From Aba to Ugborodo: Gender Identity and Alternative Interpretations of the Discourse of Social Protest among Women in the Oil Delta of Nigeria
Draft: Not for Citation
Charles Ukeje
Department of International Relations
Obafemi Awolowo University
Ile-Ife, NIGERIA
Tel.: +234 36 232 706
Fax.: +234 36 230514
Email: charlesukeje@yahoo.comPaper for presentation during the CODESRIA General Assembly, 8-12, December 2002
Abstract
Except for the interpretations of post-modern feminist scholarship, orthodox wisdom significantly undervalues (if not outrightly ignores) the role of women as important agency in the discourse of social protest, anomie and other forms of collective political actions. In the context of many non-Western social formations, the reasons for the ‘marginalization’ of women can be located in at least three sets of interrelated, but misleading assumptions. First, is the view that women are patently non-political citizens; meaning that they are primarily concerned with domestic, household issues, and consider politics too distant from the homefront and hazardous. Closely related is the assumption that in comparison to their male counterparts, the level of political consciousness of women is significantly limited by social, cultural, and other traditional taboos, myths and stereotypes constructed and implemented under a dominant regime of patriarchy. As a fall-out from these two assumptions is the third: that women cannot engage or challenge-- outside of the framework of social action dictated by men-- the existing structure of governance in a coherent, sustained and uncontrolled manner. Assumptions such as these have lost their theoretical and practical utility in the broad sense that they engage womanhood in the template of victim-hood rather than that of a distinct agency engaged (in multiple ways) in negotiating social projects and processes as well as pubic good (or public bad) in whatever forms they eventually manifest or are reproduced.
Historically, women have played a critical role in challenging established authority, structure, and values in whatever form they are disguised. Examples include the famous Aba and Egba Women Riots in eastern and western Nigeria against colonial legislations perceived as too arbitrary and regressive, especially on taxation; the protest by women against the venality of military dictatorship; and those by Ogoni women and other oil communities in the Niger Delta against multinational oil companies and/or the Nigerian State. Recently, women’s protest is assuming a new prominence in defining the thrusts and limitations of community protest within oil communities as witnessed in the re-engendering of social protest: first, by Itsekiri women from Ugborodo village in Warri, Delta State who occupied and shut down Chevron-Texaco’s Escravos plant- one of the largest oil tank farms in Africa, and about the same time, that by Ijaw women from Gbaratum (also in Warri) who laid siege over several days, around Chevron-Texaco flow stations. The grievances of these women are instructive, particularly in that they boldly indicate autonomous, yet assertive voices and expressions. Their demands include employment opportunities for themselves and their husbands/ children, greater economic empowerment, and infrastructural incentives such as good roads, portable water, medical facilities, schools, and others.
It is clear from the above that there are important elements of continuity (and discontinuity) in the social actions instigated by women in oil communities, how they articulate and mobilize their concerns and grievances, and the unique strategies they employ in giving substance to their grievances. All these point suggestively to two timely imperatives: that of engaging the broad and specific historicity of social protest by women in the delta region in a detailed manner, and that of scrutinizing more closely the logic underlying these unique, gender-specific social intervention by women. Both approaches- historical and contemporary- may yield a richer and bumper harvest of methodological and theoretical insights than is currently available in the literature on the Niger Delta. In specific terms, for instance, one of the strategies used by women protesters- in an increasing number of cases- is that of collective nudity. How did nudity (the deliberate display of female anatomy) become a weapon of protest among these women? What does this mean in cultural terms or in terms of negotiation leverage? What cluster of factors and forces (local, national and international) instigating the on-going transformation of women from passive observers to active agents of social transformation and order in the Niger Delta? What core identity issues have provoked women’s assertive engagements vis-à-vis multinational oil companies in the oil basin of Nigeria? In what ways are these identity issues engaged and transformed by women? What are the elements of continuity and discontinuity in social protests involving women in the delta region, past and present? How does this engagement by women alter the landscape of social protest and violent revolt among oil communities in the Niger Delta? What lessons can scholarship and pubic policy learn from women’s recourse to social protest in the Niger Delta oil region of Nigeria? These, and many other questions, shall be critically interrogated in the proposed paper.Since the turn of the 1990s, the Niger Delta has literally become "a cauldron of political and ethnic turmoil" (Maier, 2000: 111). The events of the third quarter of year 2002 are remarkable milestones in the annals of counter-hegemonic struggles by oil communities in the Niger Delta (ND) against environmental degradation, socio-economic marginalisation and political domination. In the month of July alone, a new and remarkable wave of protests swept through several Itsekiri and Ijaw ethnic communities involving orchestrated acts of siege directed at the infrastructures of ChevronTexaco, a major American multinational oil company operating in the region. The Itsekiri women of Ugborodo had occupied the Escravos Tank Farm operated by the company for almost two weeks, beginning from July 8 until their demands were amicably met. Almost spontaneously thereafter, another set of women from several Ijaw communities within Gbaramatu and Egbema Kingdoms organized another protest action resulting in the forcible occupation of four oil flow stations located at Abiteye, Maraba/-Otunana, Dibi and Olero Creek belonging, again to ChevronTexaco over eleven days. Again, the women’s siege, like the previous one, ended with the signing of almost similar Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the company. For a long time to come, it is clear that there will be a harvest of debates on the salient aspects of these separate uprisings, and whether they were orchestrated or merely coincidental. It is sufficient to note, nevertheless, that there is something intriguingly suggestive about the quick successions with which the protest occurred, distinguished only by the ethnic backgrounds from which the women protesters were drawn. The fact that the two actions followed strikingly similar patterns suggests the imperative of closer scrutiny.
