The left behind: oil, youth and symbolic violence in the Niger delta

ABSTRACT

Around the world, the harms and profits of oil exploration are distributed unequally. This inequality has sparked violence in many oil communities, leading to calls for redistributive approaches as an effective way to address petro-violence. Despite the inclusivity potential of distributive mechanisms, distributive agencies are often not level playing ground for community members. The capacity of excluded groups to participate meaningfully in the development agencies is shaped by the operation of symbolic violence. Using ethnographic data and symbolic violence as a theoretical basis in this paper, I map out three doxas – lazy youth, gerontocratic and deviant – which hinder youth participation in the oil development process. I show how these doxas enable institutional leaders in two development agencies in the Niger delta region of Nigeria to accumulate various forms of capital and occupy positions of power in the networks while simultaneously limiting young people’s political participation, employment prospects, and stereotyping them as social threats. Several other dimensions of symbolic domination are discussed: including the misrecognition, acceptance, and resistance of these doxas by the youths themselves. I conclude with a brief reflection on the implication of these doxas for achieving inclusive development in the Niger delta.

KEYWORDS:

• Symbolic violence
• Doxa
• Niger delta
• Exclusion
• Young people/youths

1. Introduction

Development scholars widely acknowledge the importance of redistributive interventions for achieving inclusive development. In the context of natural resource governance, researchers agree that inclusive development can be achieved through redistributive policies which target excluded groups (Segal 2011; Bebbington 2013), especially when such policies are implemented under decentralised, accountable systems (Martinez 2000; Peluso and Watts 2001; Larson 2002; Arsel 2009). However, development interventions are not implemented in a vacuum. They are implemented in a social context, and the micro-dynamics of power relations within such context shape participation in development programmes such that, in many cases, the dominant groups reproduce their power, while the subordinated groups experience violence as exclusion. It becomes vital then to examine not only how such violence within development agencies is experienced, but also how they can be addressed to achieve inclusive development.

One of the important contributions of critical development scholars have been to examine the conditions under which intervention programmes can deliver its cardinal goal of inclusive development. Researchers in the field of forest governance highlight how community participation and deliberative processes can deliver inclusive outcomes in the context of Bolivia and Cameroon (Colfer 2005), Nepal (Ojha 2006), South-Central Myanmar (Soe and Yeo-Cheng 2019) and more recently in Ghana (Volker 2020). Others have criticised national governments for their silence on the sufferings of excluded groups and acknowledged the power of group agency in challenging the status quo and negotiating inclusion in national development (Appadurai 2001; Peluso and Watts 2001). However, while these studies highlight the role of community participation in achieving inclusive development, they do not elaborate on the complexity of communities, including how the community is often not a level playing ground for all.

For many decades, researchers have documented how community participation does not always translate to inclusive development, even though it remains important to achieving it. One of the leading contributors to this debate is Escobar (1995), whose work shows how livelihood interventions in Colombia exclude women and young people. Other scholars focusing on the livelihood approach have shown how development efforts at the community level are undermined by structural power relations (Etzold et al. 2009) and elite capture (Cooke and Kothari 2001; Platteau 2004; Dasgupta and Beard 2007; Rigon 2014). Altaf (2019) has added to this debate by using rich case studies to highlight how development interventions in Bangladesh, Benin and to a lesser degree Ethiopia exclude the poorest of the poor community members, including immigrants, sex workers, the elderly and chronically ill people. But despite the wide-ranging research on the interactions between local elites and development interventions, scholarships that explore specifically how such interactions affect young people in an oil context are thin. There is, however, a significant number of authors investigating how power relations create conditions of exclusion for young people in a non-oil context using Bourdieu’s sociology (Bullen and Kenway 2004; France, Bottrell, and Armstrong 2012; Kenelly 2017). A common focus of researchers in this field is on how the concept of cultural capital and habitus helps us to understand how young people (Fraser 2010; Coburn 2011), and young men in particular (Streicher 2011) cope with their everyday experiences of exclusion within the wider community. Increasingly, scholars in this area are also exploring the analytical potency of symbolic violence for theorising young people’s experiences of exclusion within groups, highlighting how young people misrecognise and accept their own exclusion (Cushion and Jones 2006; Cooper 2012; Kenelly 2017). This paper contributes to this body of literature by investigating how symbolic violence residing in three different doxa-lazy youth, gerontocratic, and deviant-reproduce the power of institutional actors and exclude young people in the oil development process in the Niger delta.

