Thursday, 20 December 2007
At night the skies over the Niger-Delta are lit up - giant tongues of flame shooting their poisonous flares into the night skies, into the creeks and farmlands. At night, in a Port Harcourt prison yard, writer and activist, Saro Wiwa and eight others are executed , amid international condemnation, by the military junta of General Sani Abacha, for having "counselled and procured" the killing of four elders of the Niger-Delta village of Ogoni.
It is night, also, when, from the belly of the night emerge three speed boats packed with armed youths - the children of the slain and brutalized of the Niger Delta. It is a new kind of army, a shadowy militant group out for war. It attacks a Nigerian Navy boat and a vessel leased by Shell. There are no casualties. But the militants, who call themselves Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), kidnap four foreign contractors.
Since then attacks - kidnappings, killings, and even bombings have become the order of the day in the ‘struggle for the emancipation' of the region.
Why did the youths take to arms? What really happened? What went wrong? And what has been solved by these acts of individual terrorism?
Burning and Looting
The creeks and swamps of the Niger Delta lie over one of the world's largest reserves of oil: 34 billion bbl. of black gold, approx.
For an outsider - even one used to the ravages of war and poverty ‑ the villages and creeks of the Niger-Delta, a watery maze of some 50,000 sq km, comes as a shock. Whole villages are without power, health clinics, school or water. A water tanker installed about a decade ago does not work, forcing people to scoop water from a muddy hole; pipelines that scar the earth; oil slicks that shimmer on rivers; flares that blaze bright and loud...
Since the 1950s, when oil was first found, the oil-producing region of the Delta and waters off Nigeria's coast in the Gulf of Guinea have earned the country and major oil companies like Shell, Chevron, Agip, ExxonMobil hundreds of billions of dollars. But, defying the laws of gravity, these billions have not trickled down to the poor peasants of the Delta region - nor, for that matter, the working masses of Nigeria.
According to Odiki Miebi, a local chief of Oporoza in Gbaramatu in whose creeks MEND is said to have its bases, "Poverty is the major problem we are facing here." There are no local jobs, and the only school in the village is empty of furniture. The village, like most of the villages here, is in the grip of poverty.
Yet Nigeria currently earns approximately $3 billion monthly from oil - which roughly accounts for 95% of its export earnings and about 40% of GDP.
It was the military dictatorship of Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo that set the pattern in 1979, transferring ownership of all subsoil resources to the federal government. The revenues accruing were to be ‘fairly' distributed among the federal, state, and local governments.
But there is a problem with what the federal, state, and local governments do with this money. Thanks to high oil prices the oil-producing states of the Niger Delta have seen an increase in federal allocation. So, too, the Federal Government.
The country, therefore, has been perfectly placed to benefit. But, rather than this, a private fiefdom emerged as the various arms of government simply used their revenue to underpin their regimes, enriching family, friends and supporters - and girlfriends, like the President did with a gift of car to his "girlfriend", according to the Vice President. Unfortunately, this benevolence does not extend to the vast majority who continue to wallow in poverty. This has been the trend for decades.
Today Nigeria is the world's sixth largest producer of oil and reserves are said to be in excess of 40 billion barrels, along with trillions of cubic feet of gas. But unlike Venezuela, which is the fifth largest producer of oil in the world, the Nigerian government merely presents the working masses with grandiloquent plans of future benefits and ‘Commissions'.
None of these Commissions have made any meaningful impact. They have simply come and gone. Meanwhile the problem persists. The latest, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), was set up in 2000 as a means of coordinating development in the Niger Delta. How well has it done this?
The answer came loud and clear in March 2006 with a bomb thrown into the car park of the Commission's Port Harcourt office. Afterwards plastic explosives were smuggled into one of its offices in an apparent attempt to blow up the building.
Jointly funded by the oil companies, which are supposed to give 3% of their local budgets, and the federal government, the Commission has approximately $235 spending money yearly.
But, in the words of Anietie Usen, head of NDDC's corporate affairs, "that is peanuts compared to the problems of the area." (Time, May 22, 2006). Besides, says Anietie, the federal government is usually slow to cough up its share, "...it makes things difficult."
Last year the federal government unfolded yet one more white elephant project: plans to construct a $1.8 billion dollar highway through the region and create 20,000 new jobs in the military, police and state oil companies to further address the neglect.
Hand-in-hand with these bogus promises is the issue of corruption. This absence of revenue transparency and accountability keeps Nigeria on the bottom rungs in Transparency International's annual World Corruption Index.