Community protests have become frequent occurrences within oil communities in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. In the past, such community protests and disturbances have revolved around grievances over rising unemployment, environmental degradation, and the lack of social amenities such as good roads, portable water, medical facilities, schools, and others. The indicate, without doubts, the "decision of hitherto voiceless, subordinate and underprivileged minority groups to take up the gauntlet and challenge state structures and institutions controlled by majority groups who have been grossly unjust over time in the distribution of national resources" (Ojo, 2002: 8)
The recent protests by women are however distinct in several respects. For one, they indicate autonomous women action as against, say, those by youths or men. Indeed, one of the women who spearheaded the Ijaw women’s protest, Madam Wariya, claimed that they decided not to inform anyone, not even their leaders for fear of 'sabotage'. In another respect, the two protests deviated markedly from previous community and youth protests by their non-violent but resolute manner the women adopted. Indeed, apart from symbolically carrying household utensils such as frying pans, long spoons, and chanting protest songs, their only other ‘weapon’ seemed to be in the morality they evoke. One of the defiant women leaders stated this resolve bluntly when she claimed emphatically that the "Federal Government and the oil companies… like to oppress us. Since we are already suffering, we did not mind if we died on the flow stations". Two other dimensions are also worthy of note. Unlike what obtained in the past when oil companies, sometimes hastily, invite soldiers and the notorious anti-riots policemen to dislodge protesters, this time they employed non-coercive, non-belligerent methods, negotiating and reaching amicable concessions with the women. It also remains a matter of deep puzzle and curiosity, indeed, that the women’s protests occurred not just at the country’s main export terminal, Escravos, but also in Warri, Delta State, the western operational bases of the country’s major multinationals- Shell and ChevronTexaco, without the Federal Government raising hell. Thus, unlike what obtained in the recent past when government invokes the Riots Act and notarize the use of force, this was visibly absent in this instance as the state government merely provided limited ‘good offices’ that enabled peaceful negotiations between the oil companies and the protesting women.
My contention here is that much can be learnt from the wisdom and manner with which Itsekiri and Ijaw women successfully prosecuted their non-violent protests, as much as from the deviation by government and ChevronTexaco from the usual pattern of harassment, intimidation, repression and naked violence inflicted on communities when they express their collectively grievances and protests against the adverse environmental, economic, social and political effects of crude oil exploitation. Each of the unique dimensions of the protests by women determines roughly the template on which this paper is structured. The next section interrogates the political economy of violent conflicts in the Niger Delta more intensely since the 1990s: pitching on the one hand the alliance of the Nigerian State and international capital represented by multinational oil companies; and on the other, host oil communities. It reveals the deep contradictions in foreign capital accumulation in such a weak and peripheral social entities as the Niger Delta. The section that follows examines the critical interface between the historical and contemporary dimensions of women’s protests in the Niger Delta bearing in mind how such actions challenge orthodox wisdom about the role of women as distinct but critical agencies in the discourse of social protest, anomie and other forms of collective political actions.
In the light of all the above, it is timely to interrogate critically what cluster of factors and forces (local, national and international) instigated the transmutation of women from ‘observers’ to active agents of social transformation and order in the Niger Delta. Some of the specific questions that would be addressed in the paper include the following: in what ways did the recent women’s protests engage, identity-wise, with previous histories of consciousness mobilization among women in colonial and post-colonial Nigeria? What gender-specific identities and resources did the protesting women invoke and why? How did such identities enable women to mobilize and articulate their concerns and grievances?
It is hoped that understanding the historical-contemporary angles to the recent women’s revolt can yield a bumper of useful insights solely underestimated in extant literature on the Niger Delta. The final section examines the alternative futures for women (and community) protests against the backdrop of the prospects of a larger project of resistance by women (and the larger communities) on a pan-Niger Delta scale.
Oil and the Political Economy of Civil Conflicts in the Niger Delta
It is best to presage the discourse on the changing gender identity within the rural oil communities of the Niger Delta by revisiting, briefly, the larger template that enabled community protests to flourish in that basin. Without doubt, almost three-and-a-half decades of uninterrupted crude oil production in Nigeria has benefited only a minute fraction of the foreign, national, and local elites, to the neglect, impoverishment and detriment of the majority of oil-producing communities in the Niger Delta basin. This is not surprising, indeed, as the history (and politics) of hydrocarbon oil has also been aptly described as the history, and politics, of imperialism, par excellent. Nascent oil capital made its earliest inroad into the social formation later christened Nigeria in the 1930s when the imperatives of securing strategic oil minerals for the Imperial Navy led to frantic geological expeditions in the vast colonial outposts of Britain. By 1938, Shell D’Archy had confirmed the presence of oil in the southern Nigeria, although none was sure at that time of the commercial value of this discovery. The outbreak of World War II a year after, in 1939, slowed down the drive for crude oil, but only for the short period that the war lasted, as further prospecting activities intensified soon after this global catastrophe in 1945. In 1958, commercial deposits were found in Oloibiri village in present day Rivers State, and in quick successions afterwards in other towns and villages throughout the riverine Niger Delta. Clearly, Shell D’Archy was much like its monopolistic and ruthless predecessor, the Royal Niger Company, which not only maintained uncontested rights to commercial opportunities in the Niger Delta area and the hinterland, but also enjoyed a lasting romance with the colonial government. This unrestrained access to the government, with time, effectively emboldened Shell (and subsequently, other oil companies) to engage in business without question in modern day Nigeria.
