[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.One study suggested thatwhile 17 million people lived below the poverty line of less than onedollar per day in 1980, that number almost quadrupled by 1996.In rela-tive terms, 27 per cent of Nigerians lived in poverty in 1980, but in 1996,two-thirds of the population were below the poverty line, rising toalmost 70 per cent in rural areas.Rural impoverishment was also associated with an apparent shiftfrom the politics of manipulating the peasantry to the politics ofsuppressing them.An early instance was the elected Shagari govern-ment s uncaring and violent response in 1980 to peasant protestsagainst the Bakalori irrigation scheme in Sokoto State.The governmentresponse to protests by rural communities in the Niger Delta, whentheir interests conflicted with those of the petroleum industry, was evenmore brutal.[ 59 ] OIL WARSThe national question and the betrayal of minorities: state creation,ethnic tinkering and revenue allocation16Identity politics and ethnic conflict preceded military rule, the civil warand the oil boom.But they were reshaped and intensified by all three.Even before independence in 1960, state and nation building involvedthe articulation and reconciliation of many shifting layers of national,regional, ethnic, local and religious identity.17 The undiminished salienceof ethnicity and religion has reflected a search for a moral compass in asociety in permanent upheaval, where development and oil havewreaked havoc on values as well as livelihoods.18 At the same time iden-tities have been mobilised in competition for political power, patronage,commercial advantage and access to land, oil and other assets.Under military rule, federalism was a somewhat fictitious concept,with military power conflicting with the underlying realities of amultinational, multi-religious and multi-ethnic society.Nigeria sregimes were constantly manipulating the structure and rules of thefederal system.On the eve of the civil war, the Gowon military govern-ment changed the federal structure of the country from four regions totwelve states.Two of these, the Rivers and South-East States, cateredfor minorities in the Niger Delta, which until then had formed part ofthe Eastern Region.The latter, which had declared itself the State ofBiafra in May 1967, had been composed of the Igbo as the dominantethnic group, with two-thirds of the population, and several ethnicminorities.Most of these minorities, including the Ijaw, Efik, Ibibio andOgoni, cast their lot with the federal government during the war.19Their leaders included the Ogoni militant Ken Saro-Wiwa.The creationof new states not only detached minorities from the Biafran cause butalso placed the bulk of Niger Delta petroleum resources outside Igbo-controlled areas, undermining the secessionist claim that petroleumcould assure Biafra s viability as a state.After the civil war the military government moved to secure a firmgrip over crude oil reserves and to reverse the centrifugal tendenciesthe war had brought to a head.The proportion of oil revenues allocatedto states on the basis of derivation was reduced step by step, fromaround 50 per cent at the time of the civil war, to 30 per cent in 1970, 25per cent in 1977, 5 per cent in 1981 and a mere 1.5 per cent by 1984.Thebulk of the revenues were appropriated by the federal governmentitself, reaching 57 per cent by 1977, with the rest being distributedamong the states according to complex calculations based on equalityamong states, population and need.State creation also focused ethnic politics squarely around petro-leum and the sharing of oil revenues.There was a groundswell ofdemands for new states to be created and for boundary controversiesarising from state creation to be settled.Starting with the creation of[ 60 ] NIGERIAseven more states in 1976, successive adjustments increased thenumber of states to the current 36, plus the Federal Capital Territory.Yet none of this benefited the peoples and communities of the NigerDelta, who felt they were short-changed by state creation and therevenue allocation system.Indeed they came to see themselves as thereal losers from the civil war, all the more so as they bore the brunt ofthe environmental damage and social disruption caused by petroleumexploitation.Nor were they assuaged by later adjustments to increasethe share of petroleum revenues allocated to development in the NigerDelta to 3 per cent in 1992 and 13 per cent under the 1999 Constitu-tion since much of the money went to specially created agencies forthe development of the delta, which were mired in the corruption andinefficiency of the military regime.Far from destroying the power blocsof Nigeria s dominant majorities, the restructured federal system recon-solidated their ascendancy at the centre.Subdivision into differentstates only increased their share of government patronage, funded(through the revenue allocation system) by oil revenues.The North sgrip on the federal state was indeed tightened under the Buhari,Babangida and Abacha military administrations.In sum, state creation and revenue allocation reinforced perceivedregional disparities in the distribution of government spending, jobs,welfare and influence.This accelerated the political mobilisation ofNigeria s ethnic nationalities, including the minorities in oil-producingareas, and the rise of ethnic politics.As the new states often bisectedethnic communities, this laid the basis for future conflicts across andwithin state boundaries
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]