Building on the concept of symbolic violence a la Bourdieu, I argue that these doxas enable institutional leaders to accumulate economic, cultural and social capital which puts them in advantaged positions in the networks, against young people whose political, economic and social prospects are undermined due to not possessing enough capital to have significant effect on established power relations. Through this analysis, I aim to provide new ways of understanding youth experiences of violence in the context of oil exploration in the Niger delta by moving away from the visible experiences of violence which dominate scholarship in this area to recognise how violence in its subtle form harm marginalised youths. I make this argument with reference to two development agencies in the Niger delta communities, which have become arenas of exclusion despite their inclusivity rhetoric.

This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents an outline of the concept of symbolic violence and how it has been deployed in the literature to explain exclusion. Section 3 provides an outline of the study’s context, and in Section 4, I explain the method of data collection and analysis. The fifth section examines the notion of symbolic violence empirically by using ethnographic data to reveal how symbolic violence embedded within three doxas exclude young people while reproducing the power of institutional elites. I conclude with a summary of the main points and a brief reflection of the findings.

2. Doxa and symbolic violence: understanding exclusion and power

Violence exists in society in visible form as physical harm, but there are more subtle expressions of violence that we must engage with in order to fully understand how violence manifests in society. This is precisely what Bourdieu’s symbolic violence is all about. Bourdieu develops the concept of symbolic violence in many of his works (1977, 1996, 2000, 2014) as a way to show that people are not always aware of the way in which power works in society. To fully understand the reach of symbolic violence in explaining exclusion, we need to engage with Bourdieu’s other tools, including field, habitus, capital, doxa, as they are best understood when used together. To Bourdieu, the society is divided into different fields such as education, economic and political fields, which are domains of social interactions. Development agencies in the Niger delta are spaces where community members interact, and as such can be considered as a field of social relations. Consequently, the practices within the development agencies would be shaped by the values in the Niger delta community field where the habitus of the community members participating in the devlopment agencies are formed.

The field is not a level playing ground for all. It is organised in hierarchies and classifications, and interactions within a field are shaped by internal logic and access to valued resources or capital (Swingewood 2000). Those with valuable capital in a field occupy a position of advantage and domination and they have decision-making power in the field (Bourdieu 1991). Conversely, lack of valuable capital means lack of status and exclusion within social spaces. Capital exists in various forms, although economic, social, physical and symbolic capital are the most common forms of capital (Bourdieu 1990, 1993). Once individuals in a field recognise these capitals or misrecognised their arbitrariness , those who have them acquire symbolic capital in the form of honour, respect and recognition (Bourdieu 2000), which gives them the capacity to dominate decision-making and to impose knowledge that structure the field (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).

Individuals in a given field engage in various forms of social interaction, such as exchange of capitals and communicative practices which reflect the assumptions, values and logic of that particular field. In order words, through social interactions, individuals develop a shared habitus which is an internalised mental structures that reflect the deeply held perceptions, taste and preferences in a given field. Through communicative practices or discourses, individuals reproduce these mental structures. These deeply held assumptions that organise social practices is what Bourdieu calls doxa, and doxa are enacted when we ‘forget the limits’ that have led to the unequal divisions in the society (Bourdieu 1984, 471). Doxa set the limits of thinking, feeling, and acting in a particular field (Deer 2014). Not only do doxas regulate behaviour, they also confer legitimacy to social practices by normalising them as common sense and as the natural world, which conceals their arbitrariness and prevents contestations for a new world order. Consequently, they become the basis upon which individuals within a group are evaluated and assigned positions by group members (Bourdieu 1998).

Doxic views often reflect the interest of the dominant groups who have enough symbolic capital to impose meaning and explanations of social problems (Ojha et al., 2009). Although these powerful groups often uphold doxas to maintain their dominance, doxa’s are also arenas of conflict and contestation of knowledge by dominated groups who are disadvantaged by the assumptions embeded in the doxa (Broto 2013). Resistance emerges when there are inconsistencies between the doxa and the habitus, which leads to the unmasking of the arbitrariness of doxa and the production of radical knowledge through reflexivity which challenges the assumptions of the doxa. According to Bourdieu, just like the enactment of symbolic violence is shaped by access to symbolic capital, the extent to which members of a dominated groups can challenge doxic assumptions or symbolic violence also depends on their access to symbolic capital.

