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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Obasanjo, Oil-Politics and the Dramaturgy of State Terror in Nigeria.
| Panel |
61. Autochtony, citizenship and exclusion - struggles over resources and belonging
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| Paper ID | 19 |
| Author(s) |
Tam-George, Austin
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | The Niger Delta region of Nigeria continues to generate a consensus of concern among developmental and activist scholars as one focal site in which transnational business profit stands side by side with horrendous social and cultural death. For nearly half a century, transnational oil corporations devastate the local ecology while prospecting for oil, while the protests organized by minority oil-bearing communities are brutally quelled by a state entirely dependent on petro-dollar rent. But for the state and for business political and operational risks rise phenomenally as more and more communities and groups dramatize refusal in ways that leave more dead bodies in the streets and creeks of the region.
In this paper, i examine the synonymic connection between Nigeria's petro-dollar modernity and its social and cultural deaths. In particular, i examine the roles of transnational capitalism and the state under Obasanjo as cardinal forces in the creation of death and siege in the region. Since communities and groups use demonstrations, rallies, seizures of oil platforms and hostage-taking as ways of narrativizing communal resistance, i also analyse how these strategies function as rational agencies for the articulation of an alternative Nigerian modernity. My aim throughout this paper will be to examine how oil as a power resource is gained and lost and appropriated and then struggled over by state and non-state forces in Nigeria. |
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