COMPLETE SCHOOL PROJECT TOPICS & MATERIALS :
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Abstract
The major purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of the amnesty programme by Nigerian government to the Niger Delta militants on crude oil exploration in Niger Delta and also, look at the implication to crises management in public relations. Six research questions and two hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. This study utilizes the ex post facto and historical research designs. Data on Crude oil production, export and prices by NNPC from 1961 to 2010 were collected for the study. The data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics. One-tailed test was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The major finding of the study was that immediately after the amnesty program, the crude oil production appreciated by 181 million barrels in 2010 and this increase amounted to $14.659 billion or N 2.2 trillion. It was concluded that the amnesty programme had significant improvement on the level of crude oil exploration and on the level of revenue generated from crude oil from Niger Delta region. (1) It was recommended that the government and the oil multinationals should use every public relations and crises management strategy to rebuild, sustain and maintain peace in the Niger Delta region as this will guarantee steady growth in oil revenue. (2) The government and the oil multinationals should be transparent and accountable enough and ensure participatory development schemes that should foster development in the Niger Delta communities. (3) The Niger Delta crisis requires a negotiated political resolution as any attempt to use military solution would always be disastrous for residents and risky for the oil industry. Most facilities are in the maze of creeks and rivers that are particularly vulnerable to raids by well-armed militants with intimate knowledge of the terrain. (4) Greater effort should be made to stop illegal oil “bunkering” as it accelerates the conflict and provides militant and criminal groups with funds to purchase arms. (5) To encourage faster development of Niger Delta and in an effort to deflect growing public impatience, government should spend, more than ever, greater amounts on community projects. The Oil industries should also contribute to greater extent to the development of the region and should not leave the developmental efforts to the government alone.
CHAPTER ONE:
INTRODUCTION
1.2 Background of the Study
Prior to the discovery of crude oil in the Niger Delta, the area had been very peaceful. The residents were mainly engaged in agriculture and fishing. But the discovery of crude oil and its subsequent elevation as the basic or major resources of the nation, Nigeria, created problems to the inhabitants of the Niger Delta, especially those communities from whose land the oil is tapped and those whose means of livelihood come from fishing. As the federal government of Nigeria received huge royalties from the oil companies, and the oil companies themselves, as well as their workers swim in affluence while the oil communities wallow in abject poverty in addition to contending with environmental degradation and pollution. This situation over the years had propelled and provoked strong agitation and upheaval in the Niger Delta region. The contention has always been between the oil communities in one hand and the oil multinationals and the federal government of Nigeria in the other hand.
However, the Niger Delta crisis was multifaceted. The root cause of this crisis is traceable to the collective failure and neglect of the region by the federal government of Nigeria, the Niger Delta state governments and the multinational oil corporations. They failed to bring about rapid socioeconomic development to the region over the decades, beginning from the time crude oil was found in the region. Thus the Niger Delta crisis is reducible to underdevelopment of the region. The region has been clamouring for fair compensation and revenue allocation from oil extracted from their land.
Oil revenue allocation had been the subject of much contention well before Nigeria gained its independence. As shown in Table 1, allocations had varied from as much as 50%, owing to the First Republic’s high degree of regional autonomy, and as low as 10% during the military dictatorships. In practice, 85% of the oil wealth was retained by Nigerian elites who comprise 1% of the population. It is important to note that petroleum industry is the largest industry and main generator of GDP in Nigeria. Since the British discovered oil in the Niger Delta in the late 1950s, the oil industry has been marred by political and economic strife largely due to a long history of corrupt military regimes and complicity of multinational corporations, notably Royal Dutch Shell. Despite this, it was not until the early 1990s that the situation was given international attention, particularly following the murder by the Nigerian state of playwright and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, provoking the immediate suspension of Nigeria from the Commonwealth of Nations. During that time, Nigeria was identified by the international community as well as the firms in operation therein as a major concern with regards to human rights and environmental degradation. Also, the Nigerian government, oil corporations, and oildependent Western countries were criticized for being too slow to implement reforms aimed at aiding a desperately under-developed area and remediating the unsustainable environmental degradation that petroleum extraction has wrought in Niger Delta region (Wikipedia, 2010b). Table 1.1 Showing the Oil Revenue Sharing Formula in Nigeria
Year Federal State* Local Special Projects Derivation Formula**
1958 40% 60% 0% 0% 50%
1968 80% 20% 0% 0% 10%
1977 75% 22% 3% 0% 10%
1982 55% 32.5% 10% 2.5% 10%
1989 50% 24% 15% 11% 10%
1995 48.5% 24% 20% 7.5% 13%
2001 48.5% 24% 20% 7.5% 13%
Source: World Bank Report cited in Wikipedia (2010 a).