Symbolic violence cannot be understood without reference to the operation of the doxa. When individuals accept the knowledge, preferences, taste and classifications in the doxa as legitimate and natural without recognising or misrecognising the inequalities embedded within them, Symbolic violence occur (Bourdieu 1991). It is the belief in the legitimacy of discourses and those who utter them because they are believed to have symbolic capital which qualifies their language as the authorised language (Bourdieu 1977, 1989, 170). It involves both the tendency to impose doxa as natural (Parker 1999), and the acceptance of this doxa by dominated groups (Grenfell 2008). For example, socialising women as naturally inferior and incapable of performing at the same level as men lead women to see men as naturally superior, and to accept abusive relationships as the natural order of things, without questioning the power relations which often underline such abuse (Sanli 2011; Thapar-Björkert, Samelius, and Sanghera 2016). Acceptance, non-recognition and misrecognition are very crucial for sustaining inequalities in the social order because once the arbitrariness of symbolic violence is recognised, its legitimacy is compromised (Bourdieu 1996; Recuero 2015; Zhu, Spence, and Ezzamel 2021).

Symbolic power is located within the social norms of institutions, including cultural institutions and they mediate social relations within institutions to set the rules about what can be done and by whom (Bourdieu 2014). As such, rather than looking for instances of explicit domination and exclusion of young people as evidence of symbolic violence, I look at situations where exclusion occurs in a less obvious way through schemes of classification and rules existing within the cultural context in the Niger delta which excludes young people . Conceptually in this paper, I argue that symbolic violence occurs when dominant discourses about youths engrained in the dispositions of youths and elites act as the basis for the justification of youth exclusion and the reproduction of elite power.

Turning attention to how language constitute symbolic violence, Bourdieu notes that language can constitute violence because it can be used to frame issues in a way that gives power to some people and exclude others. Symbolic violence harms subordinated groups. It neglects their suffering, negates their agency and excludes them as the unworthy ‘other’, who lack the requirement to belong (Haugaard 2007; Bhambra and Shilliam 2009; Kenelly 2017). As such, undoing symbolic violence is not just about including the voices of marginalised groups in the decision-making process (Ojha, 2006; Ojha et al., 2009). It also requires paying attention to the naturalised language used to legitimise their exclusion. It reqquires challenging this language, and empowering marginalised groups with symbolic capitals so that they can live a more meaningful life in the society.

To explain how young people in the Niger delta are excluded in the oil development process, I map out three analytical categories that constitute three different doxas; the lazy youth, the gerontocratic, and the deviant youth doxa. These doxas are common ways of thinking and classifying young people, and they form the basis upon which symbolic violence is enacted against young people in the oil development agencies. The doxas tend to delegitimise young people’s participation in the oil development process. The lazy youth doxa blame young people for their unemployment and justifies the elites’ unequal access to petro-profits. The gerontocratic doxa classifies the elders as wise and natural leaders against young people who are portrayed as unwise and unfit for leadership. Finally, the deviant youth doxa stereotypes young people as social threats and strips them of status and acceptance in their local communities. In turn, these doxas deliver symbolic gains to the elites by allowing them to accumulate various forms of capital which allows them to occupy the advantageous position and to access more oil profits in the field. Understanding how these doxas undermine youth participation in the oil development process requires examining the wider field of the Niger delta where the values, classifications and preferences of the doxa originate. I discuss the Niger delta context in the next section.

3. Context

When the federal government announced the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) in 2009, many youths in the Niger Delta hoped that at last, PAP would facilitate their integration into the national development agenda. Eleven years earlier, a similar development agency, Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) had been established, both agencies created in response to the surging violence in the Niger delta (Mboho and Inyang, 2001). There are many reasons for this violence, but economic, political, and ecological factors are its major drivers. In seven decades of oil exploration in the Niger delta, the region remainsone of the poorest regions in the world. About 53% of the government’s revenue and 10% of its GDP comes from the Niger delta (NEITI 2018) but oil wealth has not translated into an improved life for many people in the Niger delta (Ikelegbe and Umukoro, 2016). In pre-oil Nigeria, the governance structure was different. Nigeria operated a regional system of government in which each region controlled 50% of the revenue generated within its territory. However, new institutional arrangements accompanied oil exploration, including the Derivation Principle, which allows the oil-producing states to retain 13% of the oil revenue generated within their states, while the rest goes into the Federation Account to be shared across the 36 states. Population size is the primary criteria for sharing federally collected oil revenue. In reality, the ethnic majorities have received a larger chunk of the oil revenue in contrast to the oil communities who are the ethnic minorities (Festus, Victor, and Ayodele 2009). Pollution, mainly from oil spills and gas flaring have also occurred in this region more than anywhere else in the world (UNEP 2011), worsening environmental quality and eroding natural capital which supports local livelihood. The oil communities have been resisting the oil revenue sharing structure, which they believe disadvantages them while also demanding an end to pollution and the remediation of their environment. The early phases of this resistance led by Ken Saro Wiwa was non-violent, but as local experiences of repression, economic and ecological harm continued, violent resistance erupted.

