THE CONTEXT OF SURVIVALIST POLITICS: YOUTH AND POST-AMNESTY LIFE IN THE NIGER DELTA

The armed insurgency led by militant youth in the Niger Delta region between 2006 and 2009 had huge international and national political-economic implications. At the global level, it fractured the steady production and flow of crude oil and oil profits to the international market which, on account of the lingering crisis in the Middle East, depended heavily on Nigeria for over 40 per cent of sweet-crude product. At the local/national level, it interrupted, in very fundamental ways, the accrual of significant economic rents earned by the Nigerian state from the transnational oil corporations. At many levels, then, the armed insurgency set off by youth in the Delta region threatened to destabilize an already vulnerable global oil market, on the one hand, and a fragile post-colonial Nigerian state on the other. This occurred in the context of a fledgling democracy, threatened by a powerful and corrupt military class that had ruled the nation for almost three and a half decades. The idea of a ‘presidential amnesty’ was conceived to harness the estimated fifty thousand young men and women involved in the armed insurgency. The strategy emerged as a desperate bid to restore industrial peace in the region, and hence uninterrupted production and flow of crude oil, oil profits and economic rents to both local and international political and economic interests. Furthermore, it had become apparent that the so-called ‘military option’, brutally waged by the Joint Military Task Force (JTF), a combined army, navy, air-force and police team created to police the region, was increasingly proving insufficient and inefficient for curbing violence and restoring industrial peace in the Delta. Thus, on 25 June 2009 the late Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar'Ardua, then President of Nigeria, announced ‘an unconditional pardon to all persons who directly or indirectly participated in the commission of offences associated with militant activities in the Niger Delta’ (Obi and Rustard Reference Obi and Rustand2011: 204). Accordingly, all militants were to disarm willingly, demobilize from their bush camps and submit their entire weaponry to designated centres in the five core oil-producing states in the region. The major commanders of the militant groups, such as Government Ekpemukpolo (alias Tompolo), Prince Farah Dagogo, Victor Ben Ebikabowei (alias Boyloaf), Ateke Tom, the late Soboma George, Alhaji Asari Dukubo, and Henry Binidodogha (alias Egema I) all caved in to pressure from local leaders to allow peace a chance. They submitted their cache of munitions that included ‘2,700 sophisticated weapons and 287,445 ammunitions’ to the Nigerian state in a sensational ceremony witnessed by both local and internal media (ibid.: 204). A whopping sum of about N52 billion ($145 million), later N68 billion, was ostensibly earmarked for the amnesty programme, to be run by a Presidential Amnesty Committee then headed by Major-General Godwin Abbe, himself a son of the Niger Delta (Nwajiaku-Dahou Reference Nwajiaku-Dahou2010: 10).Footnote ²

Since then, a total of 20,192 ex-militants have gone through the Disarmament, Demobilization, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DDRR) programme. Another list of about 6,166 ex-militants has also been drawn up for the second phase of the rehabilitation and classification programme, which is currently in progress at Akodo, Ekpe in Lagos State. In general therefore, the amnesty has been successful in the sense that it has mitigated hostilities between the angry youth and, on the other side, the Nigerian armed forces and the multinational oil corporations. But what has happened so far, Nwajiaku-Dahou (Reference Nwajiaku-Dahou2010: 10) argues, is the replacement of one kind of economy, ‘the economy of violence’ with ‘the economy of peace’, where the Nigerian state and transnational oil corporations have literally bought peace in the Delta region in order to ensure smooth exploration and production of crude products. Although an estimated N400 billion has been sunk into the amnesty programme thus far (Obi and Rustard Reference Obi and Rustand2011: 208), there have been no palpable changes in the lives of the large number of young people who took part in the armed struggle. Indeed, the fundamental structural problems that gave rise to the crisis in the oil-rich region have not been addressed.

Recent scholarship points to the fact that apart from the momentary cessation of hostilities in the region, nothing has really changed (Obi and Rustand Reference Obi and Rustand2011; Nwajiaku-Dahou Reference Nwajiaku-Dahou2010; Ukiwo Reference Ukiwo, Obi and Rustand2011). The general and prolonged culture of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Watts 2007), wherein a larger percentage of the wealth generated from the natural resources extracted from the Niger Delta region is controlled, managed and used by external bodies, prevails in the region. The oil economy in the Delta is still an ‘enclave industry’ operating without the consent and involvement of the oil-bearing communities. Citing a 2006 UNDP report, Ahonsi (Reference Ahonsi, Obi and Rustand2011: 29) observes that ‘over 85 per cent of the region's working population have no connection with the oil and gas industry, with low-wage/low-productivity informal enterprises as [their] primary source of livelihood’. To date, oil companies enter and leave oil-bearing communities without their consent. Not only are the exploration and refining facilities prefabricated, dismountable and relocatable, but the Niger Delta people in general are still being made to feel that they lack the relevant skills needed for running a highly technical endeavour like the oil/gas industry (Ukiwo Reference Ukiwo, Obi and Rustand2011: 10). Oil companies still operate with impunity in the region, destroying the ecosystem, cultures and health of peoples of the Delta through relentless gas flaring, oil pollution and other environmentally degrading industrial activities.

