OIL, YOUTH AND ‘INSURGENCIES’ IN THE DELTA: DISCOURSES OF POWER, PATRONAGE AND VIOLENCE

The history of the Niger Delta in the last ten years is a complex story of violence, social mobilisation and tensions woven inextricably into the fabric of what has been referred to as a ‘petro-state’ (Obi Reference Obi2001, Reference Obi and Rustad2011; Zalik Reference Zalik2004; Watts Reference Watts2007). At the very heart of this is a growing disenchanted youth category that has been socialised into violence by the incentives and constraints of a badly managed oil political economy and which regularly draws on local idioms of marginalisation, disempowerment and injustice to both animate and rationalise violence. It should be noted that youth in the Niger Delta is a ‘complex, fluid and permeable social category which is historically and socially situated’ (Gore & Pratten Reference Gore and Pratten2003: 215) and shaped by the politics of oil extraction and rent seeking. Here, youth simply refers to people who, by virtue of social and economic circumstances, have not attained full social independence. These are sometimes 50-year-old men who ordinarily would be referred to as adults but cannot make such claim because of their continued social marginality. Some of the people referred to as youth in this paper have indeed become quite rich and economically viable. However, they continue to appropriate the space of youth as a means of accumulation or, as Pratten (Reference Pratten, Adebanwi and Obadare2013: 251) puts it, they have turned ‘marginality into a resource’. This category is therefore still referred to as youth here because of their embeddedness within the politics of youth-hood.

To underline the centrality of youth to the ‘Niger Delta crisis’, some scholars have conceptualised the problem as a crisis of youth (Ukeje Reference Ukeje2001; Obi Reference Obi2006; Osaghae et al. Reference Osaghae, Ikelegbe, Olarinmoye and Okhomina2007; Arowosegbe Reference Arowosegbe2009; Anugwom Reference Anugwom2011). This understanding of the violent role of youth in the Delta has, however, not done much to impose the necessary fluidity in social meaning that is required to understand such a complex context. The ‘youth’ analysis is often subsumed under the analytical frame of social movements (Ikelegbe Reference Ikelegbe2005; Ukeje Reference Ukeje, Daiute, Beykont, Higson-Smith and Nucci2006; Omotola Reference Omotola2009), resource control (Obi Reference Obi2006; Osaghae et al. Reference Osaghae, Ikelegbe, Olarinmoye and Okhomina2007), ethnicity (Nwajiaku Reference Nwajiaku2005; Ukeje & Adebanwi Reference Ukeje and Adebanwi2008), human rights (Harshe Reference Harshe2003), oil capital (Ifeka Reference Ifeka2004, Reference Ifeka2006; Zalik Reference Zalik2004) and of course security (Eberlein Reference Eberlein2006; Forest & Souza Reference Forest and Sousa2006; Owolabi & Okwechime Reference Owolabi and Okwechime2007; Shaxson Reference Shaxson2007; Watts Reference Watts2007; Ukeje & Iwilade Reference Ukeje and Iwilade2012). Hardly has the voice of ‘youth’ itself been heard in the literature.

Much of the literature on the Delta takes inspiration from rational choice critiques like Collier & Hoeffler's (Reference Collier and Hoeffler2005) ‘greed and grievance’ thesis which, as Watts (Reference Watts2007: 649) argues, assumes that ‘greed is opposed to grievance, that peaceful protests stand in opposition to rebellion, that government opposes rebellion and that rebellion equals organized crime’. By conceptualising these invariably false dichotomies, many critiques of violence in the Delta are unable to effectively capture the complex web of relations that underline formal institutions and the way in which various actors (youth, state, oil companies, communities and so forth) can and do play shifting roles in what Watts (Reference Watts2007: 650) called ‘both oppositional and organically self sustaining’ interactions. While there is evidence of ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’ in the way young people engage with politics in the Delta region, it is the tendency to ignore the interstices between these two motivations or even the shifting articulation of one or the other by the same young person depending on objective calculations of self-interest that makes rational choice theories so inadequate for explaining politics.