The popular excitement that the commercial production of high-grade crude oil would accelerate development was realized, but not without enormous political, economic and social costs. In the first instance, the oil sector replaced the agricultural sector which traditionally accounted for the bulk of domestic earning and foreign exchange. With that spontaneity, emphasis also shifted from the Regional (later State) Governments to the Federal Government- making contests into the political and administrative infrastructures of the centre a zero-sum, do-or-die affair. The earliest sneak preview of this ‘fight-to-finish’ discourse of power and authority led to the failed Biafra secessionism which plunged the country into three years of destructive civil war. It is difficult to ignore the geopolitical calculations of the warring factions, especially as it relates to the control of the lucrative oil basin. Indeed, the unwritten yet boldly etched dictum in the mindsets of political entrepreneurs across the major federating ethnic units has been that whoever controls the oil-rich Niger Delta controls the proverbial honey pot of the Nigerian State with all its sybaritic trappings and indulgences. Indeed, the nature of oil as a resource is such that it has failed woefully in creating the cognitive freedom for the national elite to comes to grips with the profound crisis facing the polity; a tragedy given the manner in which clientilism bankrupts the country and shortchanges the ability to guarantee stability outside the framework of official repression (Herbst, 1996: 158; Ukeje et. al, 2002).
The earliest precedence in the indeterminable list of state sponsorship of repression against protesting oil community occurred in 1990 against Umuechem community when Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), the Nigerian subsidiary of Shell International, invited soldiers and anti-riots policemen to assist in quelling community disturbances. In the wake of this curious invitation, troops behaved much like occupation armies that had ‘vowed to take the last drop of the enemy’s blood’. They committed acts of arson, looted and damaged properties, injured, raped and murdered even harmless inhabitants, including children and old people. The brutality inflicted on the Ogoni community under the Abacha regime has become another major signifier of the extent the Nigerian State is willing and able to go in order to impose such a tenuous and delicate form of order and stability that can ensure the continuation of oil extraction (Naanen, 1995; Osaghae, 1995; Ngomutu-Roberts, 1994; Eteng, 1996). As recent as 1999, Human Rights Watch (HRW) blamed oil companies for their pretentious claims of not being privy to or in a position to avert what is happening around them; after all, they are direct beneficiaries of such crude attempts to suppress militant actions in their areas of operation.
With the exception of the local elites in the oil communities who are reaping bountifully from the formal and informal networks of state-administered corruption, most inhabitants of the delta basin have one sad tale or another to share about the miseries heaped on them by oil. There is no doubt, for instance, that oil wealth had a significant transformative impact on infrastructural development within the Nigerian State. Paradoxically, at the same time that it answered the material expectations of the elite, it also compounded the misfortunes of small-scale artisans and subsistence farmers and fishermen in rural oil communities (Frank, 1984: 215-314). In the Niger Delta, oil radically altered and crudely subverted the ‘moral economy of affection’ that sustained the population leading to the emergence of a new marginal population subsisting at the fringes of socio-economic opportunities. There is another striking similarity in the social condition and contexts within which oil altered the fortunes of peasant, intensified their immiseration and eventually pushed them in the direction of protests and violent revolts. Berry (1984: 5) gave a concrete example in the context of cocoa farming in Western Nigeria when the advent of oil frustrated rural farmers away from intensive agriculture without really altering the underlying strategies of mobility and accumulation. It is this contradiction, according to her that heralded a trend towards peasant solidarity and militant opposition to the existing political and economic order witnessed in the Agbekoya farmer’s revolts.
The Ogoni territory is one stark footnote to the misgivings suffered by oil communities in the hands of multinational oil companies. In that small but relatively homogenous community where the Anglo-Dutch oil multinational, Shell, has been in operation since 1958, social infrastructures such as hospitals, schools, good roads, and electricity have either collapsed or are in decrepit forms. Poorly maintained overland oil pipelines meanders the entire community while gas flare sites are located too close to residential quarters. Although home to one of the earliest electric power generating station located at Afam, Ogoni communities do not enjoy uninterrupted power supply. In most instances, the flare from gas pipelines provided the only constant source of illumination to this community, yet it is one of the most industrially perverted parts of Nigeria, playing host to six major oil fields, two gigantic refineries, a fertilizer company, a petrochemical plant, a federal sea terminal, all within an approximate land area of 1000 square kilometers. (Shell, 1995; WCC, 1996).
Apart from the Ogonis, however (Crawford, 1996; Osaghae, 1995; Naanem, 1995), other minority oil communities- the Urhobos, Itsekiri, Kalabari, Okrika, Nembe, Bonny and the Ijaws- have also constructed their struggles in the context of the above global-national realities. Generally, oil communities have demonstrated that they are passive recipients of the misfortunes occasioned by the adverse effects of oil exploitation; rather they have demonstrated their exasperations by persistently agitating against environmental pollution, dwindling socio-economic opportunities, and political domination. Initially, such exasperations were conducted in peaceful manner, with communities embarking on non-violent demonstrations, petitions, picketing, sponsoring paid advertorials and opinion editorials in national dailies, expensive litigations in law courts, as well as raising high-powered delegations to present grievances to the government. With the failure of such non-belligerent overtures, oil communities have changed tactics by becoming more militant and assertive, and on occasions, violent (Gboyega, 1997: 177).
