APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 36 36 AFRICA PEACE AND CONFLICT JOURNAL CONFLICT IN THE NIGER DELTA Given oil’s importance to the Nigerian economy, it is not difficult to understand the desire of the government and oil companies to protect the energy sector. Eleven companies operate 1,481 oil wells and 159 oil fields, pleasing shareholders and helping sustain the state through huge revenues.19 The problem with this scenario is that key actors in the oil business and national political system have failed to ask if killing or conditions that lead to it increase or lessen the value of oil to the state. Does oil influence the shape of politics in ways that lead to killing? Can oil-related violent conflict lead to killing? The relationship between oil and killing is manifest at various levels in the delta. Government security forces have killed members of armed groups challenging the oil companies and state security personnel. The corporations and the government are being confronted by armed groups for various perceived injustices, political underrepresentation, environmental despoliation, and the general failure by the government to develop the Niger Delta. In addition, local gang members and members of armed local justice and environmental groups, such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, have been involved in killing. Hazardous health conditions, criminal activities, and frustrations stemming from the economic and environmental situation have contributed to the early deaths of some residents. A non-physical form of killing flows from the psychological effects of the negative environmental impact of the oil industry’s activities on local communities and destruction of livelihoods, complicating the already difficult conditions of poverty. According to one of the voices from the field, ‘The oil companies neglect what happens to the land as long as they are mining oil. Oil mining results in death, gradual death, for the dispossessed local people. Government is slow to respond to the effects of oil mining’.20 Despite the immense importance of oil production to the Nigerian state, the oil companies, and Niger Deltans, the resource has been volatile in terms of the politics and violence involved in its regulation. Since the 1990s, resistance against destruction of the environment and the distribution of only limited or inadequate benefits from the exploitation of oil has led to state and non-state violence resulting in a number of deaths.21 Attacks on oil companies and government security personnel as well as hostage taking and killings were routinely carried out by armed groups operating under the umbrella of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. The credibility of claims by some involved in fighting for development and against environmental despoliation in this group was doubted by many, as they were at the same time vandalising pipelines and killing members of rival groups seeking to control the illegal sales of stolen oil, colloquially referred to as condescent. Their attacks appear to have had the more devastating effect on the Nigerian state because 19. Agbonifo, ‘Oil, insecurity and subversive patriots’, 72. 20. Interview, Celestine Akpobari, Bori, 5 May 2010. Akpobari is the national coordinator of the Ogoni Solidarity Forum. Also see Fidelis Allen, ‘Implementation of oil-related environmental policy in Nigeria: Government inertia and conflict in the Niger Delta’ (PhD diss., University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2010), 204. 21. An Ijaw group led by Jasper Isaac Boro had been the first to revolt against the federal government, in the 1960s. Jasper and his colleagues had been infuriated by what they saw as the injustice in the federal government’s failure to develop the Niger Delta region, where oil had just become a key revenue earner for the state.