Although the national revenue allocation formula had been reviewed in the 1999 constitution to allow for a paltry 13 per cent increase for oil-producing states, there is no evidence that this percentage of extra revenue has changed anything in the lives of over 30 million people in the Delta (Ako Reference Ako, Obi and Rustand2011: 49). In fact, as some scholars have argued, this revenue formula has made ‘a difference only to the bank accounts of politicians and not to the lives of Niger Delta peoples’ (Ukiwo Reference Ukiwo, Obi and Rustand2011: 26). Although Nigeria is notorious for its lack of social services in general, the plight of the Delta region, especially considering its status as the ‘golden goose’ of the Nigerian nation, is abysmal. Roads, electricity, healthcare, schools and other basic social amenities are either in absolute disrepair or completely non-existent. In spite of the existence of many oil companies and subsidiary oil-servicing companies in the Delta, it is estimated that at least ‘one in every seven young people in the region’ is jobless, making the ‘region's unemployment levels higher than the national average’ (Ahonsi Reference Ahonsi, Obi and Rustand2011: 32), estimated at 23.9 per cent by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2011. It is in this sense that former militant Asari Dokubo once described the Niger Delta as being an ‘occupied and abused territory’ whose natural resources are forcefully extracted, and the proceeds used for the improvement of the lives of external political and economic power brokers.Footnote ³

It is this general sense of dispossession and alienation, combined with the persistence of poverty, unemployment, infrastructural decay, chronic underdevelopment and the skewed fiscal imbalance in the allocation of national resources in Nigeria that has triggered a different kind of economy amongst marginalized youth in the Delta region. Excluded and overlooked by the Nigerian state, rebuffed and disparaged by oil companies, exploited by their own local political elites, and now betrayed by their former commanders, a large segment of youth in the Delta have turned to the same industry and local resources responsible for their abjection – crude oil – to find answers to the everyday social and economic hardships confronting them and their families. According to Gabriel Akpemi (21 years old) – a high school leaver and assistant at an Internet cafe in Warri who also helps his father run one of the local refining camps in Gbekebor – ‘There are no other options of survival here apart from the local refineries. Look at this our local river, if you set nets here, even for two to three weeks, you may not catch even a small quantity of fish to cook. So it is only through these refineries that we can survive in this place.’Footnote ⁴ The rise of local refineries and other associated underground economies like illegal oil bunkering can thus be seen ‘as a form of localized accumulation’, especially when legitimate repertoires of civic protest are increasingly being criminalized by the state and multinational oil corporations (Zalik Reference Zalik, Feldman, Giesler and Menon2011b: 271). Just as the insurgency during 2006–9 provided a nodal point for jobless youth to converge and secure social and economic resources for everyday survival through violence, the illegal refineries now offer the only means for the likes of Gabriel and his generation to ‘cope’ while they wait to obtain gainful employment or even admission into the university or any formal training institute. As Ebiki, one of the young refiners in Gbekebor told me, ‘Apart from offering us a means of survival, local refining has saved most of us from turning into criminals and bringing shame and dishonour to our parents and communities.’Footnote ⁵ Ebiki was 24 years old when I interviewed him in April 2012. Having completed his high school education, he dreams of being trained as a marine engineer, but he has neither access to personal funds nor a government scholarship to pursue this ambition. The local refineries in the Delta are thus traceable to what Paul Francis et al. (Reference Francis and LaPin2011) have described as a long history of relative deprivation, environmental damage and loss of traditional livelihoods in the Delta. For young people, therefore, local refineries have become part of a daily life supported by what Natasha Warikoo (2011) calls ‘balancing acts’ in which young people maintain sanity and dignity while laying the groundwork for successful lives in the future.

BACKGROUND TO GBEKEBOR

Most of the research for this article was carried out in Gbekebor, a small fishing community in Burutu Local Government Area in Delta State, which I visited in September of 2011 and February of 2012 following months of back-and-forth negotiations with research assistants, friends and old-time schoolmates from the region who helped arrange safe entry into the creeks. Accordingly, the next three segments of the article will rely heavily on personal interviews, thick descriptions resulting from participant observation, and occasional references to other sources like newspaper articles and published papers.

With a population of between two and three thousand people, Gbekebor and the adjoining villages that form what is known as the Ogbolubiri Kingdom lie on the northern fringes of Burutu, about five nautical miles from Warri, the state capital and main hub of economic activities in Delta State. Burutu itself is one of the state's twenty-five local government areas, located on the coast of the Niger Delta on both sides of the Forcados River, one of the many channels of the River Niger, about 32km upstream from the Bight of Benin. The dominant occupations amongst this predominantly Ijaw-speaking community are farming and fishing. There are also other minor subsistence economic activities such as sea diving (for aquatic snails and periwinkles), wood logging, and the sale of palm-derived products like oil, kernels and wine. But these long-established economic activities that once sustained local livelihoods have come under immense pressure from the environmental pollution wrought by oil production in the area. High concentrations of heavy metal were found in Egeria radiata, a fresh water clam that inhabits the lower reaches of most rivers in West Africa, during the course of research carried out in Gbekebor and Obotebe creeks over a 12-month period in 2008 (Nwabueze Reference Nwabueze2011: 35). The research also indicated that ‘mean levels of lead (Pb), manganese (Mn), and Cadmuim (Cd) were found to be higher than world standards’. The immediate effects of these high levels of poisonous chemicals in the land and waters in Gbekebor and its environs have destroyed plants and animals, making farming or fishing almost impossible. Local residents in Gbekebor boasted of harvesting enough fish to sell and cater for their families in the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1980s, however, it has become almost impossible to find fish, even for domestic use, because of ceaseless oil spills which have contaminated rivers and swamps in the area. Apart from the pollution for which oil companies are held responsible, Gbekebor lacks basic amenities like pipe-borne water, schools, hospitals and electricity, not to mention decent housing or good roads. Interviewees complained that local people have to be transported by boat to Warri if they become ill, even from minor health problems like malaria, and that pregnant women often have to depend on traditional birth attendants to deliver their children. There is no source of drinking water in Gbekebor, not even a borehole, so local people drink, bathe and cook with water from the tributary of the River Niger running through the village – which is contaminated with mud, faeces, crude oil and, sometimes, dead bodies.