It is important to underscore three core elements of oil communities’ mobilization and protests. (Ukeje, 2001a; 2001b). One is the pervasive awareness among the oil communities that their struggles are not isolated but rather an integral part of the larger global pedagogy and discourse instigated by indigenous and minority ethnic populations against the forces of international capital. This consciousness, it is important to note, has provided some kind of utilitarian justifications for popular protests towards the expansion of the democratic space, environmental protection and management, access to basic, subsidized socio-economic opportunities, promotion and protection of fundamental human rights, as well as the preservation of cultural autonomy and identity. Arising from the above is the second element of the response by oil communities- that of moving away from largely isolated, informal and reactive forms of social protest to more structured, formalized and institutionalized advocacies and interventions, exemplified by the proliferation of self-help movements and organizations to coordinate community responses and reactions among oil communities. As we reveal shortly, the Itsekiri and Ijaw women who recently embarked on protests benefited from these global consciousness, experience-sharing and information-exchange among such movements across the globe, as well as the aggregation and mobilization of popular social forces within their communities and nationwide. Turner (2001) demonstrated the expediency of such local-global nexus and that of created by the emerging alliances between communities and environmental non-governmental organizations from a recent encounter between Ogbodo community and Shell over pipeline explosion that resulted in 18-day long oil spillage. According to her, Shell's "extremely inadequate response left the community with almost no drinking water, and nothing for cooking food, washing dishes, clothes or their bodies". By the time the company offered a compensation of 100, 000 US Dollars to pacify the 150, 000 strong community, the chiefs' counter claim was to ask Shell for copies of the full
agreements with the last five communities into which Shell had spilled crude oil which are located in Western Europe and North America. The Ogbodo chiefs intended to seek comparable long-term reparations.In pleading for the jettisoning of the tired population growth-conflict nexus as the overriding explanation for resource wars, Obi (1997a: 21, 1997b) blamed the dialectics of globalization and local resistance: the profit motive versus the survival of the people, as responsible for the primary contradiction and cause of conflict in the Niger Delta. What particularly irks oil communities is the reluctance by oil companies to openly accept responsibilities for helping to alleviate the plight of the host communities. They often claim that they are not in the business of interfering with the duties and responsibilities of government. They ignore the fact that their activities, if nothing else, compromise the well-being of host communities; and that only by engaging in socially responsible corporate behaviors can they enjoy the kind of cordial community relations necessary for them to carry out business in the first place. This non-committal corporate attitude is shared by most of the multinational oil companies operating in the ND. In 1993, for instance, the most popular of all the companies, SPDC, reportedly insisted that:
The most important contribution that the company can make to the social and material progress of Nigeria is performing efficiently its direct line of business. It is neither feasible nor proper for the company to preempt the responsibilities of the federal or state governments in providing and maintaining social amenities and services. (Cited in Ojo, 2002: 39).
Gender Identity and the Discourse of Social Protest by Women in the Niger Delta
What have been defiantly omitted in the discourse on the communities’ responses to the contradictions of oil-based accumulation in the Niger Delta are the pivotal roles played by women in the struggles for improved socio-economic opportunities. The major line of argument pursued in this section is that to grasp the nitty-gritty of the recent protests require locating the manners in which Itsekiri and Ijaw women captured, invented, and reconfigured social realities around themselves within specific gender identities from the repertoire of traditional and contemporary resources specific to the Niger Delta.
Conventional wisdom has significantly undervalued, in some cases outrightly ignored, the critical roles women play in the discourse and praxis of social protest, anomie and other forms of collective socio-political actions. Roughly, they have ‘marginalized’ women’s contributions by pursuing two sets of interrelated, but misleading assumptions. The first suggest that women are patently non-political citizens; meaning that their preoccupation is primarily with domestic, household issues, or the ‘politics of the belly’. From this perspective, it is claimed on behalf of women that the terrains of local and national politics are too gladiatory and turbulent for women to enter into and participate effectively. Incidentally, the political space is the very site where authoritative value, wealth, power are negotiated and distributed. Such notions of access and claim are misinformed and almost non-existent giving the reality of the blurring dichotomy between private and public spaces. There is a deeper structural explanation for this pervasive assumption which must be located within the dominant regime of patriarchy manifesting in superstructures of social, economic, institutional and traditional taboos, myths, and stereotypes constructed to dampen the political consciousness of women. A fall-out from the above assumption is that women cannot engage or contest-- outside of the framework of social dictations by men-- the existing structure of governance in a coherent, sustained and controlled manner. While assumptions such as these have become internalized by some women for exactly the same reasons mentioned above, they have since lost their social utility in the broad sense that they engage womanhood in the template of victim-hood rather than that of a distinct agency for negotiating and reproducing socio-political mileages (Ibeanu, 2001).
Perhaps the Itsekiri and Ijaw women who embarked on peaceful protest and besieged oil platforms must have been diligent students of oral historicity, especially as several dimensions and aspects of their protests must have benefited immensely from the successful encounters of their predecessors during the colonial and post-colonial times. It is incontrovertible that protests by women were rare and far apart. In those times when they break out, however, they are expressive of deep-seated and popular frustrations with the prevailing social order. Harking back to the collective behaviors school represented by the thoughts of Herbert Blumer is the opinion that protests have roots in "symbolic interactionism"- that is, the fact that others are protesting affects and attracts potential protestors (Kurzman, 1996: 155). Historically, the Niger Delta is one of the nine major sites of African resistance to colonial rule. The most significant of the strategies adopted in those early times included armed struggle, establishment of independent African churches, cultural/ welfare organizations, crop-hold ups, breaking the monopoly of European businesses, tax evasion and boycotts, strikes by wage earners, sporadic revolts and protests. (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2001).
