Market Criminology

State-Corporate Crime in the Petroleum Extraction Industry

Ifeanyi Ezeonu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781134887972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Building on original research into the petroleum industry and on the theory of crimes of globalization, this book introduces the concept of Market Criminology: the criminology of preventable market-generated harms and the criminogenic effects of market rationality in variegated forms of capitalism.

Ifeanyi Ezeonu explores the ascendance of the fundamentalist form of market economy in Nigeria; the complicity of the state political and security apparatuses in the corporate expropriation of the country's petroleum resource wealth; the deleterious effects of this neoliberal architecture on the local population, as well as community resistance strategies over the years. This book offers a major contribution to research on state-corporate crime and the crimes of the powerful.

Key reading for scholars and students in the areas of criminology, international political economy and sociology, this book will also be rich resource for researchers and non-governmental agencies working in the areas of environmental protection, human rights and sustainable development in the Global South, especially the Sub-Saharan Africa.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Niger Delta region of Nigeria has been a site of enormous resource wealth and plunder. Since crude oil was discovered in the area in 1956, transnational corporations such as Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil have pillaged its petroleum resources at an enormous cost to the lives, livelihoods and ecosystem of the host communities. The plunder of the Niger Delta has largely been enabled by the Nigerian government in its frantic quest to adjust its domestic economy to the global neoliberal project. The federal government, controlled since the country’s independence in 1960 by military and civilian oligarchs, has used pro-market legislations and the repressive state apparatus to advance the process of “accumulation by dispossession” in the petroleum industry in the region (I. Ezeonu, 2015; see also Harvey, 2003, 2004, 2005). The result of decades of crude oil and gas production in the region has manifested in billions of dollars for both the Nigerian government and transnational corporations; an expansive ecology of poverty for the local population; and arbitrary arrests, detention and repression of those who questioned or protested the reckless corporate behaviour. While the 1995 brutal execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Niger Delta community and environmental activist, is probably the best known of these human rights abuses, the suppression of the rights of the local population is a common feature of the political economy of oil and gas production in the region.

This book examines and documents the harmful activities of transnational petroleum extraction corporations in this region of Nigeria, along the lines of a growing body of literature which conceptualizes preventable market-driven harms as criminal (see Friedrichs and Friedrichs, 2002; I. Ezeonu, 2015, 2008; Ezeonu and Koku, 2008). Expanding on the original thesis described by Friedrichs and Friedrichs (2002) as crimes of globalization, the book contributes to the development of a criminology of preventable market-generated harms which I have conceptualized elsewhere as Market Criminology (I. Ezeonu, 2015). The book explores the nature of social harms created by oil and gas production in the Niger Delta; the roles of corporate, political and security actors in the generation of these harms; the deleterious effects of market rationality and architecture on the local population; and community resistance strategies over the years.

The book sets out to answer the following questions:

1. What is the nature of social harms created by oil and gas production activities in the Niger Delta region?
2. What roles do transnational corporations such as Shell, Chevron and Exxon-Mobil play in the creation and/or exacerbation of these harms?
3. How has the Nigerian government responded to the social problems created by the crude oil extraction activities in the Niger Delta? How has it responded to the reactions of host communities to the unethical business practices of transnational corporations?

Apparently, because of incessant acts of resistance among communities in the Niger Delta region, especially since the mid-1990s, the occasional effects of these activities on the global oil prices, and sometimes the tactless and brutal reaction of the Nigerian government, the crisis in the region has remained on the global news. The international public opinion has also been divided. One school of thought supports the unfettered right of global capital to run roughshod over a people with the supposition that it’s always to the latter’s benefit. Another school sympathizes with the local communities over decades of plunder and abuse and understands their right to protect themselves, especially in the light of the complicity of their government in their own subjugation. This seemingly intractable crisis and the divergent worldviews it has produced have, nevertheless, helped the creation of fecund secondary resource materials for scholars. I have unremittingly tapped from these rich resource materials for my analysis.

