The Human Geography of the Niger Delta. The Political Economy of the Oil Industry

It is difficult to estimate the current population, but since the 1960s population has been growing at about 2.7 percent per annum, and the combined population of the states of Delta, Rivers, and Bayelsa (all of which form the administrative heart of the Niger delta) is in excess of 7 million. The settlement pattern is largely nucleated and rural, with villages typically occupying isolated dry sites within the deltaic swamps.

Cities such as Warri and Port Harcourt are found inland where better drainage exists, located at the heads of navigable estuaries. Yenagoa, the capital of the recently founded Bayelsa State, has emerged as a boomtown of several hundred thousands seemingly overnight. Farming systems are predominantly peasant, characterized by small land parcels, short-fallow systems of cultivation (i.e., keeping the land unplanted for one to two years) and diversified forms of rural livelihood, including hunting and fishing.

The delta is a region of enormous ethnic and linguistic complexity. While there are five major linguistic categories (Ijoid, Yoruboid, Edoid, Igboid, and Delta Cross), each embraces a profusion of ethnolinguistic communities (in excess of one hundred across the greater delta).

The history of the delta is reflected in this linguistic and cultural complexity; precolonial trade across the region was linked to a social division of labor rooted in occupation and microecology. Early European explorers commented on the transdeltaic trade networks, but those patterns were radically compromised by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, and subsequently by French, Dutch, and British slavers.

The rise of so-called legitimate trade in rubber and cocoa, which developed under British auspices after Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, helped create the Oil Rivers Protectorate in which commercial life thrived.

One adverse effect of the establishment of the Nigerian colony and the imposition of indirect rule, however, was the marginalization of the multiethnic communities of the delta. Indeed, in the transition to independence in the 1950s, the so-called ethnic minorities voiced their concerns to the departing British that they were largely peripheral in a Nigerian federation dominated by three ethnic majorities (the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Ibo).

The Political Economy of the Oil Industry. Oil production and related infrastructure development have severely disrupted the natural equilibrium of the Niger delta ecosystem since 1958, when Royal Dutch/ Shell opened its first oil field in the area. Several Western multinational oil companies operate in the Niger delta, the most prominent of which are Shell, Chevron- Texaco, Mobil, Elf, and Agip.

The oil exploration and production of these companies are almost entirely onshore. This means that the bulk of their operations— oil fields, production stations, and several thousand kilometers of pipelines—takes place in the same ecosystem inhabited by the various local communities, including the flora and fauna.

The consequences of this coexistence have been devastating to the delta's ecology. The highest gas flaring rates in the world, massive contamination of deltaic waterways, and more than 4,640 oil spills between 1976 and 1996 (totaling 3 million barrels). The ecological crisis in the delta is coupled with a deepening political- economic crisis.

The oil producing states in Nigeria— all in the Niger delta—generate 90 percent of Nigeria's oil revenues (the remainder comes from ocean drilling), yet they receive only 19 percent of the statutory revenues that the Federal government derives from petroleum sales. Local people complain that they suffer from air pollution resulting from the oil industry's emissions of poisonous gases. Incessant oil spills from old and damaged pipelines also endanger plant life, animals, and humans. Agricultural land and fishbearing rivers and creeks are also contaminated, leading to significant decrease in yields.

International and local environmental groups charge that the oil companies do not conduct adequate environmental-impact studies before operations commence to determine what potential harmful effects such activities are likely to have on the area and how to avoid or minimize them.

They also accuse the companies of committing widespread human rights abuses and collaborating with the Nigerian government to suppress legitimate protest and to subvert the quest of local people and their leaders for a new political arrangement in the country, which would give them a fair portion of the revenue from the oil taken from their land.

Not surprisingly, by the 1970s and 1980s, a number of ethnic communities had begun to mobilize against the so-called slick alliance of oil companies and the Nigerian military. A foundational role was played by Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni people, a small ethnic group of 400,000, who established a political wing (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, or MOSOP) to challenge Shell—one of the transnational companies with a large stake in Nigerian oil—for environmental compensation and the Nigerian state for direct control of their oil. Saro-Wiwa and the MOSOP leadership were hanged by the Nigerian military in 1995, an action that drew the attention of the international community to the growing environmental and social crisis in the area.

Since that time the Niger delta has become a zone of conflict and heightened struggles as more minorities (among them, the Adoni, the Itsekiri, and the Ijaw) organize. Indeed, the central political issue in Nigeria currently is resource control, which refers directly to the question of who controls the oil resources and how ethnic minorities in the delta will determine their futures in a reformed federation.

Prospects. The Niger delta is one of the most complex and fragile ecosystems in the world. It is also a source of vast wealth. These two characteristics have come into open conflict as increasingly enfranchised and militant oil- producing ethnic minorities are confronting the state and the oil companies in order to rehabilitate their environment and to regulate their resource base.

At the same time this political mobilization around oil and the environment has generated powerful forms of ethnic identification and conflict that threaten to convert the delta into an unstable and volatile zone. The future of the environment of the Niger delta unfortunately rests in part on the enormous strategic significance and the vast wealth generated by a single commodity that happens to be the fuel of the modern world economic system—hydrocarbon capitalism.