Nigeria's National Content Bill: The Hype, the Hope and the Reality

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Nna Emeka Nwaokoro
Keyword(s):  
Niger Delta ◽  
International Agreements ◽  
Bilateral Investment Treaties ◽  
Delta Region ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
High Unemployment ◽  
Local Content ◽  
Niger Delta Region ◽  
The Face ◽  
Investment Treaties

AbstractNigeria's recent efforts to pass local content legislation with stringent targets and stiff penalties have drawn widespread attention, spurred ongoing debate and prompted numerous international workshops and seminars. Lack of local content has been blamed for high unemployment and lack of capacity, and even been linked to militancy in the Niger Delta region. After much debate and delay, the bill has become law. This article reviews the bill's history and tracks the hype surrounding Nigeria's moves towards a legislative mandate. It discusses the provisions of the bill, observing that it is poorly drafted, vague and therefore difficult to comply with. The bill could also violate international agreements, such as bilateral investment treaties and GATT, and is unnecessary in the face of contractual alternatives that could be successfully utilized to enhance local content. Contract models contain ample provisions for enabling local content and have been successfully employed by other resource-rich nations.

scholarly journals Weeping in the Face of Fortune: Eco-Alienation in the Niger-Delta Ecopoetics

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abba A. Abba ◽  
Nkiru D. Onyemachi
Keyword(s):  
Niger Delta ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Delta Region ◽  
Niger Delta Region ◽  
Cultural Implications ◽  
The Face ◽  
Oil Wealth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Universe

Scholarship on Niger Delta ecopoetry has concentrated on the economic, socio-political and cultural implications of eco-degradation in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of the South-South in Nigeria, but falls short of addressing the trope of eco-alienation, the sense of separation between people and nature, which seems to be a significant idea in Niger Delta ecopoetics. For sure, literary studies in particular and the Humanities at large have shown considerable interest in the concept of the Anthropocene and the resultant eco-alienation which has dominated contemporary global ecopoetics since the 18th century. In the age of the Anthropocene, human beings deploy their exceptional capabilities to alter nature and its essence, including the ecosystem, which invariably leads to eco-alienation, a sense of breach in the relationship between people and nature. For the Humanities, if this Anthropocentric positioning of humans has brought socio-economic advancement to humans, it has equally eroded human values. This paper thus attempts to show that the anthropocentric positioning of humans at the center of the universe, with its resultant hyper-capitalist greed, is the premise in the discussion of eco-alienation in Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues and Home Songs (1998) and Nnimmo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood (2002). Arguing that both poetry collections articulate the feeling of disconnect between the inhabitants of the Niger Delta region and the oil wealth in their community, the paper strives to demonstrate that the Niger Delta indigenes, as a result, have been compelled to perceive the oil environment no longer as a source of improved life but as a metaphor for death. Relying on ecocritical discursive strategies, and seeking to further foreground the implication of the Anthropocene in the conception of eco-alienation, the paper demonstrates how poetry, as a humanistic discipline, lives up to its promise as a powerful medium for interrogating the trope of eco-estrangement both in contemporary Niger Delta ecopoetry and in global eco-discourse.

scholarly journals Understanding Niger Delta’s violence from a World-Ecology perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-43
Author(s):  
Oscar Mateos
Keyword(s):  
Niger Delta ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Resource Curse ◽  
Delta Region ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
Niger Delta Region ◽  
Oil Corporations ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Commons ◽  
The 1960S

The conflict in the Niger Delta region (Nigeria) has become one of the most environmentally and humanly devastating contexts on the African continent since the 1960s. The network of different actors involved in this context forms a complex web in which multiple and asymmetrical dynamics and interactions can be identified. From Jason Moore’s World-Ecology perspective (2015), the article suggests that this complex interaction should not be understood as a mere postcolonial episode in the context of globalisation, but as a historical network of relations. This network, in which human and extra-human natures are intertwined, is key to understanding the process of capital accumulation in the region and the resulting capitalogenic violence since the 16th century. Against this background, the article also attempts to counter the tendency to interpret violence and social resistance in the Niger Delta region as mere criminal phenomena or from narratives such as the “resource curse” that has simplified the multidimensionality of violence. In this sense, the paper analyses the different forms, strategies and meanings through which local resistance movements have tried to safeguard and re-appropriate their livelihoods and the commons in recent decades in the face of the growing presence of multinational oil corporations.

Theatre and Leadership Crises

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Hussaini Umaru Tsaku
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Niger Delta ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Delta Region ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Niger Delta Region ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Face

One major crisis that has hit this country in the face for a long time is the Niger Delta crisis. The environmental degradation in the Niger Delta, poverty, unemployment, among others have become recurrent decimals and issues of serious concern to scholars, organizations, interest groups, and spirited individuals over the years. These issues have led to the emergence of violent crises with their attendant consequences on human life and the environment. Hence, the chapter focuses on the Niger Delta crises. It tries to analyze the socio-political and economic problems that have characterized the region over the years. It discusses the challenges and paradoxes of leadership in Nigeria's democratic space and how they have contributed negatively in fueling the crisis in the Niger Delta region of the country.

SURVIVAL STRATEGIES AND CITIZENSHIP CLAIMS: YOUTH AND THE UNDERGROUND OIL ECONOMY IN POST-AMNESTY NIGER DELTA

Africa ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul U. Ugor
Keyword(s):  
Niger Delta ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Delta Region ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Delta Area ◽  
Oil Refineries ◽  
Niger Delta Region ◽  
The Face ◽  
Unemployed Youth

ABSTRACTFocusing on Gbekebor, a small rural community in Burutu Local Government Area in Delta State, this article examines the rise of small-scale artisanal oil refineries in the oil-rich Niger Delta area in south-eastern Nigeria. Mostly owned and run by unemployed youth in the Delta region, this informal underground oil economy is a classic example of the ways in which the mass of disgruntled youth in Nigeria have now evolved their own new survival strategies in the face of inauspicious social and economic conditions in everyday life. In the article, therefore, I argue that the growth of illegal refineries in the Niger Delta region represents ordinary people's desperate search for economic and social justice for themselves and their communities when the state and superordinate economic regimes (oil corporations) operating in the Delta area have connived to deny ordinary people their social and economic rights as citizens.

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