It is arguable, then, that the illegal bunkering and refining of crude oil, in spite of its criminalization by the state and the oil sector (Zalik Reference Zalik, Obi and Rustand2011a), emerged as a major occupation amongst local communities because the chief sources of livelihood for people in the area have been wiped out by the activities of multinational oil corporations. Local respondents in Gbekebor date the emergence of illegal refining in the area to the late 2000s, particularly soon after the armed insurgency in 2009. Many of the young men and women who were not integrated into the presidential amnesty programme and found themselves jobless after the insurgency embraced illegal refining as the only way to make a living. Their ranks were headed by pioneers who had learned how to refine crude from the illegal refineries set up by militant groups in the creeks during the insurgency. In Gbekebor none of the youth in the area were included in the amnesty programme. Many of the boys from the village were killed during the insurgency; those who survived the violence feared reprisals from government authorities and hence they stayed away from the amnesty programme. Those who dared to register for the amnesty programme did not see their names in the official list of ex-militants invited to the DDRR programme at Obubra. The underground oil industry in Gbekebor and other such places in the Delta creeks thus surfaced as a spontaneous response by local youth in the midst of very harsh social and economic circumstances. Having spent years in bush camps earning money as fighters, armourers, spies/informants, boat-pilots, technicians, cooks, and, in some cases, as workers in illegal oil refineries set up by the insurgents, most unemployed youth in the area looked to local refining as the only viable option – a way to eke out a living with some measure of dignity and relative safety from the threats posed by the military forces.

Local refining in Gbekebor and other such places in the Delta thus represents a classic example of how the struggles of the urban poor can sometimes be ‘surreptitiously offensive, that is, [how] disenfranchised groups place a great deal of restraint upon the privileges of the dominant groups, allocating segments of their life chances (including capital, social goods, opportunity, autonomy and thus power) to themselves’ (Bayat Reference Bayat1997: 56). According to a former member of the local legislature, Hon. Dikesi Edonyah, ‘We've just learned how to use what we have to develop ourselves, instead of dying in silence. Our communities are tired of being treated like slaves or children.’Footnote ⁶ The industry has phenomenal support and patronage from local people because it is seen not only as an alternative industry for youth to productively channel locally acquired skills in eking out a living and supporting their families, but also as a meaningful social hub that has reduced widespread criminality in the area. Of the approximately one hundred refining camps I counted in Gbekebor, each might have as many as 10–18 youths working there at any given time. A maximum of three youths manning each refining camp earn as much as a thousand Naira (N1000) per drum of diesel produced, while an average worker in the local refineries makes between four thousand and six thousand Naira daily (approximately US$27–40 dollars). The young men are often not paid for the production of kerosene or petrol, as the money accruing from the sale of such products is ploughed back into their feeding and general upkeep in the refining camps. This means that some of the youth in this underground industry earn as much as 160,000 Naira (approximately US$1,066) monthly – more than most graduate employees with the federal or state governments earn.

LOCAL OIL REFINING – STRUCTURE, AGENCY AND FUNCTIONALITY

Generally, the entire structure of the local refining business has an ad hoc basis, set up mainly by individual youth entrepreneurs, not the community. And although most of the youth involved in the local refining industry have social links with powerful politicians in government and senior army officials, such connections are covert and do not amount to formal institutional recognition of the artisanal oil industry as a business sector. The local oil refineries are neither licensed nor supported by any state legislation; they do not pay taxes to government; and the industry is not a bankable economic activity supported by the formal financial sector in Nigeria. From the acquisition of crude oil products, through the refining process itself to the marketing of the refined products, nothing is formally structured. Almost every aspect of the industry is artisanal in nature and workers in the camps where the refineries operate require very minimal advanced skills. Gabriel Akpemi told me that ‘nobody trained us to do this business and you even don't have to go to the university to do the work. We started this whole thing ourselves.’ This revelation is quite significant because it means that the new underground oil industry is amenable to the largely uneducated and unskilled mass of youth in the Delta creeks who have long complained about being kept out of the formal oil/gas sector. My host in Gbekebor, Mr F. A. Pouyeibo, buttressed this point when he told me that ‘jobless youth from surrounding cities like Warri, Port Harcourt, Benin and Ughelli all come here to work, and the only skill required for them to be part of this business is knowledge of the indigenous technique of brewing gin.’Footnote ⁷ Local gin is often distilled from palm wine – a very popular alcoholic beverage tapped from palm trees. The local refineries are thus rooted in the age-old technology of gin distillation, which local communities have engaged in for centuries. The only difference between the local distillation systems for gin and crude is the product; the mechanism is the same, only the product has changed. Indeed, the distribution network of locally refined crude between the north and south of Nigeria is itself traceable to a history of gin supply from the Niger Delta to northern Nigeria that stretches back more than a century and half. Here we see a unique example of how a new generation is reinventing old autochthonous technologies and trade networks to address contemporary urgent needs in local communities overwhelmed by poverty, unemployment and suffering from the neglect and extraversion of political regimes who have turned instead towards exogenous economic interests.

The improvised mechanism used for local refining consists of an oven that generates fire for heating the crude, a cooling mechanism locally known as Okpuroku which is used in regulating the temperature under which the crude is refined, and a reservoir for collecting the refined products – diesel, petrol or kerosene – from the oven. The oven used for refining fuel works in similar ways to those used in modern bakeries for making bread, for example. The ovens are usually powered using firewood and charcoal – and, in some cases, bitumen (coal tar), which itself is a by-product of the refining process. So there is a recycling process here which makes the industry self-sustaining and economical in many ways. There is also a crude cooling system, usually comprising a standby water-pump and a large water tank mixed with washing detergents (like Omo), ready for use if large fires break out, especially where there are no fire blankets. This technique of controlling fires, some of the boys explained to me, was learnt from some of the oil companies where they underwent safety training as contract staff. Typically, each refining oven is interconnected with a network of pipes that allow raw crude to flow through the refining system to the large tanks that hold the final products, usually in the form of petrol, kerosene or diesel. The product that comes out first from the tail-end of the improvised refining system is the associated gas normally linked with crude products. This process is imperative, supposedly to purify the final product for ‘safe’ public use. After the gas comes fuel (petrol) and later diesel. In some cases, the associated gas is followed by kerosene, and then diesel. The ovens are normally of different sizes, ranging from the ones that contain two drums to larger ones that take as many as five to ten drums. Usually more established refining camps that have been in the business for longer periods have larger ovens, while new entrants or women involved in the business use smaller ones. But whatever the size of the oven, characteristically two drums of crude oil will produce one jerry can (25litres) of petrol, one jerry can (25litres) of kerosene and one drum (200litres) of diesel. Most camps, depending on their capabilities, will produce between 30 and 50 drums of diesel daily, and each drum of diesel, depending on the season, sells for 10,000–16,000 Naira (US$66–106).