Young people have been at the forefront of this violence, many of them men. Not only are these youths resisting the federal government and the oil companies who they blame for their experiences of exclusion, they are also threatening all-out war against the elders who they accuse of moral corruption. One area where this accusation looms large is around the community development projects implemented by the oil companies as part of their corperate social responsibilities. In the Niger delta, leadership is based on chieftaincy and the rule of elders (Eberlein 2006). Thus, the elders are often in charge of community development projects often worth millions of dollars. Young people widely believe that the elders are not accountable in the way they handle funds meant for community development projects. Many youths also feel socially excluded from this gerontocratic leadership system that limits thier political particiaption. in this context of marginality, many youth began to challenge this gerontocratic structure and the oil rent attached to it (Watts 2004). They began to exert more control over oil territories, vandalising oil pipelines and stealing oil to make political demands. This resulted in the oil companies paying violent youth groups to protect oil pipelines or simply to leave them alone. Local politicians also paid the youths to use violence to intimidate opponents and to deliver election victory, especially from 1999 when the federal government increased the Derivation Principle to 13% which meant more money for local politicians Violence became lucrative more than ever been before, and so many youths joined. It was, for many of them, an alternative way of accessing the many promises of oil development which has not been delivered to them. As the violence continued, thousands of people died. Nigeria’s oil production also decreased by 40% (Watts 2007). This led the federal governmnet to establish PAP wy in 2009 as an interventionist youth development agency. PAP's mandate includes empowering the youths through job creation vocational training as a way to include them formally in the oil development process. PAP has succeeded in reducing incidents of physical violence significantly in the Niger delta presently. In the subsequent sections, I offer a perspective about the operation of PAP and NNDC that differs from many studies done in this area. I show how the local elites continue to dominate these development agencies while young people operate at their margins despite that these agencies were created specifically to foster youth participation in the oil development process.

4. Methodology

4.1. Data collection

In 2016–2017, I travelled to Nigeria to collect ethnographic data for this research. I interviewed youths (n = 84) and institutional actors (n = 19) working in two oil-related development agencies in order to understand young people’s experiences of oil-related violence. These two agencies included NDDC and PAP, which I discussed in the earlier section.

In addition to the interviews, I also collected data through focus groups and personal observations. Each interview lasted between 45 min and 2.5 h. My aim was to capture how young people and institutional representatives perceived young people’s participation in oil-related violence in the Niger delta. Above all, I wanted to critically explore how young people themselves explained their involvement in petro-violence and to enhance our understanding of petro-violence from young people’s perspective. One of the major findings of this research is that the explanations of youth violence put forward by institutional actors reproduced their power and enabled them to enjoy greater access to oil profit. In this paper, my interest is to provide a more granular analysis of how these explanations become instruments of power. This interest is due to two main reasons. First, I observed fromreading the transcripts that there were certain normalised perceptions about young people that emerged regularly in the interviews even when they were not prompted. Second, my earlier readings of Bourdieu have taught me to be very suspicious of explanations of social problems as they are often reproducers of social inequalities. As I continued reading the transcripts, it became obvious to that these dominant views were pervasive and deeply registered in people’s cognitive structures. I then continued to read the transcripts focusing concertedly on mapping out these perceptions about youths and interrogating how they were used to legitimise the exclusion and inclusion of youths and institutional actors respectively in the oil development process. To better interrogate the dynamics of power relations contained within these perceptions that I have mapped out, I developed a conceptual framework focused on doxa and symbolic violence. As such, data collection and analysis were iterative to ensure correspondence between theory and data.

Adopting an ethnographic approach was useful for this study for many reasons. It allowed me to immerse myself deeply in the local context where the mental schemas of the interviewees are formed. I was able to collect observational data from various places where my respondents interacted on a daily basis. In these places, which includes night clubs, pubs, church, wedding ceremonies, house-opening parties, child-naming ceremonies, I was able to observe how these dominant, naturalised discourses pervaded social relations and infiltrates people’s mind. In my everyday interactions with people, I observed how these perceptions about young people become naturalised in people’s mental scheme as a normal way of thinking about young people due to being used in everyday language. Thus, I was able to generate rich insights into the ways in which domination is naturalised and made invisible using the ethnographic method. I recorded my observations daily in my fieldwork diary. The informal nature of ethnography also allowed me to challenge these exclusionary discourses about youths in a few cases. In this way, ethnography allowed me to deploy fieldwork as a process of co-producing knowledge as opposed to being a passive researcher. This interactive, dialogical process is consistent with Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992) point about using sociological methods to promote social change. However, in many of the interviews, I was a spectator. Interviews were considered as a valuable method in this research because responses from interviewees provided clear evidence of the infiltration of these ways of thinking about young people in people’s mind even when they were not prompted.

