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  • High Stakes and Stakeholders: oil conflict and security in Nigeria by Kenneth Omeje
  • Edlyne E. Anugwom
Kenneth Omeje, High Stakes and Stakeholders: oil conflict and security in Nigeria. Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate (hb £55.00 – 0754647277). 2006, 218pp.

The oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria has recently been thrust onto the front burner of public discourse on oil conflict in Africa and its implications for general security. Conflict in the region has revolved around contestations and claims between the Niger Delta indigenes on the one hand, and the Nigerian state and the oil firms on the other. It is in the above light that Kenneth Omeje’s work becomes both timely and topical. The text focuses on how to tackle the oil conflict in order to enhance security and subsequent social progress in the Niger Delta region and Nigeria at large. He locates the conflict within the realm of Nigeria’s complex rentier political economy and from this vantage point highlights the disparate and interlocking roles of the different stakeholders in the oil conflict and its security dimensions.

The departure point is that the hitherto accepted primacy of the interests of transnational oil companies (TNOCs) in Nigeria’s oil politics can no longer be supported by evidence. Therefore the text attempts a deconstruction of the popular notion of collaboration between the government and the TNOCs. These form the basis of the author’s rethink of ‘conventional wisdom and misconceptions’ of the oil conflict. In adopting the rentier perspective, he makes a critical distinction between Nigeria’s rentier state framework and that of other oil-producing or rentier states in the Arab world. He sees the difference as basically lodged in ethno-cultural and demographic disparities between the Arab states and Nigeria. A very interesting contribution of the work is that it embodies a courageous effort at analysing the roles of the three parties in the conflict, and from this angle examines their orientations towards security in the region. His analytical desegregation of the attitudes of different TNOCs to the issues in the conflict is most refreshing.

The author also argues that ethnic militarism and petro-violence in the Niger Delta are not entirely protests against environmental degradation, as others have argued, but also a form of rentier accumulation through desperate and opportunistic mechanisms. He rather hastily contends that the original Niger Delta activists were motivated by genuine concerns but that the ‘process has since acquired a logic and momentum of its own with large sections of the protagonists hustling and jostling for rentier dividends on high stakes’. Hence he sees a number of oil protests, even by vociferous sections of civil society, as calculated blackmail to secure and advance rentier accumulation. In this way, [End Page 471] the insecurity becomes a process of weakening structures in order to attain egocentric interests.

The author generally sees the oil firms as attempting to address the issues in the conflict – especially Shell, which is seen as ahead of the game thanks to ingenious adaptations to the imperatives and dynamics of domestic rentier politics. But this conclusion is equally ambivalent, since he sees the corporate ‘developmentalism’ and state displacement entailed in the oil firms’ response as not comprehensive enough. The framework for resolving the crisis offered by the author is not without merits but it still needs to be disaggregated into specific actions and goals in the short, medium and long terms. Moreover, it also fails to address the sensitive issues of disparity in oil deposits and contribution to national revenue, in terms of the core and non-core Niger Delta sub-regions. The contention that the charge of collaboration between the state and the TNOCs is weak is not sufficiently borne out by the author’s findings. Also, the general dearth of socio-physical infrastructure in the area, as reported in the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2006, bears eloquent testimony to the contrast between heaven (represented by the TNOC zone) and hell (represented by their host communities).

The book is obviously well-researched and innovative in the sense that it starts from a disavowal of the conventional wisdoms or orthodoxies on the Niger Delta narrative. It is...

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