Nevertheless, I believe that nobody understands the effects of decades of oil and gas production in the Niger Delta region better than the indigenous population. Similarly, nobody understands the brutality of rampaging security forces deployed by the Nigerian state to defend the petroleum industry in the region better than the community members. So, I have ensured that the voices of the region’s indigenous people are amplified in my analysis. Unfortunately, as a result of an upsurge in the youth militant activities in the region, I have had to rely only on the diaspora population in Canada for data collection. While this may be limiting, I have ensured that community participants in the study that is documented in this book were the authentic representatives of the people who understood the issues and have been involved in the various efforts to address the challenges over the years. They lived in the Niger Delta for many years and had mostly left the country for security and economic reasons.

While this book contributes to a bourgeoning body of literature on the abuses and crisis of oil and gas production in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, it differs fundamentally from the others by contextualizing these abuses as criminal events that should fall within the interrogative framework of criminology. I have presented in this material an expansive discussion of the concept of Market Criminology which I had introduced in an earlier work (see I. Ezeonu, 2015). While a number of scholars have examined the disabling architecture of market political economy from a criminological perspective (see Matthews, 2003; Tombs and Hillyard, 2004; Friedrichs and Friedrichs, 2002), I credit the pioneering work of Friedrichs and Friedrichs (2002) for the motivation to undertake this work. In their well-received paper, in which they developed the concept of crimes of globalization, these scholars incisively placed avoidable market-driven harms at the epicentre of criminological inquiry. Using the example of the disastrous effects of a World Bank–funded dam at Pak Mun, Thailand, on the local population, the scholars argue that the neoliberal economic policies imposed on most of the developing world by the international financial institutions, particularly the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF, cause enormous harms for the population. They further note that since most of these harms are preventable, unleashing them on the population should be classified as crimes, even if no extant domestic or international law is violated. While they acknowledge that these international financial institutions may not have deliberately set out to do harm through their policies, the scholars nonetheless hold the institutions criminally negligent for a number of reasons, including their failure to consider the deleterious impact of their policies or the projects they fund on the local population (Friedrichs and Friedrichs, 2002). Their argument drew an immediate interest from a long list of critical criminologists who joined the call for the recalibration of the criminological imagination to accommodate and account for preventable market-generated harms (see Rothe et al., 2006; Wright and Muzzatti, 2007; Ezeonu, 2008, 2015; Ezeonu and Koku, 2008; Izarali, 2013). David Friedrichs, in collaboration with another colleague, has since reconceptualized the notion of crimes of globalization to address the “multiple complex interconnections” that this form of crime shares with other forms of harms, such as crimes of the state and state-corporate crimes (see Rothe and Friedrichs, 2015, p. 28; Friedrichs, 2015, p. 46).

In this book, I have developed the concept of Market Criminology as a way to expand the theoretical elasticity of the crimes of the market. In my earlier work (see I. Ezeonu, 2015), I define Market Criminology as the criminology of preventable market-generated harm. This criminological heterodoxy contributes to our understanding of “political economy as a criminogenic force” in two fundamental ways:

1. it recognizes the variegated forms of modern capitalism and therefore extends the principal arguments of crimes of globalization to the different mutations of market economy in contemporary time. In other words, it sees as criminal the preventable harms caused by the social structure and practices of these different mutations of capitalism; and
2. it places emphasis on the effects of the disabling social structure created by variegated forms of capitalism, rather than just on the activities or policies of the international financial institutions.

Market Criminology thus sees market dynamics as the source and theatre of criminal victimization. Nevertheless, while this book is fronted as a heterodox criminological material, the vortex of issues discussed covers history, economics, politics, sociology, development studies and international relations.

In addition to this short chapter, the book is further divided into six other chapters. Chapter 2 historicizes the relationship between trade and colonialization in Africa, and discusses the gradual transition of most of modern Nigeria from European trade posts to a sovereign state. The creation of modern Nigeria was thus prompted by British merchants trying to secure safe territories for a trade in human commodities (slaves) and later in palm oil during the Industrial Revolution. Modern Nigeria, like most of its African contemporaries, is thus birthed in commerce and plunder; and during both the pre-colonial and colonial periods, most of these pillaging activities were centred on the Niger Delta. So, while primitive accumulation continues in this region in its modern form and emphasizes different forms of resources (oil and gas), the region has been severely pillaged since its contact with global capital in the 15th century.