4.2. Data analysis

Data analysis aimed to link the empirical data with the primary objective of this paper, which is to show the influence of symbolic power in enabling youth exclusion and maintaining elite power in the oil development process. I began the analysis by reading the transcripts and my fieldwork dairies to map out dominant discourses about youths and paid attention to the legitimacy given to them. In order to show that these perceptions are doxa, I take a cue from Bourdieu on how doxas can be observed. Bourdieu explains that doxas can be understood as ‘answering yes to a question I have not asked’ (Bourdieu 2014, 184). Thus, in analysing the interviews and in reading my fieldwork diary, I looked for instances where individuals, without my asking, made reference to ideas, rankings and classifications of young people which shapes the possibilities and constraints for what young people can and cannot do and how they are seen in the society. To further show that these are doxas, I looked deeper into the data to see whether there is correspondence in the way young people think of themselves and how they are thought of by the larger society. Finding this correspondence was an important methodological exercise given that doxas reflect the logic in the objective structure shared by individuals in that field. Finally, I analyse these doxa to show how they are used to justify youth exclusion while simultaneously enabling institutional actors to accumulate economic, cultural and social capital.

5. Evidence of symbolic violence in development agencies

5.1. The lazy youth doxa

From analysing the interviews and observational data, I identify three doxas through which symbolic violence is enacted against young people in the oil development process. First, the habitus of many institutional representatives is naturalised to see local youths as lazy groups who are incapable of working hard. This perception about youths was widely shared by institutional representatives:

The youths in the Niger Delta are lazy, they are using violence as a way to get money, this thing they are saying about the pollution is not the problem. if you give them a job they don’t want to work. They will say what I am going to do with the small salary when other people are getting big money from militancy. (NDDC, 2017)

Even though these representatives from NDDC were asked to explain their perception of youth violence and not their perceptions of young people, their responses revealed this perception of youth as a lazy category without prompting. This perception of youths as lazy people was reinforced in responses from other institutional actors. For example, during an informal discussion with three members of PAP, they explained that:

these militants, they will be shouting we want to be president, we want to be leaders in Amnesty, NNPC, everywhere but many of them are lazy. If they see this my Mercedes now they want to kidnap me and take it from me. But they don’t know how hard I work here and if you give them job they will leave it and enter the creeks and start shooting people. Look at me now I have worked hard, I have been working since may be 30 years, I went school. So the money I have I am working for it. (PAP, 2017)

These quotes suggest that the habitus of institutional leaders is naturalised to see young people as lazy and enablers of their own unemployment, ostensibly positioning institutional representatives as hardworking people deserving of their wealth, not as people who have a self-interest in this doxa. Similarly, in another interview, an institutional representative commented that

like now everyone knows that the youths don’t want stress, they just want easy money, give them job they will come tomorrow, the next day you won’t see them in the office, they don’t want to start small they want big money so they can show off.

This respondent then concluded that the income disparity between the youths and the elites is due to the hard work of the latter. Such a view was not only shared by institutional leaders, but also the youths themselves. Blaming young people for their own unemployment removes the local leaders from the responsibility of creating the structural conditions for youth violence, including the high unemployment rate in the Niger delta which leaves young people with the option of violent militancy since it provides a pathway to earn some money.

This classification of youths as a lazy group was also shared by the youths themselves. During a focusgroup discussion, one of the youths shared the view that young people are lazy, stressing that ‘young people cannot take care of something, some of them all they are doing is to walk about (loitering), they don’t want to do anything because of laziness’. The youths themselves acknowledged that employment prospects exist in the local area, especially in the informal sectors, but that many youths do not want informal jobs even if they can provide income due to laziness. As one of the youths explained:

The youths are lazy. The thing is that the type of job they want they are not getting it. There is something to do, like you can be a taxi driver or sell something on the road, even you learn how to make clothe (tailoring) but the youths they don’t want that kind of job.

