Hobson's Choice

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Oil Worker Strike in Nigeria

November 1, 2004

The decision by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) to strike against Royal Dutch Shell is no trivial matter. The strike promises to be bitter, deadly, and devastating for a country long tottering on the brink of political implosion. Scheduled to begin after the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan (16 Nov; BBC, AP, Reuters), the strike targets the 2nd largest oil company on earth; yet the goal is to reduce the retail price of gasoline to 44 naira/liter ($1.30/gallon; it's now about $1.60/gallon). Nigeria is the 13th largest oil producer (Iraq is 14th), and traditionally oil exports have been very heavily subsidized.

Strikes against the oil industry of Nigeria have usually been motivated at least as much by a desire to control the oil or its polluting effects, as to increase the wages of the employees. This strike will be the 2nd in as many months in response to the retail gasoline price increase (BBC).

Nigeria is a nation whose outlook has been profoundly grim over the last several decades. On my lap is a book by Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent: a Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, 1996; here is Karl Maier's This House has Fallen, 2000. Most recently, Chinua Achebe, the best-known writer in Africa, rejected a high honor from the nation's president because he was exasperated that nothing had improved (hat tip to Mr. Lapite). Mr. Lapite himself has some extremely harsh words for the role of Shell Oil in the country.¹

Exactly why is Nigeria such a mess? I admit I have never set foot in Nigeria, and I want to remind readers that the information that follows is second hand. However, I was interested in the opinions of some Nigerians on the subject. So let's begin with Mr. Lapite, "Ethnic Conflict and the Nigerian Dilemma" (6 Jan '04). A few minutes ago my wife (who has been to West Africa, albeit not to Nigeria) diagnosed it as an arbitrary hodgepodge of ethnicities, thrown together by British imperialism. He explains this in very compelling terms: the Hausa & Fulani (39 million), the Yoruba (29 million), and the Igbo (25 million). These three groups comprise 68% of the national total, and they typically form unstable coalitions (e.g., Hausa-Fulani & Yoruba versus the Igbo during the mid-60's to the 70's). That leaves the remaining 32%, who are divided amongst some 250 ethnic groups (see map). According to Mr. Lapite, this is a more extreme variation than India, home to 7.8 times as many people; and most of the population of India is unified by the Indo-Dardic language group, Hinduism, and a shared cultural tradition. Nigeria, in short, has none of the prerequisites for nationhood.

He mentions Frederick Lugard. This Library of Congress article seems to bear out what Mr. Lapite says:

During his six-year tenure as high commissioner (1900-1906), Lugard was occupied with transforming the commercial sphere of influence inherited from the Royal Niger Company... His objective was to conquer the entire region ...[his] campaign ...subdued local resistance, using armed force when diplomatic measures failed... Lugard's success in northern Nigeria has been attributed to his policy of indirect rule, which called for governing the protectorate through the rulers who had been defeated. If the emirs ... cooperated with British officials in modernizing their administrations, the colonial power was willing to confirm them in office. The emirs retained their caliphate titles but were responsible to British district officers, who had final authority. The British high commissioners could depose emirs ... if necessary.... Under indirect rule, caliphate officials were transformed into ...agents of the British authorities, responsible for peacekeeping and tax collection. The old chain of command merely was capped with a new overlord, the British high commissioners.
A dual system of law functioned—the shari'a (Islamic law) court continued to deal with matters affecting the personal status of Muslims, including land disputes, divorce, debt, and slave emancipation. As a consequence of indirect rule, Hausa-Fulani domination was confirmed—and in some instances imposed—on diverse ethnic groups, some of them non-Muslim, in the so-called middle belt.
[emphasis added—JRM]

Lugard's career is astonishing. After 1906, he was sent to Hong Kong, where he was governor to 1912—then, back to Nigeria. By then, Nigeria was actually two colonies, a northern one and a southern one.