Chapter 3 aims to provide the context for understanding the development of market societies in different parts of the world. It traces the evolutionary pathway to market society by chronicling the different forms of economic thinking – from the amorphous Scholastic economics of the 13th century to the hegemony of neoliberalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The major economic ideas discussed under this chapter include the Scholastic economics of Thomas Aquinas; the classical economics of Adam Smith; the social welfare economics of John Maynard Keynes; the German social market economy; and the metamorphosis and dominance of market fundamentalism.

The concept of Market Criminology is developed in Chapter 4, and parts of its arguments have already been highlighted previously. Chapter 5 documents the preventable social harms created by oil and gas production in the Niger Delta and how the disabling social structure produced by the attendant political economy victimizes the people of the region. This chapter draws heavily from empirical data from the local population to buttress its arguments. The chapter identifies three principal avoidable harms generated by oil and gas production activities in the region. First is an intolerable degree of poverty among the local population which is partly created by the destruction of the local farming and fishing economy. The results of this include some desperate life choices among the economically displaced population, which sometimes put them in harm’s way. One such example is the resort to commercial sex activities among young females. Another major form of avoidable harms produced by oil and gas production in the region is environmental pollution. This includes unregulated gas flaring and the reckless dumping of industrial oil effluents in potable water sources or in lakes and farmlands. Beyond the negative effects of these activities on the local economy, such as the displacement of farmers and fishermen, this set of harms exposes the local population to unnecessary health risks. Studies document that some of these environmentally polluting activities often release dangerous toxic materials and carcinogens – including benzene, arsenic, sulphur dioxide, mercury and chromium – into the atmosphere and potable water sources; and that human exposure to these carcinogens often result in deadly consequences such as different forms of cancers, vascular diseases, diabetes mellitus and retarded neurobehavioural development (see, for example, Chen, 2011; Chen et al., 1988; Wu et al., 1989; Tseng et al., 1996; Wasserman et al., 2007; Wang et al., 2007).

The third major form of avoidable harms generated by oil and gas production in the region is the deliberate undermining of the fundamental human rights of the local population, especially when they protested the unethical practices of transnational corporations. While this practice, often carried out in collaboration between the Nigerian security apparatus and the oil companies, was perfected during the many years of military dictatorship in Nigeria, it has continued even more brutally since the country’s transition to democratic rule in 1999. Apparently, there is no distinction between the military leaders and their civilian successors, as many of the country’s leading politicians are either retired military officers or their lackeys. Moreover, the interest and investments of transnational corporations and the domestic oligarchy ensure that human rights consideration is significantly secondary to the goal of profit maximization. Like other captors of state power, these economic actors continue to rely on the repressive state apparatus to ensure that the process of capital accumulation in the petroleum sector remains uninterrupted.

Chapter 6 discusses the public security challenges in the Niger Delta in the context of increasing resistance activities by the local population. While community resistance in the region has generally been mild and spasmodic over the years, it has suddenly become both urgent and more militant since the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa. The placid local demand for fair and equitable treatment from the corporations and the Nigerian government has swiftly been replaced by a more robust demand for the local control of the petroleum resources, and even for the self-determination. And a section of the region’s population, having been subjected to years of brutal harassment by Nigerian security forces, is now responding with its own force. The implications of this new security development for both the continuing exploration of petroleum resources in the region and the corporate existence of the Nigerian state are yet to be fully understood. Chapter 7 summarizes some of the major arguments raised in the book.

Chapter 2
Commerce, plunder and the illegitimate birth of the Nigerian state

Introduction

Like most African states, the development of modern Nigeria resulted from a horrid legacy of a predatory and pernicious European experiment in capitalist expropriation. Starting from trade in human commodities (i.e., the slave trade) to the contemporary exploration of petroleum resources in the Niger Delta area, the modern Nigerian state has, for several centuries, existed as a commercial theatre and estate of foreign, especially Western, merchants and transnational corporations. The Niger Delta region has particularly borne some of the greatest brunt of capitalist despoliation in the country (see Dike, 1956; Rodney, 1982; Okonta and Douglas, 2003; Falola, 2009; I. Ezeonu, 2015).

