Crude Politics: Life and Death on the Nigerian Oil Fields

Abstract

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly. —Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot (1834) It has been a long, hot and violent summer in the Niger delta. The oil-producing region in the south-east of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous and arguably most important country, is ablaze, and for the most part ungovernable. Beginning in the late 1990’s, the cosy relationship between Big Oil and a despotic Nigerian state was challenged by popular, and increasingly militant, pressure from oil communities, or more properly from armed youth movements. The shift from non-violent protest to militancy, and ultimately to armed struggle, was in many respects the inevitable result of the Nigerian government’s brutal repression of the Ogoni movement and the murder of its influential and charismatic leader Ken Saro-Wiwa in November 1995 (Douglas and Okonta 2003). Popular challenges to the so-called ‘slick alliance ’ between international oil companies (who operated with total impugnity) and the Nigerian state, or more properly a

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