APCJ_1528_Win2010_00i_122_4 12/30/10 3:22 PM Page 33 Oil, Politics, and Conflict in the Niger Delta 33 and environmental rights groups against the government and oil companies began to turn particularly violent in the early 1990s, leading to killings grounded in the delta region’s social, economic, psychological, political, and cultural conditions.3 This dynamic is exemplified by the struggles of the Ogoni people, who demanded repeal of national laws that denied economic and environmental rights to oil-producing communities. Not surprisingly, oil increasingly became the basis of analyses of the political economy of conflict in the Niger Delta and development in Nigeria. It is estimated that the Nigerian government has earned more than $600 billion in revenues from oil since 1957; in 2005, it earned $45 billion from it, or approximately 80 percent of the country’s overall revenue that year. The sale of oil represented 95 percent of Nigeria’s total export revenue in 2009.4 Despite the huge sums accruing from the oil sector, social and economic conditions of residents in the Niger Delta have remained deplorable. Basic social services—such as the provision of electricity, safe drinking water, and access to affordable education and medical care—are largely negligible, leading John Agbonifo to proffer that ‘the link between dispossession, environmental degradation, political marginalisation and the perception of injustice provides the context within which to understand spiralling violence in the region’.5 Augustine Ikelegbe, agrees, asserting that criminal and state violence and resistance by local communities in the Niger Delta flow from years of neglect in the face of intense exploitation and the destructive political economy of oil.6 Nonkilling theory is a framework for research and action in which a conscious effort is made to explain or understand practices, policies, institutions, cultures, politics, and behaviours that promote killing of human and non-humans in society and to assess what is needed to transition from a killing state to a nonkilling one. The theory is a framework for action in the sense that it should guide policy and the cultural, political, and socio-economic behaviour of individuals and institutions towards creating a nonkilling society. Such a society should be devoid not only of killing, but also of political violence, injustice, hunger, poverty, and so on. The lack of vision or rejection of such a society on the part of citizens, groups, and governments is reflected in the frequency of the choice of violence as a means for resolving conflict. Violent behaviours can easily lead to death, so there is no denying that the concept of nonkilling is relevant to the broader conceptual issues of conflict prevention and conflict management to stop conflicts from escalating to violence and to reduce violence when it occurs.7 The application of nonkilling as an analytical tool in understanding or analysing politics, the oil economy, social relations, or the conflict in the 3. Loss of non-human life—that is, wildlife and flora—due to the activities of oil companies operating in the Niger Delta had long been an issue. 4. Agbonifo, ‘Oil, insecurity and subversive patriots’, 72. 5. Augustine I. Ikelegbe, ‘Socio-economic environmental challenges and the quest for sustainable development in Nigeria’s oil rich Niger Delta: A commentary’, Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa, 6:1 (2004), www.jsd-africa.com/Jsda/spring2004/articlepdf/Arc%20-%20Ikein%202.pdf. 6. Augustine I. Ikelegbe, ‘Civil society, oil and conflict in the Niger Delta: Ramifications of civil society for regional resource struggle’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 39:3 (2001), 437–69. 7. See Moolakkattu Stephen John, ‘The concept and practice of conflict prevention: A critical reappraisal’, International Studies, 42:1 (2005), 4.