Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria by Omolade Adunbi (review)

Adunbi’s Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria (OWIN) is an excellent book that should be extensively consulted by anyone interested in understanding the politics of energy production. Adunbi lived and worked in the Niger Delta, the site of Nigeria’s oil industry, for a considerable time. Long-term participation in its everyday life gives him an exceptionable knowledge of its oil realities. His chore is to explain the politics resultant upon the Delta’s oil—a work undertaken by others, notably Michael Watts—but which in Adunbi’s telling becomes one that reaches out from individuals to global actors concerned with “the struggle over control of oil resources” (p. 2).

OWIN has seven chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. The introduction outlines the topic, which concerns two matters. On one hand, it is about the actors (individual and institutional) and their politics, especially their contestation, in different spaces of oil governance. On the other, it is about the hermeneutic narratives creating these actors’ consciousness and choreographing their politics. Chapter 1 offers a history of oil politics in Nigeria from its beginning through current, neoliberal times. Chapter 2 documents the vicissitudes of the human rights and environmental rights movement in Nigeria and an account of NGOs and their politics, especially in the Delta. Chapter 3 explains the Delta peoples’ hermeneutics of claim-making and resistance against the Nigerian state and the oil multinationals based on their mythic understanding of oil creation’s and consequently its legitimate ownership. Chapter 4 reveals how oil corporations collaborate with local communities, NGOs, and the state to create “new sites of governance in resource enclaves” (p. 24). Chapters 5 and 6 are about violence in the Niger Delta. Chapter 5 discusses the narratives used to create in Delta folk on “oil consciousness” to mobilize dissent against the state and oil corporations, which can lead to insurgency. Chapter 6 examines the insurgent groups—their ideologies, their politics, especially as these are sometimes coopted by the state and corporations. Finally, chapter 7 explores the state’s 2009 amnesty proclamation for Niger Delta militants that Abuja bureaucrats interpret as putting an end to insurgency and which Delta citizens interpret in a contrary fashion.

The conclusion draws the different strands of the argument together, making clear that there are four major actors: the Nigerian state, transnational private corporations, NGOs, and local communities, strung along the Delta’s winding creeks. The political debates are over who gets how much of the value produced by the oil. Adunbi explains how in different ways the state, the corporations, and the NGOs are a “triangular power” (p. 93) whose members collaborate to make certain that the vast majority goes to transnationals and the state, leaving the Delta communities oppressed by impoverishment and environmental degradation. He further explains how individuals in these communities have come to an understanding—both from their own culture and NGOs—that creates a consciousness that legitimates their claims to oil and mobilizes some to violently insist on them. Thus, in part, contestation over oil is a hermeneutic politics. However, make no mistake, the “triangular power” prevails, though there are ups and downs, the vast majority of the value goes to the state and corporations.

There are two virtues of OWIN that I will emphasize. First, there is an understanding of the resort to armed resistance. There has been debate over the nature of armed resistance to the oil corporations and the Nigerian state, with at least some labeling it “terrorism.” Terrorism, of course, is constructed by many in the Western media as the work of terrorist monsters. OWIN shows how violent insurgency can develop. First, phenomenologically, individuals experience what might be termed “oppression terrorism” that results from immiseration caused in different ways by the oil corporations and the government. Then, cognitively, these persons seek to understand and respond to this experience. In the...