This shared perception amongst the youths themselves that young people are lazy hint at how their cognitive schemes correspond with the perceptions of institutional leaders, suggesting that these shared opinions are embedded within the Niger delta field where the habitus of both the institutional leaders and young people interact. The result is that the interest of the elites embedded within this perception is not recognised by the youths themselves who accept this view, leading to symbolic violence by acceptance. Part of the reason why the youths who are disadvantaged by this doxa fail to challenge this situation of symbolic violence is because this doxa limits the space of inquiry into alternative ways of explaining youth unemployment which may contradict dominant explanations. In contrast, some young people challenged this attribution of youth unemployment to laziness by situating unemployment and youth’s violence within the wider context of governance and experiences of oil harm in the region. Lack of good jobs, poor quality education, political exclusion and pollution are common difficulties that young people experience in the Niger delta. As such, some youths questioned the legitimacy of the lazy youth doxa in a context where job opportunities and high-quality education needed to access modern jobs are largely lacking. According to one youth:

[…] Because the government is not using the oil money well, they are not giving the young people job so many of the youths are militants (violence), there is no job. The pollution is killing the fish and the land, everywhere so nothing is growing in the land. The youths carry the gun and say enough is enough. You don’t give us job then you say we are lazy. We are not lazy, we don’t like to kill people, many of us die, the police is killing us, but if you don’t carry gun, hungry will kill you.

Similarly, in the response below, another youth deviates from the lazy youth doxa, emphasising poor quality education and how it undermines youth employability. He also blames corruption by local elites as responsible for youth unemployment.

Even the university, there is no library, the book there, old book and they are not enough for the students. I studied computer science but the computer in our lab they are not working. Only few are working. When you don’t learn well in school, you cant not get good jobs in the bank or big company. The people in NDDC are stealing the money, this is the money the government is giving the people in community, because they don’t have job, oil is taking their land … [..]

In sum, the lazy youth doxa has important implication for young people’s exclusion and the domination of the elites in the oil development process. It legitimises the economic domination of the elites by presenting them as hardworking people deserving of their wealth against young people whose unemployment is attributed to their own laziness. The endorsement of this perception by both institutional actors and the youth themselves hints at how this perception is embedded as a way of thinking about youths in the local context assimilated into people’s cognitive schema. Because this way of thinking is registered in the cognitive disposition of individuals, they hardly question its accuracy, which facilitates the reproduction of the status quo.

5.2. The gerontocratic doxa

The second doxa through which young people are excluded in the oil development process is the gerontocratic doxa. This doxa is a form of a classificatory scheme, which views the elders favourably as better leaders due to having more wisdom and understanding of cultural practices, unlike the youths who are portrayed as unwise and therefore unfit for leadership. Consistent with this classification, an NDDC staff explained that ‘young people don’t know anything, you need to be old before you understand certain things, this agency (NDDC) is not something a small boy can lead’. Similarly, this dominant view which reproduces the political interests of the elders was a common occurrence in many interviews with institutional actors. This is reflected in one manager's comment that ‘you cannot give what you don’t have, if you give the youths this place to run it, one minute they will run it down, you need wisdom to do certain things’, implying that young people lack wisdom. The idea that young people lack wisdom and cultural knowledge and therefore incapable of making decisions about cultural matters was considered by a leader in PAP as justification for the political domination of older people in the leadership structure of the development agencies:

It’s not easy to lead in this country. When you are in the kind of position that I am, there are many things that you need to do. You may not understand what I am saying because you are young. There will be a problem in the communities, sometimes they bring it to us and we have to decide what to do. You have to know about the people, their history, even the culture. If not you make mistake in the decision. Young people, many of them don’t know the culture.

The gerontocratic power structure manifests itself in this quote. The quote promotes older people as more knowledgeable about the culture, as people with historical knowledge, unlike young people. This emphasis on older people’s cultural knowledge serves older people and fails to take into account other forms of decision-making that happen in the development agencies that may not be related to cultural matters. Such views were also shared by young people themselves. One youth commented that ‘the elders, like Edwin Clark, they protect the culture. The federal government take them serious because they know what they are doing (wise)’. This view is further corroborated in a response from another young man, albeit tacitly:

I was watching the interview yesterday. There are reasons why the old people is better they are the leaders. They know more than us. They have more experience so when you provoke them they are not going to fight like young people. Because they are thinking before they talk, they can talk with the federal government and the government will listen.

The gerontocratic doxa is quite pervasive in public places in the Niger delta. During a Sunday church service in the Niger delta, I observed the pastor preaching unquestioned obedience to elders and advising the youths in the church to live examplary lives in obedience so that other youths can follow. The pastor preached that radical youths would be punished by God, urging the youths to be obedient to the elders naturally ordained by God to lead. I could see some people seated beside me nodding in agreement. Perhaps understanding that this preaching could be dangerous, the two young men seated beside me watched the preacher with a smirk of disapproval. There were several other instances where I observed the infantilising of youths while the elders are presented as wiser. During a casual encounter with a vendor in a local market, she commented that ‘young people cannot rule this state because they need experience’ which implies that only older people can participate in local leadership. The net result of this doxa is that development agencies are not a level playing space where political participation is accessible to all community members. Rather, political participation is shaped by the deeply held rules in this doxa guiding who can and cannot lead . As such, young people are largely excluded in the political process because they are seen to be unworthy for politcial leadership, while older people dominate local politics.

