This book review features wealth coming from oil that was billed to take Nigeria from Third World status to the realm of the First World. Nigeria had so many petrodollars after the 1967-to-1970 civil war that the then Nigerian leader, General Yakubu Gowon, boasted that Nigeria’s problem was not money but how to spend it.
Of course, Gowon was overthrown in due course by his military mates for not knowing what to do with money! The sad matter, really, is that the Nigerian military leaders and the civilian types failed woefully in utilising Nigeria’s vast oil wealth to give the hapless country a place in the sun.
Dr. Omolade Adunbi, an Assistant Professor of Afro-American/African Studies and Faculty Associate for the Programme in the Environment at the University of Michigan, USA, undertakes a groundbreaking study of the multiform dimensions of oil conflicts bedeviling the Niger Delta in the very contemporary book, Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria.
Adunbi was forged in the smithy of Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophy student at Ondo State University, Ado-Ekiti. As fate would have it, he undertook his one-year national service in the oil city of Port Harcourt where he collaborated with many notable Niger Delta activists such as Oronto Douglas, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ledum Mitee, Agnes Shaaba, Chris Akani, etc. In undertaking the research into the oil crises of the Niger Delta in Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria, Adunbi takes cognisance of the crucial factor that the Niger Delta is not homogenous, which entails facing “the task of conducting a multi-sited ethnography in a region with diverse languages, customs, and traditions”. He centres his study on the key oil-producing states of Delta, Rivers, Bayelsa, and Ondo.
Adunbi stresses in his prefatory note that “the federal government of Nigeria derives more than 90 percent of its revenue from oil”. The irony strikes in the face that a zone so rich in oil wealth is economically challenged because of the consequences of oil exploration. The oil-bearing communities share an ancestral promise of wealth, from the Ilajes to the Ijaws and the Ikwerres.
Many of the Niger Delta people thus see their migration to the land through the prism of a sacred promise to their ancestors that they would eventually settle in a wealthy place. In the course of time, the communities are made to bear the burdens of the predatory state, oil corporations, NGOs, and even their complicit leaders.
The story of oil wealth is indeed harrowing, as Adunbi notes, thusly: “While Abuja celebrated 50 years of oil exploration in Nigeria, many Niger Delta communities were oblivious of the fact.” The commonwealth becomes privatised to the extent that the multinational oil corporations and their fronts are effectively owners of life and death. Asking for more benefits from their wealth can only meet with the brutal force of suppression.
It was only after the end of the Cold War, that “transnational NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Friends of the Earth International, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (which later became Human Rights First) started paying attention to human and environmental rights issues in countries such as Nigeria”.
Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria is a work of unremitting courage. Adunbi boldly names comrades who started out as activists within the NGO network only to end up as collaborators with the oil companies and the state.
Violence supervenes with increasing cases of insurgency, kidnapping, and hostage-taking. Militant groups such as MEND, NDPVF, the Martyrs Brigade, NDVM, and the Egbesu Assembly cannot but use hostage-taking to replenish resources for additional attacks. Principalities like Asari Dokubo undertake hostage negotiations, delineating the Niger Delta hostages into three broad groups, notably: struggle hostages, financial hostages, and political hostages.
The book ends on the note of the 2009 proclamation of amnesty for the Niger Delta militants by the President Musa Yar’Adua administration. Even so, the struggle continues with the continuing reaffirmation of the ideals of the early Niger Delta activists such as Isaac Adaka Boro and Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Omolade Adunbi has in Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria given the world a vista of penetration into the dark nooks of oppression in the creeks and span of Nigeria.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist, and author.
Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.