Informants were generally quite reticent to reveal the sources of the crude used by the local refineries. This is perhaps because most of the refinery operators genuinely do not know the exact source. But informal discussions with many of the young men working in the refining camps indicate that crude oil is supplied by illegal bunkerers. Illegal oil bunkering is the practice of stealing oil from government or oil company pipelines by very sophisticated and vast international oil rackets in which locals only participate to a degree that accesses a very small fraction of the loot (Shaxson Reference Shaxson2008: 202). The process ‘involves tapping into a pipeline, filling plastic jerry cans with crude oil, and taking the oil away in speedboats to waiting barges, which in turn sell the oil to large ocean-going tankers, which then sell it to refineries in neighbouring countries such as Ivory Coast, at a considerable profit’ (Ghazvinian Reference Ghazvinian2007: 45). The current Nigerian Minister of Petroleum, Dieziani Allison-Madueke and the Managing Director of Shell Petroleum Development Corporation of Nigeria (SPDC), Mutui Sunmonu, recently declared that this ‘complex criminal enterprise’ presently costs Nigeria about 180,000 barrels of crude oil per day, amounting to annual losses of US$5–7 billion.Footnote ⁸ Although illegal oil bunkering began modestly in the early 1990s, perpetrated mostly by industry insiders and ‘big wigs’ in the Nigerian military, it expanded exponentially during the armed insurgency in the Delta between 2004 and 2009 because money from this covert commerce in crude oil was central to the popular revolt in the region – especially in purchasing weapons and munitions for the young militants (see Duquet Reference Duquet, Obi and Rustand2011). But with the rise of local refineries, an almost insatiable local demand has also emerged for the products from this complex underground oil business sustained by both local and international entrepreneurs. For most young Deltans, then, illegal oil bunkering has always offered a practical avenue for the socially and economically disenfranchised people in the region to access locally extracted resources with which the Nigeria state will not allow them lawful contact (Zalik Reference Zalik, Obi and Rustand2011a: 187; Ghazvinian Reference Ghazvinian2007: 60). Emmanuel Egbele (28), a father of two children and a high school dropout who came all the way from Bomadi to work in the refining camps in Gbekebor, explained it to me this way: ‘The state is the criminal here, not us. They take our resources and give us nothing in return. And oil companies employ only Yoruba and Hausa people. Look around – there's nothing here to do. So if you're not creative in this place you'll die.’ In Gbekebor alone, approximately 120 drums of illegally bunkered crude are supplied to each of the refining camps at least twice each month (perhaps more), and it is customary for the bunkerers to pass the cost of settling soldiers and other security personnel along the waterways in the Delta creeks to the local refiners, who often pay anything between five and seven thousand Naira per drum of crude. The price of the crude thus varies, depending on how much the bunkerers have incurred from the point of extraction to the point of delivery. Production within the local refineries itself is often determined by demand, so there is usually a higher demand for products during annual Christian celebrations like Christmas or Easter, or even local seasonal festivities like the New Yam festival.

The market for the locally refined crude is huge, extending from the far reaches of the Delta hinterlands to the Sahel region and other countries around the Gulf of Guinea. In fact, according to my informants, there are two main distribution channels: one is through the Atlantic Ocean and the other is by land. The latter channel is used for both local and international distribution. Each of these channels has a series of middle men stretching from the local refiners to the point of consumption. At the local level, for instance, distribution is directly undertaken by the refiners, who often load their products (particularly petrol and kerosene) in drums and take them to Warri and other coastal towns where they sell to local marketers, who then resell to local consumers in small quantities. In some cases, the middle men in coastal cities buy from the local refiners and then sell to buyers from the rest of the country, particularly petroleum marketers from the north who then convey their products through fuel tankers back to various states up north. At the micro-local level, both private/domestic and larger/public social and economic activities are sustained by the products from the local refineries. Almost all the speedboats that crisscross the creeks, both commercial and private, depend entirely on diesel or petrol purchased from the local refineries. Improvised filling stations line the sea shore in Warri and other coastal towns where passengers board boats for various destinations in the creeks across Delta State and beyond, selling bootlegged petrol or diesel to boat operators and other local entrepreneurs who need fuel or diesel to run their businesses. Locals in the creeks also buy kerosene from these stations to power their lamps and for cooking. These filling stations are usually run by young entrepreneurs, mostly unlicensed marketers, who buy directly from the refining camps and move these locally refined products in large barges to various selling points across the Delta region. Given the fact that access to the creeks is only by sea, the local refining industry has thus become crucial to the lives of people in the region. It sustains local transportation in the area, especially since legally refined products imported from abroad or produced by the four state-owned Nigerian refineries are becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to access. Although Gbekebor, unlike many other parts of the Delta creeks, is connected to the national electricity grid, it rarely receives a constant supply of electricity and, like much of Nigeria, depends heavily on cheap portable power generating plants imported from China and other parts of South-East Asia to generate electricity. These electricity generators are often powered by fuel produced by local refineries. Tamunu Jacob (32), an undergraduate at the Delta State University who also works part-time in one of the local refineries, told me that apart from local consumption by ordinary people, these refineries also sell diesel to middle men who in turn sell to some notable oil-servicing and construction companies who operate around the Delta region. He explained to me that the companies prefer products from the local refineries because locally refined diesel is said to have better and higher combustive quality than diesel from the conventional or orthodox refineries.Footnote ⁹ In general, therefore, the local refineries have become integral to and almost irreplacable in the economy of daily life in the Delta region.

