The Niger Delta insurgency and the limit of force
The Niger Delta problem has been with us since independence. The root causes are violence, underdevelopment, environmental damage, wanton corruption, the absence of credible state institutions, and the failure of leadership. Being the geese that lay the golden egg for the country, it was expected that the region would benefit maximally from the oil resources, at least to keep the geese well fed and healthy to enable her lay more robust eggs. But that has not been the case. The entire region was, and still is, a sad tale of gross criminal neglect by the government and oil companies that operate there.
Since the Nigerian army violently crushed Isaac Adaka Boro’s twelve-day revolt in 1966, the Nigerian state has found it expedient to employ brute force to suppress any legitimate expression of frustration and dissent by the people of the region.
Ken Saro Wiwa and his Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) tried the peaceful means in 1990 to press for “political autonomy to participate in the affairs of the Republic as a distinct and separate unit” and the “right to the control and use of a fair proportion of economic resources for Ogoni development”. But, as usual, the Nigerian government responded to MOSOP’s demand with a brutal crackdown and, ultimately, decapitated the leadership of the group. Since then, security forces are constantly deployed to protect oil installations that dot the region and the forces take the liberty to engage in torture and extra judicial killings of people in the communities.
Even with the return to democratic governance in 1999 and the attendant freedom of expression it guarantees, the people of the region still found out that the Nigerian state was unwilling to listen to any legitimate agitation and was determined to employ maximum force to crush any form of dissent and protect oil installations. Gradually and with time, the people came to understand that the only language the Nigerian government understands is that of force.
Fortuitously, politicians in the Niger Delta region, who were locked in deadly struggles for the capture of state power, found it expedient to recruit and arm youth groups to fight their political battles. Finding themselves well armed and knowing they would soon be dispensed with after elections are won and lost, the youth groups moved quickly to assert their own relevance by resuming the Niger Delta struggle but this time through arms struggle.
Thus, by 2005, violence became the chief means by which power and resources were negotiated in the region. Consequently, the loci of power shifted from community elders – a group the government and particularly the multinational oil companies found expedient to negotiate with and settle to quieten agitations – to militant youth groups who have been using violent means to successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Nigerian state.
This is no mean feat for the youth of the region. Before they discovered the utility of arms struggle, they had existed only on the margins of their societies, incapable, as it were, of playing any meaningful role in the political, economic, social and cultural processes of the societies and becoming what Donald Cruise O’Brien describes as the “lost generation”; a disempowered, stunted, and now bitter youth with fewer access to the means of becoming adults and their ‘youth’ at “risk of becoming indefinitely prolonged”. Most of them had effectively become trapped in the vortex of ‘youthness’ and it is that space they now appropriate to show their frustration with the system and most importantly, as a means of accumulation. That is why remaining a youth even at a ripe age of 50 or even 60 is essential to remaining relevant as violent youth groups have supplanted local or community elders as real sources of power in the oil producing communities.
These disparate militant youth groups used the instrumentality of violence to successfully threaten the economic survival of the Nigerian state and consequently negotiate an amnesty programme, in 2009, with the Nigerian state, worth billions of dollars and set the precedence for violent confrontation as the only viable means of resolving disputes with the state.
That was the situation Mr Buhari inherited in 2015. Smarting from the defeat of ‘their son’ and the prospect of losing the lucrative billion dollars contracts to secure oil pipelines and other sundry benefits, a return to violence was always on the cards. Mr Buhari should have been more tactful, magnanimous and conciliatory in relating to these groups. But no! He chose triumphalism instead and resorted to empty threats of “crushing the militants” as they reacted by resuming their abandoned struggle. Probably, he thought or was wrongly advised that he could scare off the militants by talking tough or that the Nigerian military was capable of crushing an insurgency in the region and successfully protecting oil installations. But alas the militants have dared him and have successfully crippled Nigerian’s oil production to less than a million barrel per day and have shown the capacity of shutting down oil production in the region! They have also exposed the obvious reality that the Nigerian military does not possess the capability to stop an insurgency in the region or indeed, protect oil installations. Now that it is obvious that the so-called “avengers” have Nigeria by the balls, the federal government is suspending military actions and suing for negotiations, further demonstrating to other intending militant groups that violence is the only successful means of negotiating with the Nigerian state. Like the popular adage goes, it is only when a mosquito lands on your balls that you realise there is always a way to solve problems without using violence.
Christopher Akor