One example was the Aba riots or women’s war of 1929 precipitated by the anticipated taxation of women integral to the implementation of the Indirect Rule project of British colonialism in Nigeria. The impracticality of the Native Revenue Ordinance (NRO) that necessitated the imposition of taxation was such that it was preceded by detailed assessment of people’s wealth for the purpose of taxation, as well as census of population, livestock, as well as economic trees. For a long time, however, the misleading assumption was that taxation alone triggered the eruption of the protest. A closer investigation would reveal that beyond taxation and discontentment with persecution, extortion, corruption and practices of Native Court members and the autocracy of the Warrant Chiefs (Arifalo, 2001: 27), the protesting women were embittered about illegal and oppressive sanitary fines, continuance and enforcement of unpaid labor on civil constructions, and unfair/ excessive imprisonment, and the abysmal low prices of farm produce (palm produce) and exorbitant prices on imported goods (especially tobacco and spirits)- both of which were threatening to erode, in significant ways, the purchasing power of most families. It is interesting that a year earlier, in 1928, their men had, without raising a finger, grudgingly acquiesced to pay tax.
Another remarkable aspect of the women’s protest could be deciphered from the spontaneity which extended beyond Aba to other parts of eastern Nigeria. The demonstrations began on November 18 1929, and lasted almost three months until January the following year. Within a short period of time, it covered several areas: four divisions in the Province of Owerri, two out of the three divisions in Calabar Province, and in Afikpo division in Ogoja Province. What may not be so obvious was that the spread occurred along important trade and market routes dominated, if not controlled by itinerant women traders. It is true, as Ajayi and Espie (1965: 203, 394) rightly pointed out that the prevalence of markets and long distance trading encouraged interaction between and among women from different backgrounds outside of the prying eyes of men. It is important to note that in most traditional African societies, markets were not only sites for buying and selling, but more importantly, focal points for frequent contacts- with most social arrangements revolving around market days. That the outbreak and spread of the protests took the colonial administration; perhaps also the men, unawares demonstrated that women, with determination, can pursue agenda of social change and revolt without recourse to or assistance from men. As the respected historian, Obaro Ikime pointed out; the protest by women was even more significant and complex than has often been imagined in history textbooks, especially as the upheavals were "protests against the sum total of grievances associated with contemporary British administrative practices and the allied inroads of western civilizations" (Ikime, p. 444). Another celebrated case of revolt, between 1941-1947 during which Egba matriarchs staged sustained rebellion against colonial exploitation, taxation, market closures and commodity hold-ups. This culminated, ultimately, into the kidnapping of colonial officials and their local agents, as well as the dethronement of the traditional ruler, the Alake.
For now, what we know about the real motives behind the revolt by the women is still very sketchy, until perhaps more in-depth empirical investigations are carried out. For now, media accounts and interviews with some of their leaders claim that they declined to inform the community leaders or anyone for fear of sabotage. Another leader claimed that the women "decided to take the driver's seat to make the Federal Government and the oil companies more sensitive to the yearnings and aspirations of our people. Apart from this broad aim, she argued that in the past:
Our youths used to do this for us but the government and the oil companies would label them terrorists, mobilise soldiers to trail and kill them. But this time around, harmless women are in charge, let us hear their next story. Maybe, they would say we are armed invaders.
What is incontrovertible was that as soon as the Ijaw women peacefully took over the four oil flow stations belonging to ChevronTexaco, they made a 40-point demand, among others things, for the payment of N500 million compensation as reparation for long years of neglect of their communities, the construction of two ultra-modern palaces for the Gbaramatu and Egbema Kingdoms, the construction of foreshore wall and housing projects in about nine host communities to improve the environmental and living conditions of the people, land reclamation, and electrification. The protesters also reportedly demanded the renaming of two of the facilities, Abiteye and Otunana flow stations, to reflect their Ijaw origin. Some of these demands dovetail neatly with the 18-point demands adopted by a consultative meeting of Niger Delta women held in far-away Banjul, the capital of The Gambia, from 7-12 August 2000, to review the situation in the ND, especially as it affects women. According to the meeting, government and oil companies must commit themselves to legal and peaceful means in addressing the myriad plights of oil communities and women; abrogate all laws inimical to the development of the Niger Delta as well as put in place a comprehensive blueprint for genuine development in the region; end the militarisation of the ND as well as compensate victims of past military occupation and repression; compensate victims of oil spillages and fire disasters; and introduce micro-credit schemes for the development of small-scale enterprises for women.