But, beyond the local market, informants told me that locally refined petrol and diesel find their way to international markets in places as far away as the Sahel region and even beyond. On the transatlantic route, for instance, the finished product from the local refineries, particularly diesel, is bought directly from the local refineries by oil marketers, locally known as ‘sea suppliers’, who load the diesel in large containers and then transport these by boat to the Atlantic ocean, where they sell them on to foreign customers with standby ocean carriers. The clandestine buyers on the high seas then move their supplies abroad. The specific destinations of such cargoes is not known, but it is fair to suggest that these products permeate surrounding countries like Cameroon, Togo or Côte d'Ivoire – and of course the international black market in Western Europe and North America.Footnote ¹⁰ Many respondents I interviewed in the refining camps also revealed that their products are often meant to supply the ceaseless demand for diesel or petrol from the north of Nigeria and other countries to the north like Chad, Niger and Sudan. One young man in another refining site in Bayelsa State told me that ‘buyers come here from every part of the country, especially traders from Aba and dealers from the north who buy from us and ship abroad’. Indigenous middle men or, in some cases, oil merchants from eastern Nigeria who have links to international traders from the north, buy locally refined products directly from the artisanal refineries and then use big boats or barges to move large consignments of locally refined diesel at night to obscure or abandoned quays in Calabar (Cross River State), Warri (Delta State), Mbiama (Bayelsa State) or even as far afield as Apapa in Lagos State, especially at the Waziri, Kirikiri, Ibafon and DECONSalt jetties.Footnote ¹¹ Such products are ultimately siphoned into waiting tankers brought by interested buyers from northern Nigeria who in turn mix the locally refined diesel, petrol or kerosene with genuine products from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) depots. The mixed products are then moved by road using tankers to northern Nigeria or neighbouring countries like Chad, Niger, Sudan or even Cameroon in the south, where they are sold at extremely exorbitant prices. In cases where the middle men or petroleum marketers are from eastern Nigeria, they also buy diesel or petrol directly from the refiners and transport the products in tankers to commercial cities like Onitsha and Aba, and then later sell to consumers in those areas or interested dealers from northern Nigeria.Footnote ¹²

The market for locally refined products from the Delta region is thus extensive, sustained by a complex network of both formal and informal actors, within and outside Nigeria, and inside and outside the formal oil and gas sector, thus providing jobs and income for more than two-thirds of the youth population in the creeks. Therefore, when asked what they would do if the government clamped down on the illegal refineries, many of the young men working in the camps argue that there would be no going back on the refining business until the government offered them a viable alternative. Tonga Akpemi, 19 years old and a high school leaver, dreams of becoming a chopper pilot in one of the oil companies. He puts it this way: ‘If they want to stop us, they should give us something else to do…the Niger Delta has been cheated for a long time.’Footnote ¹³ This popular response by young men and women in the Delta creeks who have invented their own local oil empires reflects a festering disdain that local communities now feel for both the Nigerian state and the oil companies; it is also indicative of a mounting defiance in the Delta region in general towards the Nigerian oil industry, which they see as being responsible for their social, economic and ecological plight.

YOUTH AND SUBVERSIVE POLITICS IN THE DELTA: RATIONALIZING THE UNDERGROUND OIL ECONOMY

An interesting consequence of the armed insurgency in the Niger Delta is that it created an intense political consciousness amongst ordinary people in the oil-producing region who otherwise would have had very little to do with politics – particularly the youth. This newfound social awareness about events shaping their lives in turn produced a climate of youth activism in the whole region. This was apparent amongst ex-militants at the NYSC Camp, Obubra and the youth manning the local refineries in the creeks, who often described themselves in revolutionary terms – as ‘freedom fighters’, for example, rather than as ‘militants’, a term often used by government officials and journalists. Most informants argued that by taking up arms and engaging the Nigerian state in violent conflict they gained first-hand experience of the enormous dangers and risks associated with antagonizing formidable political-economic forces, a fight which a number of their local leaders and elites in the region had fought and lost over several decades.Footnote ¹⁴ In fact, for most of the ex-combatants, the armed insurgency was to fulfil the predictions of future mass insurrection by the people in the Delta declared by late Isaac Adaka Boro, the pioneer revolutionary in the Delta in the 1960s, and the late Ken Saro Wiwa, writer and human rights activist who was brutally murdered by the dictatorship of General Sani Abacha in November 1995. In an interview with a group of ex-militants from Ondo, Delta and Edo states at the NYSC camp in Obubra, Cross River State, one of the boys told me that

In the same interview session, another of the ex-militants explained it this way:

By calling themselves ‘freedom fighters’, then, the young militants were framing themselves as ‘doing battle’ (what has come to be known popularly as the ‘Chicoco Movement’) and continuing the struggles of their great ancestors against the Nigerian state and multinational oil corporations. The point must be made here that while the insurgency was triggered by legitimate concerns about the deplorable state of life in the Delta, the violent atmosphere that emerged was exploited by criminal elements to further self-serving agendas. Nonetheless, many months after the insurgency, most youth in Gbekebor, as in most places in the rural creeks in the Delta, continue to see themselves as engaged in this battle of survival with the Nigerian state and the big oil companies. Local youth running refineries in the creeks thus frame their underground economies as part of the broader struggle for survival amongst oil communities berated, tricked, and exploited by multinational corporations and the Nigerian state.