Indeed the idea that young people cannot be trusted with leadership does not find a corresponding reality in Nigeria’s political history. Many Head of State in post-colonial Nigeria were young, including Murtala Muhamed (37), Olusegun Obasanjo (38) and Yakubu Gowon (42). Even Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s 77-year-old President, first ruled Nigeria under the military government in 1983 at 41 years old and before thenhe was the governor of the North-Eastern region as well as the minister for petroleum even at a younger age. In one focus group discussion with young people, they pointed out this contradiction and used it as the basis to challenge their political exclusion. In addition, young people challenged the idea that old people are better leaders by accusing the elites of corruption and emphasising their inability to address many governance challenges in Nigeria such as sanitation.

Old people are not helping us. Look at there is no light (electricity). They said young people don’t know anything. But see the country they are leading. There is no job anywhere. Look at this Aba-Port Harcourt road, so bad, every day accident. Everywhere is dirty. Those ones corruption is not allowing them to clean anything. The people in NDDC they are packing (stealing) money. They have to give the young people chance to be president, governor. Because the old people, they have failed us. The youth don’t trust them.

5.3. The deviant youth doxa

The deviant youth doxa, the notion that destructiveness and criminality are essential features of youthhood, is the third deeply held perception through which symbolic violence is enacted upon young people. This doxa creates a social hierarchy between young people and older people because it promotes a taste or preference for older people in politics; it positions them as acceptable choices whom the society can trust due to their virtuous character. The following exchange between the youths and institutional representatives during a community meeting in preparation for a local election reflects this portrayal. It also shows how young people accept but also contest this portrayal.

Institutional representative: The youth that are always drinking, they drink Kaika (alchohol) smoke Igbo (weed) every bad thing they are doing it, alcohol from morning to night, carry women up and down, every week they are in the club, is that the people who want to become leaders, youths are not responsible, the people are want leaders who they can trust, not someone who is smoking all the time.

Youth A: I agree … [.] it’s better we nominate somebody older who is responsible.

Youth B: if the young people are drinking is not your business. We are here for something important, what are you people using the money the federal government is giving NDDC to do. You have to give us account, it is our money. Everybody knows that NDDC a lot of corruption is happening there. The people in leadership is not young people. they are stealing the money to buy house in London, in America. Why are you making the youths look bad all the time? Even if we drink it is not bad like stealing, the elders are criminals (other youths cheered in agreement).

The ambivalence in the views of the youths in the above quotes exemplifies the limits of doxa. Young people have not accepted the deviant doxa unreflexively. While some youths accept that young people are guilty of pleasure-seeking, others are fully aware that the local leaders equally lack in moral character by siphoning public funds for personal gains. Several other institutional leaders also think of young people as deviants. A staff of NDDC commented that ‘young people are always causing trouble, all the kidnaping its not old people doing it, any small thing they blow up the oil pipeline’. Similarly, young people are also portrayed as criminals as many elites explained that youths are ‘are doing yahoo, yahoo (internet fraud)’ and are therefore not to be taken seriously. In another interview with an NDDC staff, he explained how high crime rates by youths have led the government to authorise security agents to disperse any gathering of young men after 6 pm, implying that young people are social threats.

Why do you think the police and JTF¹ are chasing these boys away after 6pm? It’s because they all drug dealers, anywhere you see young men together in the night you have to move away, if not they can do something bad to you. Criminals, that’s what they are. Before you know it, you will hear hey stop there give me that watch or I kill you. That’s why the government is saying they stay inside the house in the night so that the people can be safe.

The above details reveal how symbolic violence in the form of social exclusion emerges from the deviant youth doxa. Describing young people as social threats excludes them as the deviant ‘other’ who are socially unfit for local leadership, simultaneously reproducing the political power of institutional representatives by positioning them as socially upright. Although there are some exceptions, this view is widely held and ingrained in the mental schema of many interviewees. In the next section, I take this analysis further by discussing how these doxas has material and symbolic consequences in terms of enabling the differential holdings of economic, social, and cultural capital between the youths and institutional representatives. Consequently, the elites are advantaged in the oil development process while young people lack the capital to exert influence in the local context.

6. Capital accumulation and conversion

I have argued in the previous section that the three doxas – lazy youth, gerontocratic and deviant – enact symbolic violence effectively by classifying young people in a way that permits their exclusion in society. Drawing upon these doxas, I show inductively in this section how young people are disadvantaged in this context because, unlike the elites, they do not possess enough capital to have a significant effect on established power relations and therefore occupy dominated positions in the networks.

