Oil Wars

Mary Kaldor, Terry Lynn Karl, Yahia Said, Mary Kaldor, Terry Lynn Karl, Yahia Said

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781783715459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Energiebranche

Are oil-rich countries prone to war? And, if so, why? There is a widely held belief that contemporary wars are motivated by the desire of great powers like the United States or Russia to control precious oil resources and to ensure energy security. This book argues that the main reason why oil-rich countries are prone to war is because of the character of their society and economy. Sectarian groups compete for access to oil resources and finance their military adventures through smuggling oil, kidnapping oil executives, or blowing up pipelines. Outside intervention only makes things worse. The use of conventional military force as in Iraq can bring neither stability nor security of supply. This book examines the relationship between oil and war in six different regions: Angola, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria and Russia. Each country has substantial oil reserves, and has a long history of conflict. The contributors assess what part oil plays in causing, aggravating or mitigating war in each region and how this relation has altered with the changing nature of war. It offers a novel conceptual approach bringing together Kaldor's work on 'new wars' and Karl's work on the petro-state.

1 Nigeria: political violence, governance and corporate responsibility in a petro-state

Okey Ibeanu and Robin Luckham

OIL, THE STATE AND CONFLICT IN NIGERIA

On Independence Day, 1 October 2004, President Obasanjo held talks with Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo Asari, the leader of the so-called Niger Delta Volunteer Force, to persuade him to call off Operation Locust Feast, a militia offensive against oil firms. Asari and his associates demanded greater local control of the region’s oil and gas resources, together with a national conference to renegotiate Nigeria’s Federal Constitution and devolve powers to states, local authorities and local communities.

Political activists and pro-democracy groups in the Niger Delta have pressed the same demands for many years. Asari and his cohorts differ, however, in that they are linked to organised crime and are armed with relatively sophisticated weapons, including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Thus, behind the reformist rhetoric, the violence in the delta is becoming privatised, interlocking with corruption and electoral politics, including the deployment of militias by state governors to intimidate opponents.

Indeed a recent World Bank study claims that protests in the Niger Delta are being ‘transformed into something more akin to American gangland fights for control of the drug trade’ (Collier et al 2003:77). The threats to oil facilities are serious enough for the Nigerian federal government and oil companies to hold discussions with emergent warlords like Asari and his rival Ateke Tom, despite the charge that this rewards the use of violence.¹ These are some of the most recent twists in Nigeria’s evolution during the past 40 years into a prototypical petro-state. Its economy is heavily dependent upon petroleum, which contributes about 50 per cent of the country’s GDP, 95 per cent of foreign exchange earnings and 80 per cent of budgetary revenues.²

Oil has been a burning political issue since the Nigerian civil war of 1967–70, which almost ripped the country apart, causing up to a million war-related deaths and displacing some 6 million people. Since the war, Nigeria has remained in a state of suppressed, ‘silent’ or ‘structural’ or ‘repressive’ violence,³ punctured by periodic outbreaks of actual violence, some causing significant casualties and making thousands refugees in their own country. Shell and other oil majors have forged close alliances with Nigeria’s ruling classes, including its military dictatorships. Little of the oil revenue has been invested in the communities in the Niger Delta, where most oil is produced. These communities have born the brunt of the extensive environmental damage from oil extraction, and have become increasingly alienated from the oil companies and from the government. During the 1990s, originally peaceful protests by the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) in the Niger Delta were brutally suppressed, culminating in the trial and execution of MOSOP leaders, including Ken Saro-Wiwa. Although the Ogoni are one of the smaller Delta communities, their protests resonated throughout the delta and in the rest of Nigeria. They also acquired an iconic status in international debates about the environment and about the power and corporate responsibilities of multinational oil corporations.

By 1998, when ‘the hand of God’ removed the military dictator, General Abacha,⁴ and the military started a hurried retreat from power, the erosion of state authority and political violence had become so severe that many feared the country might be on the brink of another civil war. New outbursts of inter-communal, criminal and citizen–state violence accompanied the transition to constitutional governance. President Obasanjo’s government was caught unprepared and all too often responded repressively. At the same time it canvassed policies to provide security and public order, and to manage violent conflict in a series of presidential retreats, commissions and conflict assessments. Yet it appears the security crisis is too fundamental to be resolved through policy adjustments alone, being embedded in a state crippled by its lack of legitimacy, endemic corruption and inability to deliver development or security, even under a supposedly democratic regime.

The Nigerian state appears increasingly powerless to counter the powerful market forces and economic incentive systems driving violence in an oil-dominated economy. Yet in contrast to some other analyses of ‘resource wars’, we argue that in Nigeria the relationships between mineral rents and violent conflicts have been complex and mediated through the relationships between the state and the oil multinationals.⁵ Oil differs from some other resources, in that its exploration and production entail substantial capital requirements, with large sunk costs in exploration and production, and hence intimate long-term relationships with the state. It contrasts with ‘lootable’ resources like alluvial diamonds, which lend themselves more readily to the financing of insurgents. At the same time the dispersed and ‘obstructable’ infrastructure of wells, pipelines and storage facilities has remained vulnerable to disruption by protesters and insurgents, as in the Niger Delta. Indeed criminal mafias have recently devoted considerable ingenuity to turning even oil into a lootable commodity, through the process known as ‘bunkering’, fuelling the growth of an informal economy of violence.⁶

However, we are sceptical of determinist accounts of the nexus between oil and political violence. The Nigerian civil war did not reignite, and was indeed followed by a period of state and national reconstruction. Political violence, though still endemic, remained less severe than in other resource-dependent African countries, like Angola or the Democratic Republic of Congo. By the end of the military era in 1999, many of the conditions which generated civil wars elsewhere in Africa seemed also to threaten Nigeria – but they did not precipitate large-scale armed conflict.