One important line of enquiry that can serve as a useful framework through which the complex dynamics of oil politics is understood in the region was suggested by Terisa Turner in 1976 when she highlighted the impact of rising oil revenue on social and political relations in Nigeria and the networks of official and unofficial linkages that have developed in response. Pointing at the way formal institutions have been used as tools to manage informal clientelistic networks, Turner's (Reference Turner1976) work raised one of the earliest concerns about neopatrimonialism in the country.

The application of neopatrimonialism as an analytical framework to explain complex social processes in the country, as in other parts of the developing world, has however faced very strident criticism. It has been dismissed, for instance, as essentially a part of a neoliberal project that seeks to rationalise a global onslaught on the state (Beckman Reference Beckman1993; Olukoshi Reference Olukoshi1998) or as mere cultural essentialism of the type to be found in Chabal & Daloz's (Reference Chabal and Daloz1999) works on personal rule (Meagher Reference Meagher2006). These are valid critiques of the increasing essentialisation of the concept. Indeed, by focusing on the power of patrons or ‘big men’ rather than on the shifting nature of their relationships with clients, many uses of neopatrimonialism often fail to fully capture the complex dynamics of power and the ways in which specific social categories can be embedded within it. This does not suggest that understanding the moral and institutional universe within which ‘big men’ conduct their exchanges, among themselves and with clients, is irrelevant to unpacking the agency of clients. After all, it is in the way they both imagine and articulate power that the contours of the clientelist system are largely framed.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to effectively engage with the complex conceptual and methodological issues that neopatrimonial visions of politics and social relations in post-colonial states easily bring. However it is prudent, before going much further, to highlight the way the concept is operationalised here. It speaks specifically to the deliberate culturing of a social infrastructure that simultaneously challenges and strengthens formal structures of power, thereby occupying both a decidedly modern as well as traditional space of power relations. As Erdmann & Engel (Reference Erdmann and Engel2006) brilliantly put it, ‘clientelism exists not only in the “traditional interstices” and the “traditional periphery”, but also in the “modern center” itself, which itself is not so modern, but very much tainted by, and interwoven with, “traditional” elements’. It also builds on Clapham's (Reference Clapham1985: 48) definition of neopatrimonialism as:

The paper takes this further by shifting the focus from those who hold the visible reins of power (the patrons) to highlighting the important and innovative ways in which clients are able to express remarkable agency by instrumentalising the very fact of their marginality as a resource with which to engage with opportunities for accumulation. In doing this, neopatrimonial relations become articulated as shifting arenas of conflict in which both patron and client are continuously engaged in seeking advantage, using resources, including but not exclusively state-based.

In spite of early indications of neopatrimonialism's centrality to understanding the emerging politics of oil in Nigeria, and in spite of the brilliant work of others on prebendalism (Joseph Reference Joseph1987; Chabal & Daloz Reference Chabal and Daloz1999; Maier Reference Maier2000; Okonta Reference Okonta2008; Adebanwi & Obadare Reference Adebanwi and Obadare2013; Erdmann Reference Erdmann, Cheeseman, Anderson and Scheibler2013), scholarly enquiry into the nature of oil-based violence in the Niger Delta has been dominated by rationalist critiques developed within a binary narrative of exploitation and resistance which ignores the fluid interactions between actors, formal institutions and informal structures of authority.

This frame of reference understandably drew inspiration from a long period of military rule in Nigeria which not only deepened the marginalisation of the oil-producing Niger Delta region, but which also militarised and radicalised the responses of social movements. The anti-military struggles easily gave the appearance of fixed dichotomies between state and society in ways that obscured the underlying currents of informal relations that mediated power. By placing the military and the rest of society in perpetual opposition to one another, these narratives inevitably generated bifurcated visions of politics. The collapse of public authority in the Delta in 2003, however, indicates a complexity that is quite incompatible with the false dichotomies developed in anti-military narratives and scholarship on the Niger Delta.

