Oil and the Propensity to Armed Struggle in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria
| Author | Aderoju Oyefusi |
| Profession | Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Benin, Nigeria |
| Pages | WPS4194 |
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Empirical studies have established a causal link between natural resource abundance and civil conflict. Collier and Hoeffler (1998), for example, show that natural resourceavailability/ abundance considerably increases the chances of civil conflict in a country. A country that has no natural resources faces a probability of civil conflict of 0.5 percent, whereas a country with a natural resources-to-GDP share of 26 percent faces a probability of 23 percent. De Soysa (2000) observed a similar correlation between resource wealth and civil conflict; while Addison and others (2003) note that in Africa as well as other developing regions countries with point resources such as minerals have a high propensity for conflict ranging from high levels of political violence to outright wars. Ross (2004b) provides similar evidence linking mineral resources in general to civil conflict. Fearon and Laitin (2003) and Fearon (2005) however argue that the risk of civil war is limited to oil.
There are reasons why oil-dependence is particularly risky. Oil and many other minerals generate large location-specific rents for the states or groups that can control the territory where resources are located. Dependence on such rents also exposes them to shocks arising from world price volatility, discoveries and exhaustion. These (rents and shocks) create multiple routes that link to civil conflict and are particularly large in the case of oil (Collier and Hoeffler, 2005)1. It has been shown that oil-dependent countries have a particularly high risk of experiencing secessionist civil wars (Collier and Hoeffler, 2002c; Ross 2003b, 2004b) (Table 1).
According to Ross (2003a), most mineral-related insurrections have four elements. First, the people in the region have a distinct ethnic or religious identity which set them apart from the larger population before resource exploitation began. Second, they share the belief that the central government was unfairly appropriating the wealth that belong to them, and that they would be better off as a separate state. Third, the local people generally bore the greater part of the cost of the extraction process in terms of land appropriation, environmental damage and the immigration Page 4of labor from other parts of the country, and commonly argue that they have not been sufficiently compensated for these costs. Finally, the intensity of conflict (the cost in terms of lives and money) has been higher when the extraction process is susceptible to "hold-ups" by local people. The author cites recent conflicts in Colombia, Sudan and Indonesia (Aceh) that reflect these dynamics.
Apparently, the Niger Delta region of Nigeria2 contains these key ingredients for a mineral-based conflict (Ross 2003a). The region is the source of most of the country's oil reserves (Table 2). It is populated by minority ethnic groups that have borne a disproportionate share of the cost of oil extraction for which they believe they have not been adequately compensated and an equally higher share of government repression. And the spread of oil platforms, pumping stations, and other oil installations and infrastructure across the region provides an opportunity for locals to express their dissatisfaction by blocking the extraction process. Furthermore, as Ross (2003) asserts, the Niger Delta has "three addition liabilities" which increase further the risk of an armed (secessionist) struggle: its unusually high level of unemployment and poverty and abysmally low level of social services compared to the national average3, its swampy terrain which makes it difficult and expensive to develop, and what the author calls a "moral social disorder" arising from the activities of youth-based movements that frequently challenge not only the oil companies but also traditional authorities in their own communities, a development which makes peaceful settlement of disputes more difficult to achieve. There is an added "general liability" that the author did not note however : the fact that the Nigerian nation is currently passing through a Page 5 reform process4 which is creating winners and losers and thereby pushing upward the risk of violent conflict (Hegre and others, 2001; Hegre, 2003). There have been previous attempts at secession in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. In early 1967, oil-related disputes motivated an insurrection by the Ijaws5. Less than a year after, the country experienced a civil war (the Biafran war of 1967-70), a fall-out of disagreement over the sharing of oil revenues and ethnic antagonism that have been created by a series of events which bordered on attempts by each of the major ethnic groups to control political power. More recently, in the latter part of 2004, the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF), an organization of youths of Ijaw ethnic extraction (officially tagged a "rebel army" by the Nigerian government), engaged the Nigerian military forces in land and aerial battle. At the same time, the federal government declared it has identified 16 ethnic militias in the Niger Delta and discovered evidence linking some of the groups to external and internal collaborators. More recently, there has been a renewed call for local control of oil wealth, an increase in military confrontations between armed groups and the Nigerian government, and attacks on oil installations and facilities in the region. The spate of kidnapping of foreign oil workers for ransom and as a means of asserting political demands has also increased. In general, the Niger Delta has been the site of much civil violence since 1999. According to a report by Hamilton and others (2003), violence in the Niger Delta is estimated to have killed about 1,000 persons a year between 1999 and 2004.
There are many parts to oil and civil conflict in Nigeria6. In this paper, I concentrate on just one: what determines the propensity to armed struggle among individuals in Nigeria's Niger Delta region? The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I reviewed related literature on the factors that motivate individuals to initiate or participate in rebellion and when rebellion may indeed be expected to occur. A model is developed in section 3 which explains the decision to participate in rebellion as a function of individual and community-level characteristics. The basic predictions of the model are tested in section 4 while section 5 concludes.
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Resource-availability and extraction may contribute to civil conflict by providing rebels with an opportunity to loot and by creating grievances that exacerbate separatist tendencies (Ross, 2001). Theoretical explanations of the link between natural resources and civil conflict have typically followed these two approaches (Sambanis, 2004). Relative deprivation theories of natural resources and civil wars explain rebellion by atypical severe grievances arising from high level of inequality, government repression and lack of political rights, or ethnic and religious divisions (Borjas 1992, 1995; Easterly 2003; Goodhand, 2003; Cramer, 1999; Moore, 2000; Stewart and FitzGerald, 2000). As the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingandael (2003) observes, poverty, resource scarcity and inequality hold high mobilizing qualities in rebellion and may be extremely potent when they combine with other factors such as discriminatory and exclusionary policies and failure of political institutions. Rationalist theories, however, focus on the opportunity to organize rebellion. The emphasis on rebel opportunity rather than grievance was popularized by Skocpol (1979). However, the author focused on political opportunities which make a revolution feasible. Rationalist theories of natural resources and civil war extend this consideration by focusing on the economic opportunities which resources availability presents for rebellion. These models are similar to Becker's (1957) economic model of crime and draw heavily on Grossman (1991, 1995) and Hirschleifer (1995). Rebellion is modeled as an outcome of kleptocratic rivalry or as an industry that generate profits from looting (Grossman 1999)7, or as an uprising of the poor against the rich with a view to achieving a transfer of resources (Hirschleifer, 1991), or as a quasi-criminal activity (Collier, 2000). In these models, conflicts are outcomes of rational decision making on the part of actors. Actors "choose" conflict when it is more profitable (Hirshleifer 1994). In the words of Collier (2000) "rebellion is motivated by greed, so that it occurs when rebels can do well out of war".
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There is now a general consensus however about the limitation of the greed-grievance dichotomy in explaining the link between natural resources and civil war (Karen and Sherman, 2003; Collier and Hoeffler, 2002a; Collier and others, 2003:89)8. The relationship between greed and grievance in rebellion is symbiotic. Rebellion needs grievance to mobilize and overcome the severe constraints on entry9. It also needs greed for it to be sustainable (overcome the financial viability constraint). Thus greed may need to incite grievance for rebellion to get started. Natural resource availability, particularly when the resource is lootable and/or obstructable10 provides a unique opportunity for the existence and sustainability of a rebel organization irrespective of whether it is justice-seeking (grievance-motivated) or loot-seeking (greed-motivated) (Collier and...
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