The political economy of the Niger Delta struggle [Speech by Amaechi]

Sunday Tribune

19 December 2010

The political economy of the Niger Delta struggle [Speech by Amaechi]

Governor Amaechi delivered this abridged lecture at the 2010 Chinua Achebe Colloquium, Department of Africana Studies, Brown University, Rhode Island, United States of America, held at the Marriot hotel, Downtown Providence recently.

IT is a most apt opportunity for me to pay tribute to Professor Chinua Achebe who is easily one of the greatest Africans of the last and present centuries. It is easy to relate to the career of this great African from the more obvious angle of his engaging literary works...

The Niger Delta and the Nigerian Crisis.

Oil has destroyed the economy and by extension the life of the people of not only the Niger Delta but also the larger Nigerian nation. With a population of 155 million, Nigeria has a GDP of $248 billion. Per capita income is $1,600 which, when adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity, would be about $2,400. These figures place Nigeria among the poorest countries of the world. But the nation produces an average of 2.2 million barrels of oil a day and a total of 32.8 cubic metres of gas.

This is in addition to vast acres of arable land, a fairly favourable climate for agriculture and fields of solid minerals. A most invaluable asset is a vibrant mostly young population of highly entrepreneurial people which is both a potential market and an unstoppable engine of production and economic development.

Both Nigeria’s poverty and survival remain a puzzle to outside observers. Our poverty is easier to explain. It can be put down to one single word: corruption as a national theology. The Nigeria political class and the business elite do not and have never related to Nigeria as collective patrimony and enduring legacy. They have related to the nation and its resources instead as an extractive colony. Like the colonialists before them, successive administrations take what they can and leave the nation bare only for the next generation to continue the tradition of mindless but seemingly authorized expropriation.

The result translates into very embarrassing statistics. Of our 155 million people, an estimated 70 per cent live in abject poverty, surviving on the now assumed $1 dollar a day. In 2005-2006, over 70 % of Nigerians, an estimated 90 million people were among the poorest in the world, coming after China and India. Life expectancy is a frightening 47 years which places Nigeria in the 216th position in the world. Our death rate is one of the highest in the world at 16.56 per 1000. Both infant mortality and maternal mortality rates in Nigeria remain among the highest in the world.

What may be more puzzling to outsiders is the survival of the Nigerian state in spite of these crippling statistics and obvious contradictions. Nigeria is held together by a network of age old linkages along social, cultural and economic lines. More importantly, oil money funds the profligacy of the state and has created a virtual political industry peopled by national political elite that owes its privileges and wealth to their relative easy access to oil money. The bond forged by oil money is so strong that none would think of upsetting the apple cart.

Even in the present pseudo democratic context, the mandate of most of our politicians does not necessarily derive from the people. Nor does the electorate make any serious demands on the political elite because, strictly speaking, it is not their tax money that sustains them in power.