- State allocations are based on 5 criteria: equality (equal shares per state), population, social development, land mass, and revenue generation.
**The derivation formula refers to the percentage of the revenue oil producing states retain from taxes on oil and other natural resources produced in the state (World Bank Report cited in Wikipedia, 2010 a)
According to Wikipedia (2010b), the leadership of the Niger Delta region were also responsible for most of the underdevelopment in the region. There is large scale corruption amongst the elected leaders especially governors and these leaders have helped to sponsor the militant groups who kidnap innocent people and sabotage the efforts by the federal government for any infrastructure development.
These indicted corrupt leaders were also cheered by the Niger Delta people. It is also important to note, as observed by Abidde (2009) that the bloody battle in the Niger Delta is a battle over resource control. It is actually a power struggle between mercenaries of the oligarchy in Nigeria fighting over control of illegal oil bunkering in the oil rich states of the Niger Delta. Abidde (2009) asserted that both the serving and retired top military officers were actively engaged in the criminal operation of illegal oil bunkering and the Nigerian Navy cannot deny this fact, because the tankers and barges used for illegal oil bunkering were not invisible in the territorial waters of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
These people in oil bunkering were ruthless in their greed for political power and money that they have usurped the rights of the host communities and took over the reins of power in government to control the Nigerian Armed Forces and ruling party to plunder the mineral resources in the country. They shared the oil blocks and engage in do or die battle to sustain their illegal oil bunkering business which fetches over $20 million in return every day (Abidde, 2009). Regional analysts have warned that oil bunkering and the deteriorating situation in the Niger Delta poses a major threat to international security. In an effort to stop this ugly situation, some Policy wonks (experts in matters of policy) in Washington DC had been pushing the Obama administration to seek an international consensus on policies to help the impoverished Niger Delta region through a more effective Gulf of Guinea Energy Security Strategy in close collaboration with the United Nations, the World Bank, and other key stakeholders engaged with Nigeria (Huhuonline.com, 2010).
For the past two decades, Niger Delta was in the eyes of the storm over the emergence of militant groups and criminal gangsters that held the country to ransom from the Niger Delta region. Historically, the sinister hydra-headed monster of the militant insurgency and criminality grew from the hitherto struggle for resource control by the Niger Delta leaders and people who used the struggle to make various political demands on the Nigerian State for the physical development of the region. But the so-called militants and criminals capitalized upon this political struggle of the people to launch their own sinister and violent agenda. Gradually, the rather peaceful political struggle for resource control degenerated into violent agitations by the various militant insurgent groups that emerged to take over the struggle.
This began the era of unprecedented and consistent violent campaign against the Nigerian State through numerous attacks on the oil industrial facilities (the life-wire of the national economy as at present) such as pipelines, flow stations, oil platforms and others; kidnapping of foreign oil workers and non-oil workers alike (assaulting and harming others in the process); demanding and taking of heavy ransoms from the State Governments and individual in that region, families of the victims and other stakeholders were forced to pay these ransoms in order to secure the lives of the victims; accumulation and proliferation of small, light and medium weapons (illegal possession of firearms); rising in insurrection and levying war by proxy against the Nigerian State by killing military and police personnel at intervals; carving out of safe havens out of the sovereign territories of the State to carry out their nefarious activities such as imposition of terror, extortions and collection of illegal levies and taxies from the local communities as well as illegal collection of rents and royalties from oil and gas companies operating in the region; etc. All these constitute grave criminal offences according to the 1999 Constitution, the existing Criminal Code and the various laws governing the oil industry of which punishment ranges from fines, life imprisonment and even death penalty.
Chukwu (2009) writes that the federal government floated the amnesty option in its search for a solution to the Niger Delta crisis. The measure was in itself a big venture with several rough sides, especially in view of the defiant posturing of some of the militant leaders and their claim that the region deserves compensation having for long been on the receiving end. It is regrettable that the Late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua signed a historic agreement with his Russian counterpart Dimitriv
Medvedev in Abuja on Wednesday June 24, 2009, for Gazprom to invest $2.5 billion to pipe gas from
Nigeria to Europe via the Sahara Desert. But the next day, the most dreaded militant group in the Niger Delta vowed to render the deal useless, except some conditions were met, thereby raising doubts on who has the final say on oil and gas decisions in Nigeria.