First, dominant explanations of social problems have material implications for their solutions. Accepting unemployment as a conflict driver reduces the capacity of institutional leaders to attract funds to the development agencies since the funds awarded to them are supposed to provide solutions to the myriad of development problems in the region, including unemployment. As such accepting responsibility for unemployment would open up discussions for alternative ways of addressing development deficits in the region. This may mean closing down the development agencies since they do not serve their intended purpose. If this happens, the economic capital the elites accumulate through their salaries in the development agencies and by embezzling public funds would be lost. In this respect, the lazy youth doxa allows the institutional leaders to accumulate and maintain economic capital. Institutional leaders can also convert their economic capital to social capital. In Nigeria, politics is a very expensive process. Candidates require a lot of money to purchase expression of interest forms and running effective campaigns that can deliver election victory often entails buying loyalty with cash. The elites can convert their economic capital to social capital by funding activities that will establish social alliances and facilitate political cooperation, worsening young people’s prospects for political participation since many of them cant afford the financial cost of political loyalty.

Second, portraying older people as possessing essential cultural knowledge confers cultural capital on them, which gives them social advantage in the society. This cultural capital makes the elites likeable, allowing them to build social capital in the form of networks with people with shared habitus who may vote for them due to their faith that they will make better decision drawing upon their cultural knowledge. Similarly, classifying young people as deviants gives the elites an advantage in the local context in a lot of ways. First, it positions the elites exclusively as having the moral capacity for leadership, which predisposes them to acquire social capital amongst people who are able to embrace them and develop relationships with them. From these relationships, expensive contracts are awarded to the elites effectively allowing them to accumulate more oil revenues against young people many of whom lack these social capitals and therefore occupy dominated positions in the social networks. In this light, doxas set the scene for young people’s exclusion in the oil development process. Simultaneously, they are also the foundation upon which the elites legitimate and maintain their domination. Table 1 provides a summary of symbolic violence and the underlying doxas that enable the processes of accumulation and conversion of capital within the Niger delta development agencies.

Table 1. Doxa, symbolic violence and the accumulation and conversion of capital in the Niger delta development agencies.

Doxa	Symbolic violence	Capital accumulation/exclusion	Capital conversion
Lazy Youth (Youths are ‘Lazy’, unwilling to 'work’)	Unemployment misrecognised as young people’s fault. Overlooks structural drivers of unemployment	Elites maintain access to oil revenue/economic capital	Economic capital can be converted to social capital
Gerontocratic (older people are ‘wiser’, 'have superior cultural knowledge’)	Youths are classified as unwise Elites control social and political Power	Elites build cultural & social capital	Social and cultural capital can be converted to economic capital
Deviant Youth (Youths are ‘criminals’, smoke ‘weed’, ‘alcoholics’)	Youths are excluded in the political process	Elites build social capital	Social capital can be converted to economic capital

7. Conclusions

This paper has developed an analysis of youth exclusion within two development agencies in the Niger delta using the concept of symbolic violence and its underlying doxa. Symbolic violence allows for a deeper and non-conventional analysis of how youth exclusion is legitimated and maintained while elite domination is naturalised and accepted without questioning. A key finding in this paper is that symbolic violence nurtured in three doxas – the lazy youth, the gerontocratic and deviant doxas – enables unequal power relationships between young people and the institutional actors in the oil development process. I show that in the Niger delta, young people are thought of as lazy people and blamed for their own unemployment. While some youths accept this doxa, others challenge it and reframe youth violence as an outcome of unemployment enabled by governance failures. Also, the social hierarchy is legitimated and maintained through the gerontocratic and deviant doxa which portrays older people as virtuous and wiser, making them more acceptable for leadership positions within the larger social systems. The real gains for the elites is that as a result of these doxas, they are able to accumulate economic, social and symbolic capital which drives their greater inclusion in the oil development process against young people who lack these capital and therefore occupy a dominated position. This sombre finding forces us to think of ways to implement redistributive approaches such that it does not benefit only the elites but rather all groups in the community, especially marginalised groups who may already be disadvantaged by pre-exiting doxic conditions. The intention of the paper is not to capture how this redistribution can be done effectively. But challenging cultural norms or perceptions that stigmatise young people and sanctions various forms of violence against them is a vital step to enhance their participation in the oil development process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Joint Task Force (JTF) is a joint security agency comprising of the army, mobile police, naval force and other security outfits that deals specifically with oil related crimes in the Niger Delta.