The Ogoni Uprising: Oil Politics, Minority Agitation and the Future of the Nigerian State

THE BABANGIDA REGIME failed to produce the promised civilian government for Nigeria but the convoluted democratization programme offered opportunities to various interest groups to once again raise fundamental but previously suppressed issues related to the 'national question'.1 For the oil producing ethnic minorities of the Niger Delta and especially the Ogonis of Rivers state, it was time to confront the federal state on fundamental issues of the injustice of 'killing the goose that lays the golden egg'. For a long time, these communities have had serious grievances which have not been well addressed. Foremost is that although the bulk of crude oil, the country's main source of revenue, is derived from their lands, they belong to the ranks of the most backward, and politically marginalized groups in the country. Their leaders attribute this injustice to the fact that they are minorities, and accuse the ethnic majority groups of using oil wealth to develop their areas at the expense of the areas from which oil is derived. Another is that several years of oil exploration and the hazards of spillage and gas flaring which accompany it has degraded their environments and left their communities desolate. Not only having farming and fishing, the major occupations of these mostly riverine minorities been decimated, their territories have continuously lacked basic infrastructure and amenities electricity, roads, schools, hospitals, potable water and so on. These grievances have been directed against both the state and the oil companies which have been accused of contributing too little in retum for the huge profits they get from oil exploration. Demands for more equitable and privileged treatment by oil-producing minority communities, as well as struggles by them and other minorities, to redress power imbalances in the federation which make them subordinate to the majority groups are not new. Beginning from agitations for separate states in the 1950s and 1960s which led to the setting up of the Minorities Commission in 1956, right down to attempts by politicians from the minority groups in the Second Republic to organize to wrest political