Nigeria's current President, Goodluck Jonathan, is from the Niger Delta. Jonathan hails from Otueke, a village in Oloibiri, the place where Shell first struck oil in commercial quantities in 1956. The emergence of Goodluck Jonathan as the President of Nigeria, which a lot of young people in the Delta see as a positive outcome of their armed insurrection against the Nigerian state, not only sped up the peace process in the Delta region, but also redefined the contours of resistance in the area. Because he is seen by most people from the Delta as an autochthon – a ‘son of the soil’ – who could possibly attract the good things of life to the state on account of his strategic position, the degree and form of antagonism with the federal centre has changed. Rather than outright confrontation, most youth from the region now see themselves as being engaged in a ‘quiet insurgency’ in which the struggle for self-determination and direct access to the natural resources from the region will be ‘fought’ in more subtle and indirect ways. Amora (32), a law student at the University of Abuja who also doubles as chief of staff to one of the leading commanders of the militant groups that operated in the Niger Delta during the armed insurgency years, told me that local refining ‘is still part of the struggle, but we are doing it another way because our people are now involved’. This is what I refer to as a new order of ‘subversive acquiescence’ in the Delta. While there is the semblance of an atmosphere of peace and near capitulation of angry communities in the Delta to the Nigerian military and the federal government in Abuja, there is an ongoing subversive identity politics in which local communities in the Delta creeks are still engaged in the struggle for access to resources from the swampy wetlands in their backyards. It is part of this identity politics that we see in the rise of local refineries in the Delta. While the army of youth in the region are not satisfied with the social and economic conditions around them, they also do not want to be seen as ‘rocking the boat’ when their very own President Jonathan now has access to and control of the national purse, which could potentially open up opportunities for development in the region. While they await that change, which may or may not come, the informal oil sector, invented and superintended by the local communities themselves, becomes the nodal point where all economically disenfranchised people converge. Here, then, we might see a poignant example of how the informal sector in Africa continues to function as ‘nothing less than the self-organized energies of people, biding their time to escape from the strictures of state rule’ (Hart Reference Hart2001: 157). It is within this context that one must evaluate the local refineries that have proliferated within the Delta region. While there is still palpable angst amongst people in the Delta about their sordid socio-economic conditions, that resentment is being expressed in different and subdued ways because of the strategic political position now occupied by a son of the Delta. In fact, according to my host in Gbekebor, part of the reason why the illegal refineries are able to operate in the first place is ‘because our son and brother is the President’. Put differently, had the President been from the north (Hausa), south-west (Yoruba), or even the south-east (Igbo), the heavy-handed Nigerian military machinery would have been mobilized long ago to decimate the vast empire that is the local refining business in the Delta. The relentless violence unleashed by the Nigerian military on local communities across the Delta during the presidencies of Olusegun Obansanjo and Umaru Musa Yar'Ardua are good benchmarks in this regard. So while the local refineries run by youth are illegal, they are sustained by an informal imprimatur from the summit of the political hierarchy in Nigeria; Jonathan's presidency forges a hinge between the formal state apparatus, on the one hand, and young underground oil entrepreneurs, on the other. Here, then, we not only see how ‘informality is built into bureaucratic forms as unspecified content’ (Hart Reference Hart, Hart, Laville and Cattani2010: 148), but also how ‘formalization and informalization…occur in continual interaction with each other, producing a plurality’ (Hull and James Reference Hull and James2012: 2).

Youth also see the local refineries as an ingenious invention by a younger generation on behalf of local communities manipulated and short-changed by the ethnicization of politics and development in Nigeria that, prior to Jonathan's arrival, did not work in their favour. For Dr Ben Benebai, a native of Burutu and a lecturer in the Niger Delta University, political decisions at the top had profound implications and far-reaching consequences for local livelihoods. He cites the aborted ship-building project of the 1970s in Burutu, which could have been a major source of jobs for millions of youth in the Niger Delta today. A ship-building and repair company, which at the time would have been the largest company in Africa and the second largest in the world, was commissioned to be built in Burutu in the 1970s by General Yakubu Gowon's military administration. The contract for the shipping company was awarded to Navimor Consortium and the contractors had gone as far as constructing a sand-filled dry-dock with a capacity of about 150,000 deadweight tons where the ship construction company was to be located. Finally, however, funding for the execution of the project was frozen by the civilian administration that took power in 1979. Later, in the early 1980s, pipes already laid for the ship construction company were removed to Snake Island in Lagos, where a ship-assembly company with a much smaller capacity of 25,000 deadweight tons was built.Footnote ¹⁶ For most youth in the Delta, then, the local refineries are self-created ‘companies’ intended to address the skewed development in Nigeria that they deem to have affected minorities in the region so adversely. Many young men acknowledge that running local refineries is ‘a dirty job’, but argue there is nothing else they could do: ‘This is the only way we can help our parents buy books for children in school’, recounted one frail and exhausted young man after an eight-hour nightshift at one of the refineries.Footnote ¹⁷ It is through the earnings from the local refineries that local people are able to pay for groceries, medical bills, local transport, housing, college tuition for youth and children in schools, and other aspects of their daily lives that require cash income.

