs of project prototypes are sometimes modelled in corporate reports and passed off as real projects completed in the Niger Delta (see Frynas, 2000)
4	Oil companies blame community development failures in the Niger Delta on ‘inter-tribal violence’, and ‘corruption’ in the oil region (Shell, 2005:17)	The present study revealed that alleged ‘inter-tribal violence’ was in some ways exacerbated by ‘identity rape’, community fragmentation, and other modes of corporate involvement in the local communities, as described in this article
		Corporate social responsibility (CSR) processes bolstered a manipulative and rivalrous milieu whereby disaffected members or segments of a community could take up arms against those they perceived as unfairly ‘favoured’ in the development delivery process, or fellow indigenes who ‘eat at the same table with oil companies’
		The present study revealed little commitment on the part of benefactors (and even certain local development intermediaries) to genuine community development
5	The largest programmes of Shell's $106 million social investment spend in 2004 were in Nigeria and the USA (Shell, 2005:26)	While the companies have invested large sums of money in different aspects of community development, there are analysts who hold the view that ‘more money [has probably been spent] on bribes and corruption than on community development projects’ (quoted in Bustany & Wysham, 2000)
6	To ‘make up for past mistakes’, Shell has adopted ‘world class standards of community development’ since 1997	Key informants at Shell informed this author that there was indeed a new community development approach in the company. The author, however, found no immediate evidence of ‘world class’ community development in Oloibiri, Ebubu or Iko at the time of the study
		‘Partly as a result of CSR interventions … each of the three communities presented the image of a house divided against itself’ (Akpan, 2006a:237)

Local narratives also revealed that, despite the expressed need for good roads, town halls, pipe-borne water, electricity, reparation for environmental damage, adequate compensation for forests and farmlands destroyed in the petroleum extraction process, and economic empowerment of community members, the broader sentiment was against any development or economic empowerment process that appeared to put community cohesion in peril. In Oloibiri and Ebubu, for instance, it seemed that people would not readily accept a young man as an indigenous ruler if his only qualification was that he had the financial ability to buy such a position. In all three study communities, there was a strong sentiment against anyone (and this includes corporate benefactors) attempting to interfere with the indigenous traditions of electing or selecting, say, a local king. This feeling was expressed particularly strongly by some respondents in Oloibiri, where (at the time of the fieldwork), it seemed the local ruler faced a threat of being ‘dethroned’ through ‘irregular’ means.

An important finding that came out of key informant interviews at Shell was that the principal driver of corporate citizenship activities in the communities was the need to ‘secure … the license to operate … on a sustainable basis’ (SPDC, 2002:16). So strong was this need that the company was under intense pressure to be seen to be doing something ‘for’ its host communities. As one interviewee in Iko pointed out: ‘the government always tells us: “we have asked the oil companies to develop your area. If they are not doing it, you should get them to do it”’. The author learnt that, in order to deliver projects quickly, it was not uncommon for benefactors to avoid the time-consuming process of navigating the intricate tapestries of community structures, values and norms. This was partly why corporate benefactors (be they oil companies or government agencies) sometimes set up local representatives through whom to build ‘result-oriented’ local partnerships with local beneficiary communities. It also partly explains why the Niger Delta is characterised by intense jostling for relationships with oil companies, state agencies and political organs with important roles to play in the petroleum sector.

These findings have clear policy and research implications. The mere fact that corporate citizenship activities are perceived differently by benefactors and beneficiaries – indeed, the fact that this social process embodies different, even conflicting, outcomes for both parties – suggests a need for institutional and regulatory control of some sort. Companies, state agencies, and beneficiary communities enter the social partnership process with meanings, motivations and expectations that often differ markedly. While these will perhaps never be brought into complete harmony, sound regulatory arrangements (and a system where political representatives remain accountable to the populace) could set realistic frameworks for partnership and protect vulnerable communities (whether resource-endowed or not) against social and ecological abuses. An appropriate regulatory framework would be one in which local communities actively help to define, rather than remain mere beneficiaries of, corporate citizenship. Even so, more qualitative and quantitative data are needed to adequately highlight the intersection between corporate goodwill and beneficiary experiences in the corporate citizenship arena.

5. CONCLUSION

While the period since the mid-1990s has witnessed unprecedented scholarly and popular interest in the Nigerian petroleum industry, it is only in the past few years that systematic studies of petroleum-related community conflict and other sustainability dilemmas in the country's oil region have begun to emerge (Obi, 2005:1). The research on which this article has been based was part of efforts to contribute to such studies. Using ethnographic and interview data obtained in three rural Niger Delta communities, the article has shown how the differing motivations and expectations of benefactors and beneficiaries of corporate goodwill can sow or exacerbate distrust and conflict in communities. The data have also pointed to the community empowerment potential of corporate citizenship. The article thus calls for institutional and regulatory controls that could minimise the contradictions of corporate citizenship, ensuring that this potentially advantageous social process does not exacerbate the vulnerabilities of powerless communities. For researchers working in the field of corporate citizenship, the article provides a modest empirical basis for taking beneficiary narratives and experiences seriously.