According to Akaruese (2003: 218), militias are ―properly armed group with overt or covert command structures, enjoying some forms of legitimacy and permanency; and capable of resorting to the use of arms in pursuance of their objectives.‖ For his part, Adejumobi (2003: 1) contends that ―ethnic militia groups are essentially youth based
57 groups formed with the purpose of promoting and protecting the parochial interests of their ethnic groups, and whose activities sometimes involve the use of violence‖
(emphasis added). Falana (2003: 183) has argued that ―such ethnic militias that make the liberation of their ethnic nationality its main pre-occupation may sometimes be described as a guerrilla movement.‖ Conceived in this way, Isaac Jasper Adaka Boro‘s Niger Delta Volunteer Service (NDVS) becomes the first ethnic militia group in Nigeria.
This was the precursor to the Egbesu Boys which in February, 1966 announced the secession of the Niger Delta region from Nigeria.
The rapid increase of ethnic militia groups in modern-day Nigeria is best situated within the skewed nature of the Nigerian political economy and decades of leadership failures (Agbiboa, 2011). The first pertains to the violent character of the Nigerian state (Adejumobi, 2003) best exemplified by decades of military rule in Nigeria. As Ken Saro- Wiwa (1996: 43) noted during his farcical trial by the Abacha regime: ―[t]he Nigerian military dictatorship survives on the practice of violence and the control of the means of violence‖ (quoted in Adejumobi, 2003: 3). In a similar fashion, Asobie (1990: 6) argues that military regimes in Nigeria
… breeds violence because they block all chances for peaceful change. The structural inequality that is intrinsic of the socio-economic system of a rentier capitalism state, like Nigeria is compounded by military rule and militarism.
Military rule and militarism breed not just physical violence but also structural violence (quoted in Falana, 2003: 184).
As a result of the state‘s appetite for violence as a negotiating tool, any peaceful demonstration by the people was often stamped out with violence. The state‘s appeal to violence aside, most political society in Nigeria have often tilted towards the use of armed politics as one of the means for achieving political ends. Such inclination towards armed violence is a common trend that runs through most of the political parties in Nigeria right from the first republic in 1960. As Edwin Madunagu (2000: 1) puts it:
The nature of politics, whose ultimate form is the struggle for power, compels every political organisation at a certain stage in its development to acquire an armed detachment, or be militarised. Some political organisations, utilising their entrenchment in the state, use national armies, the police and other security forces as armed wings. There should be no hypocrisy or self-righteousness or attempt at falsification of history here. All political formulations in our history, which had developed to the point of directly pushing for power as an immediate political project (not as mere distant hope), had been armed or militarised in one form or another… it does not matter what you call the armed group: youth wings, thugs, intelligence officers or body guards (quoted in Adejumobi, 2003: 2, emphasis added).
58 The emergence of ethnic militias in Nigeria coincided with the brutality of military dictatorships in Nigeria, especially during the 1990s. A key background to the mushrooming of ethnic militia groups under the Babangida and Abacha regimes pivot on the phenomenon of relative deprivation that developed to its acme in the country—a harsh reality that was felt most by ethnic minorities situated the Niger Delta. The oil resource played a salient role in this development. Though the Nigeria economy depends largely on the exportation of oil which is derived from the Niger Delta region, the communities therein live under odious conditions, lacking elementary social amenities like ―feeder roads, electricity, pipe-borne water, and cottage industries‖
(Adejumobi, 2003; Agbiboa, 2011a). The general perception among minority groups in the area is that there is a nexus between their marginalisation and their minority status within the skewed Nigerian federation. The general claim is that the dominant ethnic groups use the resources gained from the oil producing areas to develop their own places (Adejumobi, 2003: 3) and to line their pockets.
Notably, a substantial body of work has been written on the travails of the Niger Delta people (Civil Liberties Organisation [CLO], 1996; Ekine, 2001; Obi, 2002; Human Rights Watch, 1999). In complicity with oil multinationals, the Nigerian state have always had an inordinate penchant for the use of military force to quell any form of dissent in the area (Omotola, 2009). Indeed, they have cordoned-off the environment by ―stationing an ‗army of occupation‘ in the oil producing communities that would keep at bay restive youths, and associations through the use of arms in order to ensure the uninterrupted flow of oil to the Nigerian state‖ (Adejumobi, 2003: 2). In the Niger Delta, it is not uncommon for several human/minority rights activists to be detained or put to death by the state without trial. Chagrined by the iron-fist approach of the state, some groups in those marginalised communities have also resorted to armed reaction ostensibly in self- defence.