In proportion, as the country's oil-based GDP increases, economic underdevelopment and institutionalised corruption increases. Last year an audit of the oil industry revealed discrepancies, running into millions of dollars, between what the oil companies claimed it paid the government and what government said it received.
And what do governments, both at the federal and state levels do with these funds? Take Rivers State. Thanks to high oil prices internationally, the government of this oil-producing state, has seen increased revenues. So much that the government of Peter Odili bought two corporate jets, a move the state Information Commissioner, Magnus Abe defended; "I don't think," he says, "that we can fight poverty by going back to live in caves. We need aircraft for a variety of reasons." (Time, May 22, 2006)
There! Mr. Information Commissioner probably didn't know that most schools in Rivers State are without furniture and in a state of collapse. The roads, too, are crumbling. Indeed, between 2005 and 2006 Rivers State Government House overheads increased from $38.6 million to $81.1 million. By comparison, increases on spending on salaries for state employees barely exceeded the rate of inflation.
Oil Doom
Oil has brought neither prosperity nor tranquillity to Nigeria. In spite of its vast oil resources, Nigeria represents one of the most sordid, corrupt and socially unjust political economies. Enormous wealth is concentrated in very few hands, a tiny oligarchy that indulges in reckless and wanton orgies of consumption. The country is marked by poor economic performance and growing inequality.
The current rise in oil prices has concentrated vast resources in the hands of a tiny political elite. In proportion, as the country's oil wealth increases, the poverty of the teeming mass increases, alongside economic underdevelopment; corruption and political violence have increased in equal measure.
Although Nigeria has earned at least over $400 billion in oil revenues in the last 35 years, a significant proportion of this oil-based revenue has simply ‘disappeared' through massive, institutionalised fraud and corruption.
According to Nuhu Ribadu, the ‘anti-corruption' tsar, 70 percent of the country's oil wealth was stolen or wasted, in 2003; by 2005 it was ‘only' 40 percent. This state of affairs really highlights the extreme rapacity and parasitic nature of the Nigerian ruling class.
While the vast majority wallow in poverty and growing misery, the government, since the 1960s, has developed mechanisms for allocating oil blocs and rents to its cronies. We will deal with this presently.
The Nigerian oil industry is thus no more than a bloated cash cow for a small privileged elite, no more than a private fiefdom of the President.
According to World Bank sources, some 80 percent of Nigeria's oil money is accrued by 1 percent of the population with 70 percent of private wealth held abroad, in foreign banks, while an estimated 70 percent of the country's inhabitants live on roughly $1 per day, or less.
National annual per capita income had remained static between 1960 and 2004, while income distribution had suffered marked deterioration.
The Petroleum Act of 1969 provides ‘the entire ownership and control of all petroleum in, under or upon any land to which this section applies (i.e., land in Nigeria, under the territorial waters of Nigeria or forming part of the continental shelf) shall be vested in the state.'
This was further consolidated in 1978 when the government of then Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo enacted the Land Use Decree, divesting land from the control of local communities and investing ownership in the central government to be held in trust by state governments.
This Act was further extended in 2003 by the inclusion of deepwater offshore oil reserves, with control vested largely through the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
Nowhere are the paradoxes of poverty and squalor in the midst of great wealth, occasioned by increase in oil price, so pervasive as in the Niger Delta, home to the world's third largest mangrove forest and the most extensive freshwater swamp forests in west and central Africa, an area of intense global bio-diversity.
Thus the Delta does not exhaust itself as a source of oil wealth for the Nigerian ruling class; it is also a vital and fragile natural environment being destroyed by capitalism in its period of senile decay.
Despite its economic and ecological importance, the Delta states fall below national average on virtually every measure of social and economic development. The Niger Delta remains poor. Its inhabitants continue to eke out a precarious existence on its ever-diminishing fishing grounds and farmlands.
For the last three decades, farmers and fishermen have had to compete with oil multi-nationals for the limited space available. The human and environmental cost of over four decades of oil exploration in the Niger Delta has been devastating.
The UNDP Niger Delta Development Report released in August 2006 states that ‘vast revenues' have ‘barely touched the Niger Delta's own pervasive poverty'. In oil-rich Bayelsa and Delta states, for instance, there is one doctor for every 150, 000 inhabitants.
Individual Terrorism
About four decades ago, the first insurgency sparked off. In February 1966, Isaac Adaka Boro, a graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, formed the Niger Delta Volunteer Service (NDVS), a militia comprising several young and educated Ijaw men, and declared the Ijaw-speaking areas of Nigeria's then ‘Eastern Region' an independent ‘Niger Delta Republic.'
