Participation In Petroleum Development …Towards Sustainable Community Development In The Niger Delta

Continued from last Friday May 28, 2010.

The book “Participation in Petroleum Development, Towards Sustainable community Development in the Niger Delta” by Eseme-Alabo Dr. Edward Bristol-Alagbariya is essential for key oil industry experts, administrators, scholars and students who wants to gain further insight on how the Niger Delta can benefit from oil exploration and exploitation. The Tide, beginning from this edition, run excerpts of the book. Enjoy it.

To overcome the negative effects of social capital relations and other challenges hindering the success of CI, the win-win environmental consensus and conflict resolution strategy may be applied by development proponents while interactively involving citizens of each directly-affected community in environmental decision-making processes, so as to translate the community’s collective vision into these processes of petroleum development proposals. This strategy promotes consensus-building based on common grounds, which satisfies the powerful and vociferous citizens and citizen groups as well as supports and encourages the weak, voiceless or less powerful ones – who would otherwise have been neglected or excluded from participation.  Government regulatory agencies and project proponents thus have a role to be diligent so as to ensure fair play between and among directly-affected citizens and citizen groups, in the course of CIs. In turn, powerful and vociferous community groups have a responsibility to restrain themselves from frustrating the process of due diligence designed by government regulatory agencies and project proponents to ensure the success of CIs regarding petroleum development projects in the Delta region.

This book does not contend that relationships among people should not be mutually advantageous; rather, it demonstrates how certain relationships (ie, social capital relationships) constitute internal contradictions in the Delta region, as these relationships undermine collective interpersonal and intra- and inter-group relations in the region. In other words, the book discusses where social capital relationships have reared their heads and generated internal contradictions in the Niger Delta. Social capital relations determine how some governments (including traditional governments), social institutions and community-based organisations (CBOs) either function or are organised and administered in the region against overall public good in the Niger Delta. Such contradictions determine how relationships among citizens and groups thrive, especially the relationships among some influential citizens and citizen groups, relative to the advantages they are deriving from impact-benefit and other social investment initiatives of the MNOCs operating in the region. These internal contradictions aggravate poverty and misery inflicted on the ordinary citizens of the region. As demonstrated in Chapter 4, in the Eastern Delta kingdom of Bonny, internal contradictions have the effect of worsening the crises in the Delta region. Besides, the state of affairs in Bonny kingdom reveals that even though the kingdom has been participating in IA and other environmental decision-making processes since the 1990s, the involvement of the citizens in these processes is being undermined under the house system of governance because of the system’s diluted and misdirected nature from the seventeenth century, after the era of King Halliday (Awusa). Hence, Chapter 8 reveals that the house system no longer represents the true will and/or vision of Bonny citizens, considering the views of the citizens on how their inputs were ignored in decision-making processes, when they commented in the EIA process of the upgrade of Shell Bonny Terminal Integrated Project (BTIP). There is thus a need to improve the ongoing pattern of decision making so that the voice of traditional rulers of Bonny kingdom would truly represent the voice of the people of the kingdom. The apex traditional rulers of Bonny kingdom need to command such natural law attributes as virtue and commitment to the service of their people, as demonstrated by the founding fathers and premier kings who established the kingdom’s house system. Based on contemporary challenges, more rational, trustworthy and public-spirited decisions are required of the apex traditional rulers of the kingdom. Thus, if properly managed by the JV partners with the aid of a visionary traditional leadership, public interest-spirited state and local governments and vibrant CBOs partnering towards collective public good, the BTIP, Nigeria LNG and Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited (MPN) Bonny River Terminal (BRT) projects ought to sustainably boost socio-economic development, rather than poverty, misery and crisis in the kingdom. Besides, these multi-billion USD worth projects and other FG’s JV petroleum development operations have greatly polarised the traditional Bonny society. Consequently, the FG has commissioned the military to protect these development operations.

Other instances of internal contradictions in the Delta region include those cited in Chapter 1, from the report of the Human Rights Watch entitled ‘Nigeria Chop Fine: The Human Rights Impact of Local Government Corruption and Mismanagement in Rivers State, Nigeria’, dated January 2007. This report charts the failures of local government administrations in Rivers state, whose government is wealthier than most Nigerian states. According to this report, the contradiction of the wealth of Rivers State, which is the heart of the Nigerian oil industry, is the material deprivation being experienced by the majority of its citizens. The report is complemented in Chapter 1 by the account of the deplorable nature of the plight of the entire less privileged, marginalised and impoverished citizens of Nigeria. Given that internal contractions are worsening the Niger Delta crises in ways which the outside world may not easily appreciate, the need arises for social capital relations to support the welfare of the citizens and productive activities towards environmentally-sound and socially-equitable SCD in the region. Such social capital relations are equally needed in other areas or regions of Nigeria.    

Regarding international concerns about the Niger Delta crises, Chapter 2 points out how the USA, whose National Intelligence Council (NIC) in 2004 predicted the collapse of Nigeria, entered into a joint security compact to address the associated issues of security, peace and prosperity; while in 2008 the British government agreed to provide training and logistical support to the Nigerian military to combat anti-oil production militancy in the Delta region. The NIC November 2008 report indicates the need for foreign military intervention to end the Niger Delta crises so as to stabilise petroleum exports in Nigeria. The role of the advanced countries in the growth and development of Africa and African nations is also considered in Chapter 7, where proponents of corporate social responsibility (CSR) identified the significant role of business to Africa’s development over centuries. CSR proponents contend that the future of Africa and African countries may be enhanced with the assistance of the advanced countries and Africans in Diaspora.

The diverse nature of the key issues associated with the community crises in the Delta region is thus overarching, complex and complicated. These crises have generated several negative consequences, including the insecurity of lives, livelihoods and property in the region, as well as insecurity of supply of Nigeria’s petroleum resources to its consumer-countries, as indicated in the Preface and Chapter 1. In the process, the lives of citizens of the region and those of foreign multinationals, and the joint venture (JV) investments of the FG with the MNOCs, are endangered. Considering these and other negative effects and challenges of petroleum development on the people of the region and their future generations, including the environment in the region, some citizens and citizen groups of the region started making efforts to improve the situation. Among these efforts is the initiative to educate the outside world about the state of affairs in the region. On this note, Chapter 2 examines the presentation made by the Rivers Chiefs and Peoples Conference (RCPC) at the UN Earth Summit on Environment and Development (UNCED) which took place in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992. The high point of this presentation, centred on the historic and continuing multifaceted problems and challenges confronting the region, was a declaration by the RCPC that the environment in the region is endangered, and that the region is perhaps the most endangered delta region in the world, due especially to the adverse effects of petroleum development.

To be Continued