The recalcitrance of the protesters forced the company to invoke force majeure clause in its contracts with exporters on Sunday, 21 July. This act of defiance which, in monetary terms must have caused the NNPC/ Chevron Joint Venture partnership heavy losses for each day that the women prevented operations on the seized oil platforms, accelerated the search for a peaceful negotiations and resolution. As negotiations commenced with the management of ChevronTexaco at Abiteye flow station, one of the four seized, the Ijaw women protesters vehemently refused to vacate the oil platforms until each of the 10 communities were paid 2 million Naira each "as compensation for the women who abandoned their various trades to occupy the flow stations". The protesters also reportedly asked for a N20 million micro-credit loans scheme for each of the ten communities to enable the women embark on small and medium scale enterprises after the siege, to be administered by a non-governmental organization conversant with the operation of such an economic empowerment scheme. They also demanded more permanent jobs for indigenes. Specific highlights of the MOU eventually signed with the women by ChevronTexaco included: to employ 10 indigenes every year for 5 years through established hiring process; increase bursaries effective from 2002/2003 academic session to students in tertiary institutions from N50, 000 to N75, 000 while those for communities' scholars in secondary schools will be increased from N10, 000 to N20, 000; commitment to commence plans towards the execution of the Oporoza Cottage Hospital within two weeks of signing of the agreement; and the provision of N200 million to finance micro-credit schemes and business development of communities on the following conditions- that the amount be shared equally by the 10 communities managed by reputable and credible non-governmental organisation (NGO) with proven expertise in the relevant field.
The demands of the women are, of course, concrete bread-and-butter issues. Such concrete demands and expectations are not known to automatically translate into protest, except in instances when they are mediated by "cognitive liberation"- involving an oppressed people breaking out of the pessimistic and quiescent patterns of thought and begin to do something about their situation" (Kurzman, 1996: 154). In another sense, what this suggests is that whereas social conflicts may be triggered by the denial of tangible resources, they are complicated by structurally embedded questions of identity. Indeed, as Fischer (1990: 95) pointed out, the centrality of identity is fundamental to the etiology of conflicts; especially in so far that it "influences a great deal of social interaction at the group, intergroup and international levels". At the same time, also, the management and resolution of violent social conflicts can become intractable for the simple reason, also, that fundamental identity questions are yet to be addressed, talk-less, resolved. Rothchild made this important observation in his analysis of two types of demands by social interest groups: negotiable demands which tend to be "elastic and modest in resource cost and to be accepting of the legitimacy of the political order in which they are asserted"; and non-negotiable demands which concern their "cultural identity status, participation, political and physical survival or other intangibles…" (p. 209-213). In his opinion, "when issues of identity and participation or of basic personal privilege are at stake, and when the actions of one group infringe on the privacy or identity of others", the demands may transform into non-negotiable claims on the part of both state and state-linked civil associations. (See Rothchild, in Zartman 1997: 197-241).
No matter its source, then, - be it class, ethnicity, religion, gender, and so forth- the mobilization of identity is one of the strongest, most attractive, yet most dangerous form of clientilism (Osaghae, 1994: 217ff). Identity is a powerful organizing force, especially in confronting superior power since, according to Rodgers and Staff people have historically secured the survival and development of their communities by creating cultures of resistance which, in turn, inspire specific techniques of struggle and provide the spiritual bulwark against dehumanizing forces (1995: 91). It is an exercise in futility trying to capture the meaning and utility of protest from the perspective actors other than those who actually engaged in them at a given point in time. It is precisely the tendency to disengage the discourse and consciousness of protest from the perspective of ‘outsiders’ that may be responsible for the shortfalls in our knowledge and understanding most interventions. The truth, of course, is that it is only from the perspective of the instigator that we can grasp the instrumentalities of protest. As Vayrynen (1991: 2-3) pointed out, protests can either help political collectivities to defend or expand their interests in a given societal structure, or to express grievances and seek the opening of the political space long foreclosed. It is also by conducting our interrogations from the perspective of the instigators that we can transcend the mystery of the powerless embarking on them with all the hazards.
In much of post-colonial Africa, the public space was characteristically a place of exclusion and marginalisation, of violent struggles, and indeed, a chaotic plurality (Mbembe, Bayart, Ake, 1992: 29-48; Fatton, 1992). Ake added that the intrusive impacts of globalization and the end of the Cold War have created a phenomenal orientational upheaval, anxiety and identity crisis. Rather than help secure the continent, therefore, both phenomena have intensified its insecurity. (1995: 19-42). The seminal works of James S. Scott, Eric R. Wolf, Jeffrey M. Paige, Moore, J.S. Midgal point us in the directions that a peasant population can no longer be viewed as an ‘object of history’ (Skocpol, 1982: 351-375). Whereas Scott linked peasant revolutions to cultural and social-organizational autonomy of peasants to resist the intrusive impacts of hegemony ruling elite; Wolf added that ultimately, the decisive factor in making a peasant rebellion possible lies in the relationship of the peasantry to the field of power which surrounds it. Hence, according to him, a peasant rebellion is most unlikely to start from "a situation of complete impotence". Paige argues that historical realities contradict the principle that "peasants should lack the coherent political organization necessary to oppose landlords’. (p. 365). Midgal insisted that ‘peasants undergoing the most rapid, disruptive exposure to newly penetrating market forces will be the ones most likely to respond to organized political movements that offer solutions to their market-induced woes". (p. 364). Arendt reminded us long time ago but in a broader theoretical context that "violence appears as an alternate to institutionalized political influence- the voice of the voiceless, the ultimate, and often effective insistence of the deprived in being taken into account" (Mitchell, 1996: 156-157).