Subsequently, the region witnessed the emergence of various militant youth groups and radical youth wings. At risk of oversimplification, the major objective of these groups was ―to counter the violence of the state, and drive home their point of deprivation and marginalisation‖ (Adejumobi, 2003: 3). The extra-judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa—
the passionate leader of MOSOP—in 1996 increased the determination of those groups that only a resort to violence will protect them from the gross repression of the Nigerian state. Consequently, the Niger Delta people ―reconceived and sharpened their demands from purely social and economic claims to political claims. Their demands were refocused on relative autonomy and self-determination for their ethnic areas within the context of the Nigerian federation‖ (Adejumobi, 2003). This is the only way they felt that their grievances could be heard and addressed.
59 Between 1990 and 1999, the Niger Delta region witnessed the rise of more than 24 ethnic based minority rights groups (most with radical bent) (Adejumobi, 2003: 3).
Notable among these groups are: ―the Egbesu Boys of Africa (EBA), Chikoko, Ijaw National Congress (INC), Ijaw Youth Council (IYC), Ijaw Peace Movement (IPM), Isoko National Youth Movement (IYM), Itsekiri Nationality Patriots (INP), and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP)‖ (Adejumobi, 2003: 3).43 The overarching reason for the existence of these groups is essentially resource control.
Briefly put, the concept of resource control that is dominant in the Niger Delta has three main components:
(a) The power and right of a community to raise funds by way of tax on persons, matters, services and materials within its territory
(b) The executive right to ownership and control of resources, both natural and created within its territory
(c) The right to customs duties on goods destined for its territory and exercise duties on goods manufactured in its territories (Osaghae et al. 2007: 8).
Thus, for minority groups in the Niger Delta, resource control would mean a favourable transition in their political and economic demands from ―Fairer sharing to total control of the natural resources found in a state by the state for use in its development at its own pace‖ (Osaghae et al. 2007: 8).
Thus far, our discussion has focused analytical attention on a review of important variables that set the scene for a proper understanding of the Niger Delta conflict.
Omotola (2006: 24) has noted that a crucial first step in addressing the crisis in the Niger Delta is a discernment of the underlying causes of the grievances felt by the people in the region. So conceived, the next chapter seeks to examine the root causes of conflict and spiralling violence in the Niger Delta with particular focus on its political and economic dimensions. At the close of this chapter, the reader should be au fait with key historical, economic, and structural factors that have contributed (and still contributes) to the frustration and aggression of the Niger Delta people.
43 ―The specific conjuncture for the rise of each of these groups differs. For example, while the militia groups in the Niger Delta emerged as a result of the peculiar problems in the Niger Delta, of
environmental degradation and political insensitivity of the state, the OPC emerged as a consequence of the annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election won by a Yoruba man named Moshood Abiola.
The perception from the Yoruba ethnic group of the annulment was that it was an ethnic agenda of the Hausa Fulani aristocracy to perpetually control political power in the country and to regard people from other parts of the country as ‗second class‘ citizens. Further persecution of some Yoruba elite after the annulment by the Abacha regime reinforced the conviction of the Yoruba ethnic group that the Hausa Fulani oligarchy was out to ‗exterminate‘ them. The resolve was to resist such through all means including formation of underground organisations and possibly an insurgency‖ (Adejumobi, 2003: 3).
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Chapter Three
Root Causes of the Niger Delta Conflict
3.1 Introductory Remarks
This chapter seeks to explain the root causes of the Niger Delta conflict which it identifies as political and economic in nature. The chapter suggests that ethnic minority problems in the Niger Delta have their roots in complex historical and structural processes of pre-colonial and colonial incorporation of diverse ethnic segments, federal territorial evolution and re-organisations, revenue allocation, oil politics, and political representation. These processes have operated not only to foster and institutionalise the oppressive hegemony of the country‘s three major ethnicities—Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba—but also ―to legitimize the inordinate expropriation of the resources of the oil-producing communities as part of an official strategy of centralized national ‗cake sharing‘‖ (Suberu, 1996: xi).