In an eleven-point declaration of independence, Boro stated that "all former agreements as regards the crude oil of the people undertaken by the now defunct ‘Nigerian' government in the territory have been declared invalid," and that "all oil companies are commanded... to stop exploration and renew agreements with the new Republic. Defiance of this order will result in dislocation of the company's exploration and forfeiture of their rights of renewal of such agreements."
The revolt was crushed within a couple of weeks and ‘militants' supported the federal effort in the civil war with the then Eastern Region. Forty-three years since, conditions in the Delta remain, as the UNDP report say, ‘dismal'.
On a night, in a Port Harcourt prison yard, writer and activist, Saro Wiwa and eight others were executed, amid international condemnation, by the military junta of Gen. Sani Abacha, for having "counselled and procured" the killing of four elders of the Niger-Delta village of Ogoni.
The Task Force - drawn from the army, police, navy, and air force - cut a murderous swath, carrying out executions and razing villages, instituting a reign of terror. The frightened villagers fled into the creeks, leaving behind their life's possessions, a ravaged community of torched houses and bloodied corpses of relatives and friends. Fleeing villagers talk of rape, massacres and torched villages.
Sometime in 2002, a large body of Ijaw women occupied Chevron oil refineries near Warri, demanding jobs for local inhabitants, marking a deepening crisis over ‘resource control'. In March 2003, seven oil workers were kidnapped, prompting major shut down of oil facilities and withdrawal of staff, reducing output by more than 750,000 barrels per day (40 percent of national output).
Since late 2005, the situation in the Niger Delta has worsened. Two self-styled ‘freedom fighters', Ateke Tom (Niger Delta Vigilante) and Alhaji Asari Dokubo (Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force), both driven and partially funded by oil monies accrued mostly from bunkering and actively deployed and maintained by top politicians, as political thugs, has further transformed the political landscape of the Delta.
The current campaign of violence in the Delta kicked off on January 11 with an attack on a Naval boat and a vessel leased by Shell by gun-toting men packed in three speedboats. There were no casualties, but the attackers, who called themselves the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), took hostage four foreign contractors.
In late December 2006, the MEND started calling for the international community to evacuate from the Niger Delta by February 12 or ‘face violent attacks'.
Since then there have been a series of attacks on all installations and military personnel guarding them, as well as hostage-taking. Between then and now, oil-related deaths in the Delta region have risen significantly and oil production output has been cut significantly.
In a reprisal move, the outgoing President Obasanjo sent in additional troops to strengthen the Joint Military Task Force in the Delta and, in a recent conflagration, no less than 60 militants were reported killed and another 100 arrested in two days of fighting in Bayelsa State in August 2006.
Trotsky once wrote that: "By its very essence terroristic work demands such concentrated energy for the ‘great moment', such an overestimation of the significance of individual terrorism, and finally, such a ‘hermetic' conspiracy, that-if not logically, then psychologically, it totally excludes agitational and organizational work among the masses."
The shooting and bombing campaign embarked upon by MEND and other similar militant group in the Delta will not achieve the ‘emancipation of the Niger Delta'. It will simply give the regime an excuse to bolster the forces of repression which will be used, not just against the Niger Delta workers, but inevitably against the workers of Nigeria
Indeed, in one instance, the oil workers union, NUPENG and PENGASSAN held a meeting with the regime and threatened they would not go to work until their safety was assured. So, rather than win the workers and people of the Delta to its side, the campaign of bombing and shooting risks lining up the workers behind the regime, in the face of the failure of the NLC leadership to offer a clear and effective lead in the fight against not just sectarianism, but also against the root cause of the pervasive poverty not just in the Niger Delta, but in Nigeria as a whole.
At some stage it is not ruled out that the ruling class, troubled by the cut in production brought about by the militants' campaign, will re-introduce military rule. The bombing and shooting campaign in the Delta, rather than stave this off is actually precipitating it. For now, however, due to high oil prices internationally the ruling class will reserve this as a last resort. But this threat is dangling over the head of the Nigerian workers.
The neglect and destruction of the Delta, the grinding poverty, in spite of years of massive profit from oil, is striking confirmation that neither a so-called ‘democratic' government of outgoing President Obasanjo or Umaru Yar' Adua, the new president, nor a military dictatorship can solve the problem of Nigeria, under a regime of capital.
