Abstract
Oil is contributing to Nigeria’s failure in six main ways. First, its extraction undermines the quality of life and standards of living of tens of thousands of Niger Delta residents. The unsightly pipes, noisy pumping stations, frequent oil spills and constant gas flaring create an unpleasant and unhealthy environment to live in. Many of the streams and springs that provide drinking water are polluted. Much of the food produced locally is contaminated. The number of cases of certain types of cancer and respiratory illness are higher than the national averages. And the traditional industries of farming and fishing are in decline due to the damage caused to agricultural land and fish stocks leading to the impoverishment of those who work in them.
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Notes
Cited in Andy Rowell, James Marriott and Lorne Stockman, The Next Gulf (London: Constable, 2005), p. 105.
This term is perhaps the least common and, unlike all the others, relates to Nigeria alone. It is used by William D. Graf, The Nigerian State (London: James Currey, 1988), p. 223.
Coined in the late 1970s by the Economist magazine to explain the collapse of manufacturing in the Netherlands following its discovery of natural gas a decade earlier, the term ‘Dutch Disease’ refers to those instances when a country suffers from exchange rate problems resulting from its sudden overdependence on the export of a single commodity usually an unrefined or unprocessed natural resource of some description. John Ghazvinian, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil (London: Harcourt, 2007), pp. 96–98.
Nicholas Shaxson, Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 6.
Paul D. Williams, War and Conflict in Africa (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), p. 5.
Tim Niblock, Saudi Arabia: Power, Legitimacy and Survival (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006), p. 70.
Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 223.
Peter Lewis, ‘Getting the Politics Right: Governance and Economic Failure in Nigeria’, in Robert Rotberg (ed.), Crafting the New Nigeria: Confronting the Challenges (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004), p. 99.
David Moffat and Olof Lindén, ‘Perception and Reality: Assessing Priorities for Sustainable Development in the Niger River Delta’, Ambio (A Journal of the Human Environment), December 1995, Vol. 24, No. 7–8, p. 532.
The amounted quoted by Kew and Phillips was 1.5 million tons. Darren Kew and David L. Phillips, ‘Seeking Peace in the Niger Delta: Oil, Natural Gas and Other Vital Resources’, New England Journal of Public Policy, 2007, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 159–160. The author has converted this to barrels to facilitate comparison with the other figures cited. The author used BP’s conversion formula of 1 ton equalling 8.5 barrels. The formula can be found at BP, 1999 – 2012, available at http://www.bp.com/conversionfactors.jsp (accessed 8 March 2012).
Environmental Resources Managers Ltd, Niger Delta Environmental Survey Final Report Phase I; Volume I: Environmental and Socio-Economic Characteristics (Lagos: Niger Delta Environmental Survey, 1997), p. 263.
Toyin Falola and Matthew M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 183–184.
Hazem Beblawi, ‘The Rentier State in the Arab World’, in Giacomo Luciani (ed.) The Arab State (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 87–88.
Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 116.
John Campbell, Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink, (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2011), p. 26.
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© 2012 J.N.C. Hill
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Hill, J.N.C. (2012). Fuel to the Flames: Oil and Political Violence in Contemporary Nigeria. In: Nigeria Since Independence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292049_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137292049_5
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