On the surface, the architecture that sustained the rapacious extraction capabilities of international capital in the Nigerian post-colony, as elsewhere, has transformed at critical historical junctures stimulated largely by the changing global regimes of production and consumption: in the case of the Niger Delta, through the eras of slavery, oil palm and crude oil productions. The truth of the matter, however, is that very little structural changes took place in the appetite for crass accumulation required by the alliance of foreign capital and national elite to reproduce. What is often omitted, once again, is the fact that very little of substance also changed in the nature, character, and behavior of subaltern local forces; either in terms of mobilizing social identities and/or using such identities to engage the contradictions of accumulation. We only need to place the legion of complaints against the monopolistic Royal Niger Company (RNC) by Nembe Brass people of Akassa prior to the attack on the company’s factory in 1895, side by side with those presently by oil communities against multinational oil to appreciate the common strands running through them, almost a Century after. (Davies, 1960; Jones, 1963; Alagoa, 1964).
The Nembe people had complained persistently and bitterly against the closure and control of the lucrative oil market in the hinterland; a situation that triggered economic hardship for the coastal middlemen. Several entreaties and emissaries were made to the company as well as to the colonial administration, including to Consul MacDonald when he returned to establish the government of the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1891. Unfortunately, all these fell on deaf ears until the attack on the RNC depot on January 29, 1895. Three factors finally impelled the chief to take recourse to war. First, the company embarked on series of unprovoked (provocative) attacks on Nembe people of Akassa whether they were carrying trade goods or merely foodstuff. In the process, people were killed and wounded, while the abandoned canoes and their contents were confiscated. Second, the RNC also warned other Ijaw communities not to pay any debts owed to Nembe men. Lastly were evidences that certain company servants taunted the people and treated them brutally, telling them that they would be forced to eat dust. Alagoa also reported an allegation against a Captain Christian, who ordered a woman to be stripped naked and covered with tar. (Alagoa, 1964: 94). In the face of these provocations, the Brass people never hid their disdain for the RNC, openly swearing they will rather die that "eat dust’ as personnel of the company taunt. In many ways, the situation at that time bore close similarities with event in contemporary Niger Delta such that to even suggest that contemporary rebellions lack historical roots, as the conditions of the past are not carried over into the present, may betray a falsified comprehension of history, especially of societies characterized by "severely limited opportunities for indigenous participation in political, economic and cultural affairs". Otherwise, as Welch argued, rebellion will likely occur:
Under conditions of high population density, of social rootlessness resulting from tenancy and violation of subsistence ethic, of traditions of resistance to government exactions, and of means of communicating grievances on the basis of shared values. (Welch, 1995: 3, 31)
There is a well-founded suspicion that past levels of protest increase current protest activities, just as there are established links between repression and the escalation of protest action (Rasler, 1996). It is here that the value of culture, which I define as lived traditions binding people as a result of shared memories of the past and collective destiny for the future, as an instrument for politicized identity mobilization can help us grasp the salient aspects and uniqueness of the protest by women in the Niger Delta. This is pertinently so, since "a culture includes the ‘map of meaning’ which makes things intelligible to its members" (Cited in Kofman and Williams (1989: 1-23). The women of the Niger Delta have a history of resistance against international oil capital. There were smaller revolts of lesser implications that need not detain us here. The major ones included two that occurred in the 1980s: the 1984 Ogharefe women's uprising which took place in the Ethiope local government council, and another in 1986 embarked upon by Ekpan women in Okpe council area. Both communities are predominantly Urhobo ethnic groups, but their protests were impelled by separate immediate circumstances in two different contexts. According to Turner and Oshare (1994: 123-160), oil–based industrialization superimposed on the local political economy of the two communities, a new regime which dispossessed women of access to land. According to them, the template for both initiatives by women was made possible by existing gender solidarity, consciousness and identity. In the light of this, they pursued three broad arguments in greater details. First is that the uprisings were clashes resulting from class formation spurred by oil-based capitalist development. Second is that the gender character of the uprisings followed from changes in gender relations that took place in the process of oil-based capitalist development. Last is that the degree of success enjoyed by women in their struggles reflects both the extent to which peasant relations persisted or were eroded by proletarianization, and the degree to which man acted in solidarity with women. Influenced by Boserup’s (1970: 126) insightful theoretical construct on how the expansion of capitalism marginalized and disempowered women in peripheral social formations, Turner and Oshare, argued that:
"…in Nigeria not only did capitalism break up women’s social order but it also created or strengthened the conditions for resistance. The uprisings are products of capitalist development just as much as is women’s marginalisation".
In 1995, women seized the Odidi oil well owned by Shell in protest against the destruction of economic crops as a result of oil spill over 10 days from oil site. Before now, Chevron has had a far share of corporate embarrassments, like every other oil multinational operating in the Niger Delta. At the peak of the Abacha dictatorship in 1998, the company used its helicopter to fly in Navy personnel and anti-riots policemen, in order to recover boats seized by youths that had laid siege at Parabe platform. In the ensuing fracas, many of the youths sustained severe injuries, while at least two died immediately. Again, less that one week before Christmas 2000, ten Ijaw communities, including Pereore, Esemighan, Belefiegha, Boukri, and Erebi, gave CNL an ultimatum to cease operation and vacate their territories by January 2, 2001, on account of what it claimed to be the corporate irresponsibility for not employing youths from the communities and poor EIA of projects before commencement. More recently there has been the Egi women's revolt that started around Sept 1998 and the Ijaw women who demonstrated in Port Harcourt in January this year. The demands of the former were and are similar to the two previous revolts. In November of the same year, a large assemblage of Egi women gathered in the streets and began marching towards the giant Obite gas plant, the largest in West Africa, operated by the French multinational oil company, ELF. As the women approached the site, a detachment of anti-riot mobile police barricaded the entrance to the company ensuring that all the women could do was to sing and dance as a means of making their message heard. In the end, their demand for one particular senior security personnel of the company be reposted was heeded.