At no other time, has the country made so much money from oil. But at no other time has there been so much poverty, so much lack of faith in government.
The campaign of violence in the Delta will solve nothing. What the situation reveals is nothing but the blind alley of individual terrorism and the dead-end of capitalism. It is striking confirmation of the theory of Permanent Revolution. For backward countries like Nigeria, the road to development does not pass through capitalism, but through Socialist Revolution and a radical reconstitution of social relations.
Redistribute the Wealth
Only a Socialist Revolution can solve the problem in the Delta. Only this can bring about development and lasting peace and guarantee ‘resource control' and the right to self-determination for the people. This is not mere theorizing. It represents unassailable deductions from the entire experience of our recent, and not too recent history.
Years of privatisation have not solved the problem of the working masses. They have not solved the economic problems of Nigeria. The commanding heights of the economy, especially the oil sector, must be nationalized and used as a basis to provide quality healthcare and education for the working masses. Only a working class government can do this - through a party of the working class. Now is the time.
RENEGADE EYE
22 comments:
I had a discussion once with a Canadian about the Niger Delta. She thought my argument that the exploitation of the area had led to the waves of unrest, was simplistic.
I told her it didn't make it less true. Thank you for this, Renegade.
Only one question. Once you begin your welfare payments to the 133 million poor inhabitants of Nigeria with one of the highest fertility rates in the region w/5.6 birth's/woman... and the population triples to 400 million... and then the oil money runs out... who's going to feed the 400 million poor slobs still living there?
Thomas Malthus, "Essay on the Principle of Population"
I think I may fairly make two postulata.
First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.
Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.
These two laws, ever since we have had any knowledge of mankind, appear to have been fixed laws of our nature, and, as we have not hitherto seen any alteration in them, we have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they now are, without an immediate act of power in that Being who first arranged the system of the universe, and for the advantage of his creatures, still executes, according to fixed laws, all its various operations.
I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food. But Mr Godwin has conjectured that the passion between the sexes may in time be extinguished. As, however, he calls this part of his work a deviation into the land of conjecture, I will not dwell longer upon it at present than to say that the best arguments for the perfectibility of man are drawn from a contemplation of the great progress that he has already made from the savage state and the difficulty of saying where he is to stop. But towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no progress whatever has hitherto been made. It appears to exist in as much force at present as it did two thousand or four thousand years ago. There are individual exceptions now as there always have been. But, as these exceptions do not appear to increase in number, it would surely be a very unphilosophical mode of arguing to infer, merely from the existence of an exception, that the exception would, in time, become the rule, and the rule the exception.
Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.
By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.
Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them. The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death. Among mankind, misery and vice. The former, misery, is an absolutely necessary consequence of it. Vice is a highly probable consequence, and we therefore see it abundantly prevail, but it ought not, perhaps, to be called an absolutely necessary consequence. The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.
The city Lagos in the 1940's had about 200,000 people. By 2020 or 2030, it will have a population of 25 million.
Oh, I forgot. Socialist only worry about equality of distribution. Production is a propblem for the capitalists to figure out...
Nigeria, thirty years after the socialists take control...
The problem of capitalism is NOT one of poverty. It is one of coping with wealth.
Farmer John, you're smoking up all your profits again. Is your idea of capitalism a handful of elites doling out money to their supporters, and buying luxury items for their girlfriends? If I had to choose, I think I'd pick Venezuela over Nigeria any day.
Not to say Venezuela is doing everything right, of course they're not, but how can you sanction this?
Who says they have to dole out all the profits to every single individual in Nigeria. It seems to me if they really believed in capitalism, they would want to invest a percentage of their profits in infrastructure, education, health care, etc. It would pay dividends over the long haul.
Of course, they could keep on doing what they are doing, and they will keep getting the same results they are getting now, until eventually-as usual, of course-they end up with another Lenin, another Chavez, another Castro, etc., etc., etc.
Sometimes you have to make choices in life, and leaders are supposed to be intelligent enough to make the right choices. If they are the right kinds of leaders, they invest in the common good of their nations and peoples. If they are not, then they act like they are acting right now in Nigeria. Then guys like you come around moaning about how those "poor slobs" should accept their lot in life because it would be sooooooo much worse under communism.
You ought to spread some of that crap around on your farm, it will help you make up all those profits you're smoking up.
Oh come now pagan, we all know that Nigeria isn't being run by capitalists. Capitalists invest their capital in self-sustaining means of production that generate surplus capital (profit). Nigeria's leaders are 'investing' in Swiss Bank Accounts.