Many of the youth also see their involvement in the illegal refining of crude as ‘patriotic acts’ of concerned citizens frustrated by the way the powers that be are running state-owned refineries. According to 19-year-old Tonga, who lamented the perennial absence of fuel or diesel in the country, ‘Our companies are doing what government refineries are not doing. But here we produce the kerosene that our mothers use to cook and petrol for the small generators that give us electricity. Government has never done anything for us.’Footnote ¹⁸ While legitimizing their illegal business, the above response also constitutes a kind of acerbic indictment of the tardy management of the four state-owned oil refineries currently run by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC). The four refineries are located in Port Harcourt (Rivers State), Warri (Delta State) and Kaduna (Kaduna State), but production at these refineries has fallen drastically since the 1990s, drained by corruption and mismanagement (Balouga Reference Balouga2012: 31).Footnote ¹⁹ Billions of dollars worth of contracts have been awarded for turn-around maintenance, but Nigeria continues to spend about US$8–10 billion every year to pay for imported petrol and kerosene. In May 2010, the Nigerian federal government signed a joint contract worth US$23 billion with a Chinese company to construct three additional kerosene refineries and a fuel complex in Lekki (Lagos) to augment the existing state-owned refineries. The deal, struck between the NNPC and the China State Construction Engineering Corporation Limited (CSCEC) was expected to add 75,000 barrels a day to Nigeria's refining capabilities.Footnote ²⁰ What has become of that project almost two years after the contract was signed is unclear. But what has not changed is that ordinary Nigerians still queue incessantly to buy even the smallest quantity of kerosene for domestic use and licensed filling stations are often without petrol. Filling station operators who secure allocations to lift products from government depots prefer to export their products to the Sahel region, where they make huge profits. It is this cruel scarcity, artificially caused by the ineptitude and corruption of Nigerian rulers and the greedy business moguls in the downstream oil sector, that the Niger Delta youth see themselves as helping to address by running the illegal refineries. One young man I met in a local pub in Gbekebor explained to me that ‘our people have asked the government for licences and loans to help us run this business properly, but they won't. They give licences to only rich people who have money to pay. But these people have no refineries. They come and buy from us, instead.’Footnote ²¹ For most of the youth, therefore, they are filling the gap in petrol and kerosene supply created by a corrupt adult generation running the Nigerian state, and thus helping to address the everyday problems of existence created by poor and greedy leadership. And by indicting the formal but failed bureaucracy that runs the state-owned refineries, the youth position themselves on both a moral and organizational high ground. While the local refineries are illicit, they help offset chronic problems in fuel supply created by the legal/formal oil sector, thus legitimizing informal refineries as timely interventions in a national economy beset by corruption and greed.

In many ways therefore, the illegal refineries in the Delta quintessentially represent what Osef Bayat (Reference Bayat1997: 57) has appropriately termed ‘the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” – a silent, patient, protracted and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive hardships and better their lives’. Drawing from the ordinary daily activities and struggles of disenfranchised urban poor in Iran in the early 1990s (but also in cities in Egypt, South Korea, Chile and South Africa), Bayat demonstrates eloquently how tens of thousands of poor families – mostly economic migrants, the unemployed and homeless classes – who besiege big cities for daily survival and/or improvement in their lives took advantage of the collapse or rigidity of formal state structures to form themselves into a collective force that had serious ‘political consequences’ for these developing countries. Mostly self-driven, unplanned, uncoordinated, spontaneous, and devoid of sensationalism, these quiet, everyday activities by common people were propelled and legitimized by the ‘force of necessity’ to seek alternative modes of survival and dignity through direct individual actions. The ultimate aim of such quiet encroachment of official spaces was animated by the pursuit of ‘the redistribution of social goods and opportunities in the form of (unlawful and direct) acquisition of collective consumption’ and the attainment of ‘autonomy, both cultural and political, from the regulations, institutions and discipline imposed by the state’ (ibid.: 58–9). The illegal refineries strongly resemble the radical subsistence activities described by Bayat in the Middle East. They are largely spontaneous and politically inexplicit everyday activities triggered by young people's search for daily survival and ‘a dignified life’. The local refineries may be informal and illegal, but they are legitimized by the stark terror, harrowing trials, and cruel scarcities endured by ordinary people on a daily basis in the oil-rich but extremely poor Niger Delta creeks. The illegal refineries represent 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 area have connived to deny ordinary people equity and social justice.

CONCLUSION: INFORMALITY, YOUTH AND SURVIVALIST POLITICS IN THE DELTA

Originally coined by the British anthropologist, Keith Hart (Reference Hart1973) in his study of informal income opportunities in Accra, Ghana, the term ‘informal economy’ is now often mobilized in referring to a constellation of varied and highly dispersed underground economic activities in the developing world that frequently operate outside of state regulation, especially with regards to state taxes. According to Castells and Portes (Reference Castells, Portes, Portes, Castells and Benton1989: 12), the informal economy refers to ‘income generating activities that take place outside the regulatory framework of the state’, thus making informality the ‘antithesis of national capitalism’ (Hart Reference Hart, Hart, Laville and Cattani2010: 144). Variously described as ‘shadow’, ‘invisible’, ‘twilight’, or even ‘dark’ economies, the informal sector encompasses an aggregate of ‘extra-legal’ or beneath-the-radar marginal economic activities invented, run and superintended by peripheral and marginalized social groups exclusive of, but not completely detached from the mainstream regulated economic sector. The informal economy is thus often rationalized as that renegade and alternative but active economic territory forged by the disenfranchised masses in most parts of the Third World in search of livelihoods and survival in the face of unfavourable socio-economic conditions.

The African continent in general has been at the very centre of the discourse of the informal economy. This is not surprising, because the onset of relentless neoliberal economic reforms since the 1980s, globalizing processes and vicious structural adjustments programmes (SAPs) between the 1980s and the 1990s, combined with the increasing inability of most African states to cater for the basic social needs of their citizens, have forced many in urban spaces, particularly the bulging youth population besieging African cities for jobs and better lives, to seek alternative avenues of making headway in life. In their recent introduction to a book of essays on Reconstituting the State in Africa, Pita Agbese and George Kieh Jr (2007) have observed how most states in sub-Saharan Africa have lost the ‘social contract’ with their citizens, culminating in alienation and the rise of what Neil Smith (1997) describes elsewhere as ‘satanic geographies’. According to Agbese and Kieh, most citizens in sub-Saharan Africa have ‘no faith in their leaders and they entertain no illusion that the state would address their concerns and material well-being’ anytime soon (ibid.: 5). Instead of acting as protector and provider, the post-colonial African state now constitutes ‘a veritable danger to its own citizens. Even when it does not pose a direct danger to its citizens through violence, repression, incompetence, corruption and inefficiency, it remains irrelevant to the needs of the people’ (ibid.: 11). It is this chronic indifference, exacerbated by cruel and insensitive global economic forces, that has propelled ordinary people like women, youth, children and other dispossessed masses facing inexorable economic straits to look outside the spheres of state control and mainstream economic activities to ‘manufacture hope with the raw materials of irony’ (Hecht and Simone Reference Hecht and Simone1994: 13). The artisanal refineries are indeed informal ventures toying with the ‘raw materials of irony’ precisely because scores of young men and women, and in some cases, entire households and villages, have been destroyed by fire accidents resulting from the illegal activities of local refiners. Operating in open clearings (camps) around surrounding forests without any safety protocols and protective gear, tending huge fires and highly combustible chemicals like crude oil and ethanol gas, they have been exposed to occasional accidents where scores of youth have been charred to death, and in some cases, entire communities wiped out, by fires resulting from the local refineries. The lack of protective gear exposes the young men in these camps to poisonous fumes that may lead to lung cancers and other deadly diseases in the future. At a conference on local refining and bunkering in the Delta held at the University of Oxford on 28 September 2012, it was reported that there are increasing cases of cancers amongst rural people in the Niger Delta, especially around communities with local refineries. But this irony illuminates the extent to which irresponsible post-colonial African governments have pushed helpless youth in the face of unfulfilled dreams and unrelenting gaps in wealth to embrace hazardous enterprises that endanger their lives and those of others around them.