Before addressing the critical turn of the 2003 general elections in Nigeria, it is necessary to examine briefly the trajectory of violent conflict in the Niger Delta itself. The Ogoni crisis of the 1990s is a useful place from which to trace the more recent history of violence in the region. The Nigerian military junta of Sanni Abacha had viciously repressed protests by the Ogoni people against the activities of Shell which had despoiled the environment, distorted economic activities and, more importantly, gave little back to the communities by way of infrastructure. The Ogoni crisis was important because it brought the plight of Niger Delta communities to a global audience, and the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa, leader of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) in 1995 was a dramatic culmination which helped prepare the ground for the coming shift from social protests to armed insurgency (Obi Reference Obi2001; Okonta Reference Okonta2008; Iwilade Reference Iwilade2012). The Ogoni crisis demonstrates the capacity of Niger Delta communities to play out different registers of grievance, and the state's response only deepened their sense of alienation. Between 1995 and the outbreak of large-scale violence in 2003, the state stepped up its repression as well as instituted many new programmes that sought to incorporate the Niger Delta elite into the neopatrimonial system that mediated power in the country. One such attempt was the creation of the Niger Delta Development Corporation (NDDC) in 1999 by the new civilian government of Obasanjo to, among other things, ‘formulate policies and guidelines for the development of the Niger Delta and conceive, plan, and implement projects capable of fostering sustainable development of the area in line with set rules and regulations’ (NDDC Act 1999). The NDDC however failed to assuage feelings of neglect in the region as it has become, in the words of Idemudia (Reference Idemudia2012: 190), a ‘tool of patronage to the detriment of oil communities’. Similar organisations dating as far back as the Henry Willink Commission set up by the colonial office in 1957 have failed to effectively address the infrastructural and inclusion concerns of the Niger Delta.

To be sure, these state interventions did not come without substantial prodding from social movements in the Niger Delta who became increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction with issues ranging from the widespread ecological damage from oil extraction (Greenpeace International 1994; Okonta Reference Okonta2008), the contradictions of wealth extraction and infrastructural deficits (Ifeka Reference Ifeka2004; Obi Reference Obi2004; Idemudia Reference Idemudia, Obi and Rustad2011) and the violent clampdown on social protests (Ibeanu Reference Ibeanu1997; Ikelegbe Reference Ikelegbe2005). These various state-driven projects were therefore conceptualised as ways of placating restive communities by making a larger pool of revenue available and by systematically embedding the region within the broader national system of patronage.

The unprecedented and sustained violence of the last ten years is, however, evidence that while these measures may have drawn a significant percentage of Niger Delta elite into the neopatrimonial system, they still left a critical social mass – the youth – out in the cold. The emergence of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) from the ruins of the Ogoni problem of the early 1990s, the Warri violence of the late 1990s and the 2003 election violence marked a watershed in the Niger Delta crisis. MEND is itself a disparate group of violent youth gangs created in 2005 in response to the perceived systematic attack on the Ijaw people (the dominant ethnic group in the Niger Delta) by the government of Olusegun Obasanjo. These attacks included the destruction of Odi community in 1999 by the Nigerian military, the arrest of Chief Diepreye Alamasiegha, then Governor of Bayelsa State, the liquidation of the All States Trust Bank owned by Chief Ebiniti Banigo, an Ijaw elder, and the arrest and detention of Asari Dokubo and Henry Okah, leaders of Ijaw youth groups (see Oriola et al. Reference Oriola, Haggerty and Knight2013).

Two important shifts occurred at this critical turn for the oil-rich Niger Delta. The first was a generational shift that moved the locus of power from local elders to disadvantaged young men who were beginning to effectively challenge traditional structures of authority at the same time that they questioned the legitimacy of the state (Obi Reference Obi2006). The violent response of the state to social protests also inevitably created the second critical shift which was the militarisation of what was initially largely an ideological and imagined struggle. Even though it had occasionally been violent, as in the Adaka Boro rebellion of the mid 1960s, the Niger Delta struggle was generally conducted through elite negotiations. By 2004 however, violence had become the language through which power was mediated in the Delta. Violent methods of protest and of crushing protests had become the norm rather than the exception in the way social relations were conducted in the oil enclave. It was in this context of escalating violence that the state conjured up the latest intervention, the amnesty programme, beneficiaries of which are the main subjects of this study.