Unification meant only the loose affiliation of three distinct regional administrations into which Nigeria was subdivided—northern, western, and eastern regions. Each was under a lieutenant governor and provided independent government services. The governor was, in effect, the coordinator for virtually autonomous entities that had overlapping economic interests but little in common politically or socially. In the Northern Region, the colonial government took careful account of Islam and avoided any appearance of a challenge to traditional values that might incite resistance to British rule. This system, in which the structure of authority focused on the emir to whom obedience was a mark of religious devotion, did not welcome change. As the emirs settled more and more into their role as reliable agents of indirect rule, colonial authorities were content to maintain the status quo, particularly in religious matters. Christian missionaries were barred, and the limited government efforts in education were harmonized with Islamic institutions.
In the south, by contrast, traditional leaders were employed as vehicles of indirect rule in Yorubaland, but Christianity and Western education undermined their sacerdotal functions. In some instances, however, a double allegiance—to the idea of sacred monarchy for its symbolic value and to modern concepts of law and administration—was maintained.

Much of the post-colonial behavior of the Hausa-Fulani elites seems to reflect a Spartan attitude towards the middle-belt of the country, under which a Muslim-dominated praetorian state and its main client, the Hausa-Fulani,² have sought to retain their old propinquity over the middle belt. Add to that the fact that the British had sought to maintain that system intact, while liquidating the indigenous social structures of the South and East. When Nigeria was a British colony, the ethnic composition of the country hardly mattered; afterwards, the North had a conservative society governed according to age-old Maliki-school precepts, while the South and East were socially nebulized by the commercialization of agriculture (and some industry).

Hence, the Hausa-Fulani dominated the armed forces and tended to control the rest of the country, while their own region recoiled from the shock of mechanized agriculture and urbanization. Northern Nigeria has a high population density, but few modern cities. The big employer of the Hausa-Fulani was to become the armed forces and police. Political organization also ensured Hausa control not only of a plurality of seats in the federal parliament, but also seats to have been held by the Tiv and other groups under Hausa hegemony. In '62, the Tiv revolted; in '64, electioneering by Northern political parties sparked riots. By '66 Igbo military officers attempted a coup, which triggered a bloody retaliation by the Hausa (50,000 Igbos massacred), secession and civil war, then more military rule.

The conclusion drawn by Mr. Lapite is that Nigeria (and probably Congo-Kinshasa, Guinea-Conakry, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Benin) will need to have their bordered redrawn—a process I cannot imagine being done smoothly. Many of the violent eruptions of sectarian violence in West Africa are occurring in places where this is quite new. A wave of killings (about 20,000-40,000 in N. Nigeria) began in 1999, when Olusegun Obasanjo became the country's first elected, civilian leader since 1983; the killing in Plateau State, in the central part of the country, erupted in 2001 and the riots in Monrovia, Liberia, are the first to pit Muslims and Christians. Hence, communal violence appears to have a peculiar form of propagation that defies prediction.

However the Hausa and Fulani elites have abused their military control of the nation—and they assuredly have—their proximate subjects have suffered the most, being thrust further and further back into poverty, overpopulation, and subsistence agriculture. This, in a time of acute desertification of Hausa-Fulani lands. Also, there is grounds for arguing—as I will attempt in another entry—that Pres. Ibrahim Babangida and (more grievously still) Gen. Sani Abacha were responsible for another, decisive phase of mismanagement that ruined Nigeria.
NOTES: 1 Technically, Foreign Dispatches quotes a report by independent consultants commissioned by Shell and cited in the Financial Times. I doubt he'd let the article go uncriticized if he disagreed with its contents, though. The curious thing is that it declares that Shell will likely need to quit the Niger Delta by 2008 because of spiraling violence there. I've never heard of violence being predicted so precisely. Is it a matter of Shell losing money? It appears as if the company has lost a total of 52 million barrels of oil (23 days worth of national output) due to shut downs and theft.

2 The Fulani (about 15 million in Nigeria) are part of a much larger chain of Muslim peoples running to Mauritania; in early 1800 they conquered the Hausa (some 24 million in Nigeria), a people who straddle the Niger-Nigerian border. Both are Muslim.