Chukwu (2009) also maintained that for many years, the federal government had tried to subdue the militants, from Warri to Yenagoa, Port Harcourt to Uyo, etc, but the more the Joint Task Force (JTF) tried to fight the war, the more oil is lost. Both military and political leaders in the region said the situation needed political solution, meaning a form of dialogue. It is believed that every dialogue leads to an agreement. The militants say they were fighting because of lack of economic and infrastructural developments in the region, but the federal government of Nigeria said militancy had made it impossible to begin the much-needed development, a situation that has brought Nigeria to the dreaded vicious circle. The federal government needed funds to meet the needs of Nigerians but the militants said they require the needs of their region met before they would allow the federal government to get the oil funds. To break the vicious circle, the Government floated the amnesty option. This was expected to persuade the militants to lay down their arms and the Government to use the peace to earn quick income to begin economic development.
As a result of this insurgency in the Niger Delta, Chukwu (2009) maintained that the nation had been losing billions of dollars and that was why Yar’Adua made the Niger Delta crisis one of his key agenda for rapid response when he assumed office on May 29, 2009. Yar’Adua before his sudden death made serious effort to restore peace and order in the Niger Delta. He began by appointing a 45-man technical committee on 8 September 2008, led by Ledum Mitee, a lawyer and president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), among other credible members. The committee was mandated to collate, review and distil all previous reports, memorandums and submissions relating to the Niger Delta issues from the 1957 Sir Henry Willinks Commission through the 2002 General Ogomudia Panel to the 2007 Niger Delta Peace and Conflict Resolution Committee. The President wanted the committee to harmonise the recommendations of the various committees and make suggestions necessary for the Government to take urgent action. The Technical Committee was the government’s most promising effort to develop a coherent, long-term strategy in the Niger Delta. Dr Goodluck Jonathan, who was Vice President then, pledged that the committee recommendations “will not be treated with levity”. It was widely believed that the government would adopt those recommendations as its definitive roadmap for resolving the Niger Delta crisis.
However, at first it was as if considerable success would not be achieved as an early attempt to convene a Delta summit was aborted due to local opposition. The proposal on May 2008 that militants be incorporated as security companies so they could be hired to guard pipelines and other oil installations met with public scepticism and militants’ rejection and never got off the ground. Creation of the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs in September 2008 initially drew mixed reactions, coupled with low funding in the 2009 budget, and vague division of responsibilities with the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) in addition to unclear guiding principles, raised doubt in the mind of the publics.
The Technical Committee report recommended amnesty for militant leaders within a comprehensive demobilisation, disarmament and rehabilitation (DDR) program; an increased allocation of oil revenue to the Delta; urgent improvement of infrastructure and human welfare services; and new institutions for the region’s longer-term development. While it did not address all aspects of the crisis, its proposals were sufficiently comprehensive to serve as a catalyst. The Technical Committee also urged the government to issue a White Paper by 1 January 2009 outlining strategies for rapid implementation of its recommendations. All stakeholders concerned with the destiny of the region were also, called upon to show determination and sincerity of purpose towards ensuring lasting development to the people of the Niger Delta region. This was believed to be the ultimate solution to the crisis in the Niger Delta and against this background I wish to state the problem.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
The discovery and the actual exploitation of crude oil in the Niger Delta have obviously brought drastic changes in all aspects of human lives in the region. The deplorable state of economic, political and ecological lives of the inhabitants of Niger Delta is unimaginable. Specifically, the poor human security (basic needs), lack of infrastructures, wanton environmental damages, theft and unjust distribution of revenue from the sale of oil, violence, underdevelopment, the perceived apathy on the part of the government and the multinational oil companies and failure to establish credible state and local government institutions had contributed to increasing public frustration at the slow pace of change under the country’s nascent democracy, and this is caused by endemic corruption and misadministration inherited from its military predecessors. These various facts contributed to what became known as the Niger Delta Crisis.
Over the years or in the past decades the region had been engulfed in unprecedented crises. These crises ranges from communal clashes; disruption of flow stations and pipelines; disruption of business activities of oil companies; military incursion; obstruction of movements in major land and sea ways; attack on oil workers; and oil bunkering. With time, the conflict graduated to low intensity conflict which is a condition characterized by assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, and mutual destruction of interests. In fact the region became a war zone between the militant youths from Niger Delta and the military force of the Federal Government. Niger Delta became very hostile for oil business activities and many oil wells were abandoned. Subsequently, there was a great drop in quantity of barrels of oil produced by the oil companies on daily basis and generally, life in Niger Delta region became deplorable. In view of these multifarious challenges the Federal Government of Nigeria under the leadership of President Umaru Yar’Adua embarked on an ambitious move to end armed insurgency in the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta region.