The literature on the Niger Delta has responded to the twists and turns of oil politics in the region. From environmentalist critiques to gender, the Delta has been a critical space through which the politics of the rentier state in Nigeria is studied (Zalik Reference Zalik2004; Obi Reference Obi2010; Obi & Rustad Reference Obi and Rustad2011). However, the tendency to focus on the theme of resistance by many analysts undermines our ability to fully integrate the Niger Delta into the broader debate about neopatrimonialism in Nigeria and the way this structures governance and social relations. By pitting the region against the state, one gets a sense that many scholars assume a homogeneous Niger Delta collectively fighting social injustice. This ignores the linkages that connect the region's elites to the rest of the neopatrimonial system in the country and of course the very many cleavages that play as much a role as ‘marginalisation’ in inducing violent conflict in the region. This focus on security, particularly military and resource security, and the way it shapes politics in the region, is of course important. However, it has encouraged in the Niger Delta literature a notion of actors operating from fixed positions and from which cross interaction not framed by conflict is impossible.

Challenging this analysis is a rich body of knowledge about the workings of Nigeria's neopatrimonial system which focuses on insecurity rather than security. In this regard, scholars like Joseph (Reference Joseph1987: 191) argue that ‘insecurity is felt as much by those who temporarily win control of critical resources as by those who feel excluded from them’. Pratten (Reference Pratten, Adebanwi and Obadare2013) takes this further by drawing attention to the permanence of insecurity rather than the temporality that Joseph (Reference Joseph1987) sees. He notes that insecurity is ‘not an episodic moral panic … but the context itself, a permanent, radical sense of uncertainty, unpredictability and insecurity’ (Pratten Reference Pratten, Adebanwi and Obadare2013: 246). This analysis is important not so much because it draws attention to how insecurity shapes the neopatrimonial system – imposing uncertainty on both patrons and clients – but in the way it captures insecurity as ‘neither paralysing nor entropic, but productive of modes of youth action’ (Pratten Reference Pratten, Adebanwi and Obadare2013: 246). The implication for the study of youth violence in the Delta is that it allows us to situate it within the broader neopatrimonial structure, what Pratten called the precarious prebendal system (also see Joseph Reference Joseph1987), while allowing for the agency of both individual youth and youth as a specific social category in constructing a response and in continually reshaping it as the occasion demands. This fits into what Peluso & Watts (Reference Peluso, Watts, Peluso and Watts2001: 5) describe when they talk of youth violence ‘as a site specific phenomenon rooted in local histories and social relations yet connected to larger processes of material transformation and power relations’.

THE QUESTION OF ‘HOW’: NETWORK OF/AND VIOLENCE IN THE DELTA

One key lesson that is easily learnt from the narrative of exploitation and resistance that has dominated the Niger Delta literature is that the consequences of the political economy of oil incentivises violence as a tool for mediating power as well as for accumulation. It answers in large part the question of why young people sometimes choose the path of violence. It also clearly shows how the general atmosphere of ‘resistance’ both legitimises as well as rationalises this choice. What it however does not tell us is how young people are able to take the chances that this violent oil political economy offers.

In other words, the question to ask is what specific social asset mediates that critical turning point at which a young man decides to and is able to join a violent cult or militant group, or at which he chooses or is forced to choose alternative forms of social survival, such as religion for instance? One could also ask how this social asset is manipulated to provide an entry point into a dangerous yet lucrative violent political economy. Contrasting the life story of Tony Obiakolor (2013 int.), a young man of about 29 from Ekeremor in Bayelsa State with that of Bereni, a young ‘ex-militant’ who was active in armed gangs in Port Harcourt, capital of Rivers State and one of Nigeria's largest oil-producing states, illustrates the kind of influences that clientelistic networks have in shaping the specific ways in which young men engage with the violent context of the Niger Delta.