Hence in this chapter we focus on two central analytical concerns. First, we seek to understand how both violent conflict and its absence have been determined by the shifting and troubled relationships between the Nigerian post-colonial state and the oil sector. Second, we consider how both oil and violence have seeped into and transformed Nigeria’s complex and varied social formations, slowly embedding a political economy and a culture of violence, especially (but not only) in the Niger Delta. We will show how Nigeria became a near-prototypical rentier or petro-state. Initially Nigeria’s military rulers used swelling oil revenues to finance state building and state-managed development. But oil-financed state building soon acquired a more perverse and regressive face, typifying Karl’s ‘paradox of plenty’ (1997). Oil revenues insulated the state from accountability to citizens in general and to communities in oil-producing regions in particular. An abundance of oil fostered a deficit of democracy, as well as a surplus of corruption and violence. The corruption and ultimately hollowing-out of the state was reinforced by a flawed ‘cohabitation’ between state (especially military) élites and international oil firms. This enabled Nigeria’s military rulers and their acolytes to accumulate wealth and power. And it allowed oil multinationals to extract oil with little effective government regulation or community voice in their operations or in the distribution of oil surpluses.

What is less frequently considered, however, is how oil penetrated and reconfigured the country’s social formations, including the complex web of relationships among different nationalities and local communities. This too has proved to be a contradictory and contested process. On the one hand it spawned active grassroots movements, which arose in the Niger Delta to protest against environmental degradation and the mal-distribution of oil revenues. Their protests articulated a strong sense of the rights and entitlements of Niger Delta communities to control their own resources. They also seemed to herald new forms of democratic politics, demanding renegotiation of Nigeria’s federal structure to bring government closer to the people, a demand which also resonated outside the Niger Delta. But in the train of the protest movements, there emerged a new political economy of privatised violence, fuelled by oil. Its protagonists played on the grievances of Niger Delta communities to foster a different kind of entitlement politics more in tune with the rentier nature of the Nigerian state. There emerged a new and dangerous version of the ‘politics of the belly’, featuring seizures of oil installations, hostage taking, bunkering, intimidation and violence. Privatised violence began to eat into the social fabric of Niger Delta communities, corrupted grassroots protests and resonated with the intimidation and corruption marring democratic governance in the state and federal political arenas.

Petroleum dependence, state corruption and privatised violence indeed pose serious threats to Nigeria’s unconsolidated democratic transition. But in our view it is not helpful simply to lament them. Instead we stress the double-sided nature of Nigeria’s petro-state and of grassroots contestation of it. At critical junctures, different policy decisions and political choices might have been made about Nigeria’s oil assets, so as to break the vicious cycle of oil dependence and economic and political decline. Moreover, transition to democracy, whatever its flaws, could still create spaces for better governance of the petroleum sector and to tackle the growth of violence. To focus solely on the malign legacies of oil-funded authoritarianism and corruption would be to write off Nigeria’s new democracy from the start, and to condemn the country to a future of escalating conflict. Similarly we see the vibrant tradition of grassroots protest in the Niger Delta and elsewhere as a potential foundation for democratic politics. Protest movements posed an alternative vision of the state in the dying years of the military era. Although that vision has been badly compromised by the social divisions, rent seeking and conflicts now tearing Niger Delta communities apart, it has not been entirely extinguished, and could still pose a credible alternative to violence.

MILITARY RULE AND NIGERIA’S PETRO-STATE, 1966–99

Nigeria’s experience of violence has intertwined with its history of authoritarian, and more specifically military, governance. The country was under military rule for 30 years, most of its post-independence history. The militarised state was authoritarian and rapacious, but at the same time increasingly fragile, corrupt and unable to deliver development.

The historical turning point in the formation of a petro-state was the civil war. War broke out in 1967 because of the political and economic contradictions of the post-colonial state, including the legacy of uneven development under colonial rule, vicious oligopolistic competition amongst members of Nigeria’s political class for power and patronage in a three (later four) region federation, and two military coups whose impact reverberated outside the armed forces themselves and came close to breaking up the federation.⁷ There remains some dispute about how far the start of oil exports caused the civil war. What is beyond doubt is that it had a decisive impact on its course and outcome, including the creation of the de facto alliance between the government of Nigeria, foreign powers (notably Britain) and international oil companies (especially Shell-BP) which defeated Biafra’s secession.

After the war, the politics of rent extraction both consolidated and subverted the emergent petro-state through struggles to appropriate oil revenues. The federal military government appropriated the bulk of these revenues to expand state investment, to build a large federal bureaucracy, to sustain a well-armed coercive apparatus and to construct an extensive patronage system, redistributing jobs and rents at every ...