Whereas scholarship has bequeathed such a rich and diverse tradition of persuasive theoretical insights on violence, they have proved grossly insufficient in explaining the recent protest by women in the Niger Delta. Indeed, non-violent and violent protests can no longer be construed as "irrational outbursts" or associational life as having no "predetermined destination" simply because social movements in most developing societies are emerging in the context of the repressive nature of the state, its institutional weaknesses and its vulnerability to external influence and control (Fatton, 1992: 6; Jenkins, 1995). Galtung developed the linkage between culture and violence further in his thesis on "cultural violence" defined as "those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence…that can be used to justify or legitimize direct and structural violence". (p. 39). The exploitation of basic needs, according to him, is the root source of the prevalent and archetypal violent structure through which consciousness formation and mobilization are impeded. Exploitation come in four different patterns: penetration, that is, implanting topdog inside underdog; segmentation, that is, giving underdog only a partial view of what obtains; marginalization, keeping the underdog outside; and finally, fragmentation, that is, keeping the underdog away from each other (1999: 42). Earlier, Galtung captured the conditions of structural violence in which the poor are denied decent and dignified lives because their basic physical and mental capacities are constrained by hunger, poverty, inequality, marginalization, and exclusion. (Galtung, 1969; Uvin, 2000). Incidentally, these aspects of exploitation are so deep and widespread in the gender domain in Nigeria’s Delta region.
Conclusions
Despite the restoration of civilian rule after a long and tiring period of autocratic praetorianism, the widespread crisis of authority which arises when people lose faith in the existing social, economic and political order authority crisis have not changed in any fundamental way (Rosenau, 1995: 195). Only recently, Human Rights Watch warned that the end of military rule in Nigeria has brought little benefit to the people living in the oil producing communities of the Niger Delta. According to the Organization, the level of discontent among the inhabitants of the ND remain very high leading to frequent protests against oil companies and government. Rather than minimize, violent protests and conflicts have intensified in various parts of the country since the inauguration of the Fourth Republic under the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidency. Beginning from May 29, 1999 when the inauguration ceremonies was taking place in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, various ethnic factions in Warri were up in arms against one another- as usual over the question of ownership of the oil-rich city. In another case, the administration demonstrated how it planned to react to the surge of violent conflicts in the oil delta when it ordered troops to raze down the village of Odi, close to Yenogoa, the capital of Bayelsa State, as a reprisal for the killing of seven soldiers by bandits terrorizing the village and its neighbours. (Ukeje, 2001a). It is such insensitivities and lack of concrete policy responses on the part of government that underscore the plausibility of the view that acts of protest tend to escalate into violent conflicts because official responses are more likely to be diversionary, repressive, than reformist. (Gurr, 1995: 215).
Yet, more than any other time in Nigeria’s post-independence political history, the present civilian administration of President Obasanjo has a good chance of alleviating the myriad plights of oil communities in the delta region. But that will require demonstrating genuine political will to tackle the problems. The new government had taken one step in the right direction as contained in a Note Verbale reference 127/2000 to the 28th session of the Commission held in Cotonou, Benin, admitting that gross violations of human rights were committed by past regimes and a lot of atrocities are still being committed in the Niger Delta. But there is no question that the government must translate this acknowledgement into concrete restitutions to oil communities who continue to suffer the debilitating effects of crude oil exploitation and state repression to secure this important accumulative regime. Unfortunately, there is a gaping shortfall in terms of translating public rhetoric into concrete socio-economic mileage for the oil communities as witnessed, for instance, by the way government authorized the military punishment for Odi village in Yenogoa. Also, there are genuine complaints that the much-celebrated institutional framework for the integrated development of the oil basin, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), may suffer the same fate as its predecessors- the Niger Delta Development Board (NDDB) and the Oil Minerals Producing and Development Commission (OMPADEC). It would seem that this new creation is another ‘job for the boys’ as there are complaints that the NDDC is another institutionalized framework for patronage; and that it does not have much to show for the huge sums of money earmarked for it.
There will remain, for long, a major debate over whether the separate protest by Itsekiri and Ijaw women were merely spontaneous and coincidental, or demonstrative of an attempt to forge a pan-ND alliance across the six oil producing states. It is still noteworthy that women (and hopefully, communities) are uniting to fight a common cause irrespective of festering sub-ethnic differences; they are strong indications that the lessons from the recent protests may soon be broadened to cover more grounds. Already, Lagos-based Vanguard newspapers, recently reported an on-going consultations among various women leaders in oil communities across the ND to stage a week-long co-coordinated protest on all oil installations in the six major oil producing states of the Niger-Delta. The main objective of this pan-Niger Delta, according to the paper, will be to paralyze completely oil exploration activities in the Niger-Delta, peacefully. Much doubts have been raised regarding the staying power of new social movements of the nature that are emerging on the oil region. In a broad social context, Amin (1993: 87) has criticized them as "symptoms of the crisis, not solutions to it, and exclusively products of disillusionment. They will eventually lose steam as they reveal their powerlessness in the face of real challenges". Despite this note of caution, a popular idiom among oil inhabitants suggest a wise counsel and caution on the part of government and multinational oil companies in the face of renewed protests by women (and communities) in the oil delta of Nigeria. It emphatically enjoins a man to run for his dear life any morning he wakes up and sees fowl pursuing him, because he does not know if the fowl grew teeth overnight!
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