Tony had lived in Warri, one of the most violent cities in the Niger Delta, until he turned 13, after which he moved to Lagos to stay with an uncle of his who had a small car part business. After suffering abuse in Lagos from his uncle's wife who, according to Tony, ‘had no respect for him as a man’, he moved back to Warri in 2003. Tony met a very different city and as a young man of 19 found it difficult to fit back into the fast-paced and dangerous life of gangs and cult groups that were now menacing the neighbourhood he had grown up in. In his words:

After struggling unsuccessfully to reintegrate into the Warri gang networks, doing odd jobs and committing petty crimes in the meantime, he eventually found an opening that could have embedded him within violent militant networks and qualified him for the rational choice label of ‘greed and grievance’. The unfortunate circumstance of his would-be patron's death, however, remarkably altered his story and provides critical insight into how networks often play uncredited roles in youth engagement with violence.

Tony (2013 int.) narrates these events thus:

After being excluded from many of the most lucrative kidnappings, oil bunkering activities and armed robberies, Tony became disillusioned and began to look for alternative ways of earning his keep. He grew close to the pastor of a small Pentecostal church around his neighbourhood in Ekeremor and eventually found God. By 2009, when the amnesty came, the pastor, to all intents his new patron, had become influential and was able to get Tony's name, through connections to a politician, into one of the many ‘militant’ lists that were eventually granted amnesty.

Tony's journey is a very familiar one in the Niger Delta as many other ‘respondents’ agreed. They all acknowledged that being introduced to or excluded from violence, at least with regard to direct mainstream lucrative activities such as oil bunkering, kidnapping and so on, was largely dependent on the ability to find a patron.

Bereni's story is not so different except that he had much more success in accessing the acquisitive potentials of the Niger Delta's many struggles. Born in Yenagoa into a poor family of fishermen, Bereni had very early in life learned to fend for himself by learning the language and gaining the confidence of the streets. He was a part of a small group of children that roamed the weekly markets, acting as porters and occasionally picking pockets when the opportunity presented itself. He had picked one pocket too many around the age of 15 that landed him in a police cell. It was in that police cell that he had his first real encounter with the authoritarian state as well as with the language of resistance with which much of the public discourse in the Niger Delta is framed. A group of cultists (members of violent groups based in university campuses around the country) from the University of Port Harcourt had been apprehended some days earlier and were being detained in the police cell into which Bereni was shoved. According to him:

After he was ‘bailed’ (a pseudonym for having bribed the police to avoid prosecution) by his mother, he kept in touch with the young men he had met in the police cell. He sometimes went off to the Choba campus of the University of Port Harcourt to meet with them and in 2003, about a year after that arrest, he left home permanently to live with them. He was subsequently initiated into the ‘Greenlanders’ cult group and was well placed to participate actively in the pre-election violence that erupted in Rivers State that year.

The patrons Bereni somewhat fortuitously acquired in that police cell in 2002 were members of the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF) led by Mujahid Asari-Dokubo, who has now become one of the best-known faces of Niger Delta militancy. Asked about the trajectory of his friends with whom he once roamed the markets of Yenagoa, Bereni makes a very telling point:

The ‘big time runs’ Bereni was referring to here included oil bunkering, expatriate kidnappings and bank robberies. It also included violent street battles against the Niger Delta Volunteers (NDV) group controlled by local rival Ateke Tom, a violent confrontation that did much to embed many of these young men into the murky space of Nigeria's political contestations. It is difficult to imagine Bereni's involvement in what later became a violent life of militancy in the creeks of Bayelsa State without his connection to the inner loop of the Greenlander's cult following his fortuitous arrest and detention among some of its kingpins. In truth, Bereni may well have ended up in some form of violent gang as his early life trajectory suggests, however, without the patron–client relationship he developed with the young, but older gang members, he is likely to have become a social reject, incapable of claiming the ‘moral high ground’ that the rhetoric of ‘struggle’ and ‘resistance’ often afforded groups with the appropriate linkages to Nigeria's convoluted networks of patronage and violence in the Delta. As another young ‘ex militant’ described, those who engaged in very similar violent activities but somehow fell outside this loop through which one may ‘acquire the status of militancy’ (Nwajiaku-Dahou Reference Nwajiaku-Dahou2012), Bereni would have been a ‘common criminal. His activities condemned by everybody’ (Peter 2013, int.).