Chavez, on the other hand, is investing in the Cuban means of production (like the recently reopenned $120M refinery @ Cienfuegos). Only I don't think it's going to make him any additional 'capital' to re-invest... especially since it's only capable of refining petroleum products suitable for the Cuban economy...
I wonder how many Cuban Divisions Fidel owes him now... and I wonder how long before Hugo starts down the tried and true primitive means of capital accumulation... more like the "Nigerians".
It is looking very much as though the era of the nation-state, with national armies fighting other national armies, with soldiers who possess a patriotic, sworn loyalty to that state, is over. It's private individuals making war with hired armies, and mostly on civilians, not on professional armies.
See the new book coming out in March, On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy, by Eric Hobsbawm, who describes this proces -- how we got here from there -- in precise detail.
Love, C.
btw - Only an idiot would invest his hard won "capital" in a country like Nigeria or Venezuela, controlled by leaders who are still in the the "primitive" mode of capital accumulation. No wonder the "unofficial" dollar exchange rate in Caracas is almost 3 to 1. Everyone's busy trying to get their money OUT of the country.
...so like I said before, the problem of capitalism is one of coping with wealth... ensuring it get's virtuously reivested into some self-sustaining, if not PROFITABLE, enterprise.
The point is, the Nigerian government is making revenue off oil from Shell and other companies, and they should invest it in the nation's infrastructure, education, health care, etc. How many miles does your average Nigerian slob have to trudge to get a bucket of water? I don't know that much about it, but if Nigeria is like a lot of countries, probably quite a few, all for a bucket of water filled with parasites that will eat your guts from the inside out. Fuck that. How many Nigerian villages could use electricity. How about land irrigation for farms? How about a decent education? Those kinds of investments aren't socialist giveaways, they are common sense investments in people's health and well-being, the kind that pays long-term dividends.
Or, if they don't, well, that's just too bad, as leaders of the nation, a position for which they spent a lot of personal energy to acquire, they are obligated to the people they are lording it over. I don't mean obligated in the sense they have to dole out so much money to each individual a month with no requirements or no questions asked, but they have a responsibility to the country and it's citizens as a whole. That's what being in leadership positions is all about.
The fact that the Nigerian people are getting bent over and raped is NOT Exxon or Shell's fault. They're merely providing a way for decent folk to earn a living. Talk to the Nigerian proto-primitive capitalist accumulatists if you think that the money Shell is FORCED to pay THEM isn't being properly "re-distributed" and that capital re-investment is NOT occuring. THAT is where your problem lies.
Were the leaders of Nigeria REAL capitalists, the money would ALL be going back into the local economy, but THEY are NOT capitalists.
...but merely investing in the local economy is not enough. The money must be invested into "productive" sectors of the economy AND NOT "services". The "service" sector is a DRAIN on the "productive" sector. (Adam Smith, WoN)
...and investing in money-losing bath fixture "worker coops" or "hotels" is like flushing good money down a toilet.
One has to be able to benefit from the "surplus value" of labour that comes from a "division of labour" to "profit".
...self-sustainably profit, anyways.
And if your growth is NOT self-sustaining, it's like force-feeding cattle for twenty years and then STOP feeding them in the middle of a winter famine. Millions... possibly billions, die.
The day oil returns to $15/barrel is the day Chavez gets shot in the head.
Yes, this is a very crazy and dangerous situation going on in the Niger Delta region. I've been following it for a while and glad that you are shining light on the issue also.
The infrastructure of Nigeria, and Africa, in general is in complete turmoil. The residents are not only being exploited by Transnational Capitalists but also by every level of the State and authority in Nigeria.
As you summed, the only solution is a redistribution of wealth, which can only occur through a socialist mode of production.
A socialist redistribution of wealth that will invest ZERO in "profitable" or "productive" means of production and spawn a gazzilion new labourers with nothing to labour upon. Brilliant! NOT!
In the case of Nigerian "transnational capitalism" those who provide the market and blow their wealth on foreign goods are the "suckers" (you and me). Yes "Shell Oil" profits... but not nearly as much as Nigerian "Royalty" collectors.
And putting socialist bureaucrats into the roll of domestic "profit-making investor" is a cruel cruel JOKE! Just look at Hugo Chavez. He's investing his capital everywhere BUT in the Venezuelan economy.
Farmer is quite the expert on Venezuela.Why has he made Renegade Eye his new home?
Ask me to leave, and I'm gone.
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