In many ways, then, the informal sector in Africa is not necessarily that subversive and anti-development economic terrain that evades objective study and negates genuine efforts to improve the mainstream national economy in Africa – as has been suggested by much essentialist Africanist scholarship.Footnote ²² In fact, as a number of new studies have begun to show, the informal sector is linked to, and indeed complements the formal global economy in more ways than contemporary Africanist scholarship has acknowledged (Hart Reference Hart, Hart, Laville and Cattani2010; Hull and James Reference Hull and James2012; Lindell Reference Lindell2010; Meagher Reference Meagher2010). Indeed, as Hart (Reference Hart, Hart, Laville and Cattani2010: 152) recently argued, ‘to the extent that neo-liberalism has succeeded in reducing state controls, the world economy itself has become largely an informal zone’. The crucial question at this stage, then, as Kate Meagher (Reference Meagher2010: 16) has rightly noted, ‘is not [even] the boundary between the official and the unofficial spheres, but the distinctive organizational dynamics and the power relations that characterize non-formal forms of order’. Although the informal sector is often linked to innocuous and frantic struggles by the desperate urban poor to eke out a living, non-mainstream economic activities by marginal individuals and groups can also be fruitfully connected to political and social struggles. Now no longer condescendingly viewed as poor people engaged in small-scale and survivalist activities, informal non-state economic actors are not automatically the passive or apolitical social weaklings depicted in extant literature on informality, but also active socio-political agents who seek to reorder the power relations between them and dominant political and economic forces. As Ilda Lindell (Reference Lindell2010: 2) argues, ‘there are growing calls for looking upon local informal economic practices not merely as marginal, acted upon, as manifestations of chaos and decay or deviations from a Western normative ideal, but as providing the basis for social economies from which a different kind of urbanism can be envisioned’. It is this particular approach, recognizing popular economies as offering the marginalized a new language of citizenship and vocabulary of protest – seeing how informal ‘economic transactions are implicated in processes of political articulation or discontent, and in the shaping of new and emergent identities’ (Hull and James Reference Hull and James2012: 9) – that I bring to bear on my reading of private artisanal refineries run by youth in the Niger Delta creeks. I interpret the rise of private small-scale artisanal refineries organized and run by these youth as new forms of ‘insurgent citizenship’ (Pieterse Reference Pieterse2008) by a disgruntled and disenfranchised generation actively engaged in not only finding ‘balance and control’ in their lives, but also in renegotiating and reordering the power relations between it, the Nigerian state and global transnational oil forces. ‘For Citizenship to succeed as a historical project,’ Paolo Henrique Martins (Reference Martins, Hart, Laville and Cattani2010: 164–5) tells us, ‘it must benefit from a confluence of struggles for recognition and dignity, free and equal representation and participation and enjoyment of civic, political, social economic, cultural and environmental rights in common.’

I therefore argue that the illegal refineries now proliferating all over the Delta region are constitutive of unfolding ‘accountability struggles’ taking shape worldwide in which poorer, politically disenfranchised and economically marginalized individuals and groups are mobilizing and finding creative alternative strategies – both formal and informal, orthodox and unorthodox, legitimate and illegal – for claiming the social and economic rights that constituted political and economic authorities in their lives have refused to grant them, either out of unrelenting corruption and mismanagement or sheer wilful indifference (Kabeer Reference Kabeer2005; Newell and Wheeler Reference Newell and Wheeler2006). As John Gaventa puts it, ‘for poor and marginalized groups, struggles for accountability gain traction when they involve access to the basic resources and services that are necessary for survival and for sustainable livelihoods’ (2006: xv). As state institutions that are supposed to act as guarantors and protectors of citizens’ rights revert (in some cases) to being rights violators, as the rift between the rich and poor deepens, as the influence of powerful corporate entities continues to weaken the ability and willingness of nation states to cater for ordinary citizens, and as elected representatives of people increasingly lose touch with the realities and concerns of people on the streets, it becomes imperative that we rethink classical notions of social reform and citizenship, especially as something granted by the state, and pay attention to the informal, innovative, and sometimes unconventional ways in which ordinary people actively engage in struggles to gain access to social and economic rights and resources through collective agency and the reconstruction of individual identities. The legal, political and moral basis of citizenship is grounded in equality; equality both before the law and in access to social, civic and economic rights. The local refineries run by unemployed youth in the Delta creeks in Nigeria are thus emblematic of ‘multiple livelihood strategies’ (Owusu Reference Owusu2007) and everyday struggles by poor people in what Naila Kabeer (Reference Kabeer2005) has appropriately termed a search for ‘inclusive citizenship’, especially ‘from below’.