A conventional position among some Western scholars is that despite the deleterious effects of both the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, the incursion of Europeans into Africa is ultimately beneficial to a continent without an organized economic life and which was isolated from the rest of the world. These scholars see (especially Sub-Saharan) Africa before contact with Europeans as a dreadful land burdened by a backward economic system built purposely for elementary subsistence; an economy imperilled by primitive technology, community land ownership, a network of kinships and extended family systems which discouraged the spirit of individual entrepreneurship; and the absence of a formalized market mechanism that promoted the growth of capitalism, as in Western societies. They further conceive of Africans of this era as stunted by their servitude to alien customs that were supposedly in dissonance with the promotion of innovation and economic progress (see Hopkins, 1973; Conrad, 1969; Achebe, 1978; Gilley, 2017). The most arrogant of these colonial apologists see African states as irredeemably backward without the European colonial intervention (for instance, see Gilley, 2017). Conrad’s (1969) rather patronizing novel, Heart of Darkness, most aptly epitomizes this Occidental portrayal of a primitive and backward continent and its people prior to the contact with Europeans. In fact, the Africa he depicted in his work was “a prehistoric earth… that wore the aspect of an unknown planet… [and inhabited by] the prehistoric man” engaged in all forms of “savage” activities (see Achebe, 1978, p. 4; Conrad, 1969). Similarly, in a recent propaganda piece masquerading as scholarship, and controversially published in the Third World Quarterly, a Western colonial apologist, Bruce Gilley, not only romanticized the colonial occupation and despoliation of Africa but also called for, among other things, a return to the colonial project, including the re-colonization of some African states as a solution to what he sees as the perennial problems of the continent in contemporary times. According to Gilley (2017, p. 1),

The case for Western colonialism is about rethinking the past as well as improving the future. It involves reaffirming the primacy of human lives, universal values, and shared responsibilities – the civilising mission without scare quotes – that led to improvements in living conditions for most Third World peoples during most episodes of Western colonialism. It also involves learning how to unlock those benefits again. Western and non-Western countries should reclaim the colonial toolkit and language as part of their commitment to effective governance and international order.

As demonstrated in Gilley’s (2017) pathetic and racist work, the debilitating arrogance of Occidental scholarship which justified the colonial occupation of Africa in the past is still masqueraded today by a section of social science scholarship. Clearly, the “civilising mission” of Western colonialism romanticized by the likes of Bruce Gilley deliberately ignores or conveniently fails to account for the brutalities of Western colonialism across the African continent and the numerous genocides organized and supervised under its banner. They rather celebrate brutal colonial murderers like the Belgian King Leopold II, Cecil Rhodes, Frederick Lugard and George Taubman Goldie as the saviours of colonial Africa and equate the colonial plunder of the continent’s resource wealth to improvement in the living conditions of the local population.

In fact, the myth of pre-colonial Africa as a continent without an organized economy or one that existed in isolation from the rest of the world has long been debunked (see Rodney, 1982; Dike, 1956; Hopkins, 1973; Isichei, 1997). Hopkins (1973) believes that the challenges of properly documenting economic activities in Sub-Saharan Africa prior to 1900 resulted from a number of factors, including a dearth of indigenous records in written forms (and, I will add, in forms intelligible to European invaders), and the reluctance of the then largely European scholars to use the few available domestic sources in their studies. He argues that these facts did not prevent the general belief (mostly among European knowledge producers and consumers) that Africa was economically backward and unorganized prior to its contact with the West.

However, the structure of economic activities in many parts of Africa prior to 1900 have been well documented. Unlike the Western capitalist model, these activities were organized differently. The economies of most traditional African societies were driven largely by communal well-being rather than the quest for profit maximization. This is not to suggest that a few African merchants did not seek to maximize profits at the detriment of their communities. However, economic activities were principally regulated by the community and customs, which also determined such things as inheritance and access to the fac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Commerce, plunder and the illegitimate birth of the Nigerian state
• 3 “In the long run we are all dead”: historicizing our journey to a market society
• 4 Market criminology: an ontological recalibration of a discipline
• 5 Petroleum resources and the plunder of the Niger Delta: lessons on Market Criminology
• 6 Public security challenges in the Niger Delta: the catharsis of community resistance
• 7 Conclusion: extending the periscope of criminology to market rationality
• Bibliography
• Index