What the above indicates is that access to clientelistic networks of violence which sometimes go all the way to the higher echelons of the state, as will be shown later, is critical to the kind of social meaning that is given to public violence. Indeed, many groups appear to have learned that the rhetoric of ‘resistance’ provides effective cover for a complex blend of violent activities as well as advances what are in effect often demands for inclusive access to resources accruing from oil (Iwilade Reference Iwilade2012).

The critical role of patron–client relations which governed the violent landscapes within which youth were socialised in the Delta are often lost in the narratives of resistance through which social mobilisation and conflict are explained in the region. While the evidence provided here relates more specifically to young men in the lower hierarchies of militant groups, there is growing evidence that this applies to even the most prominent and high-ranking militant commanders. For instance, the story of Mujahid Asari-Dokubo, leader of the NDPVF is often told as having started off with the patronage of Peter Odili, former governor of Rivers State. His violent rivalry with Ateke Tom, another very prominent militant commander, is also closely linked to the role of patrons like Peter Odili and the former governor of Bayelsa, Diepreye Alamaseigha. As reported by Elias Courson (Reference Courson2009: 17):

What the above indicates is that neopatrimonial networks are evident at all levels of the Niger Delta ‘insurgency’. As has been demonstrated, even though the contexts of disempowerment and social marginalisation within which young people have to make a living in the Niger Delta generate immense resentment against the state and traditional centres of authority and control, thereby legitimising the rhetoric of resistance, these do not offer adequate explanations for how young people end up making violent life choices. It may contribute to our understanding of why young people make violent choices, but it contributes little to our understanding of the important question of how young people get embedded into violent social structures. Rather than focusing therefore on the thoroughly addressed issue of the way the political economy of oil shapes violent social mobilisation, the section demonstrates the critical importance of access to neopatrimonial networks in shaping the instrumentalisation of violence.

MASCULINITY, ‘BECOMING’ AND SURVIVAL: THEMES IN THE NORMALISATION OF VIOLENCE

The contradictions of so much poverty embedded in a highly profitable and profligate political economy of oil appear to have legitimised multiple variants of violent social action in the Niger Delta region. As has been shown by Obi, youth become prominent in the region by virtue of their ‘insertion into the politics of plunder and how they have mobilised themselves around issues of resource control and community security by tapping into local/traditional idioms of power, knowledge and accountability’ (Obi Reference Obi2006: 5).

The socialisation of youth into a culture of violence in the oil Delta is a long-term historical process that has normalised force as a legitimate means of making claims against the state and oil multinationals on the one hand and against competing communities, generations and interests on the other. While the sheer scale and scope of violence often makes social interactions in the Delta seem indiscriminate and even irrational, these activities are in fact mediated by important social codes of masculinity, coming of age and survival. They are neither indiscriminate nor irrational. To see violence as a normal product of specific forms of social production and relations (Blok Reference Blok, Aijmer and Abbink2000) is important to the way one may grasp the place of youth in the instrumentalisation of violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta. As Daiute (Reference Daiute, Daiute, Beykont, Higgson-Smith and Nucci2006: 9) aptly notes, youth violence is a social practice, ‘an activity characterized by circumstances, goals, expectations, behaviours, and discourses in particular contexts’.

These social codes, while mediating violence in interesting ways, are also critical to explaining how youth become inserted into ‘local idioms of power’ (Obi Reference Obi2006) and the legitimising social canvas that oil disempowerment offers for all these. They also show what motivations drive and animate the networks of patronage through which youth gain access to the opportunities provided by the violent oil political economy of the Delta. It is useful here to use the story of an intriguing young man, Tarela, to explain the way these themes shape youth perceptions of violence.

Born in Amasoma, an oil-producing town in Bayelsa State, Tarela had belonged to the violent cult ‘Greenlander’ that operated in Yenagoa, the state capital, and only disengaged from the group in 2009 after accepting the amnesty. He had spent some of his childhood in Lagos and only moved back to the Delta in 2003 at about the age of 19. Speaking with him, and gaining his trust, over a period of about three weeks, the initial resistance rhetoric about a ‘Niger Delta struggle’ gradually faded away and he began to discuss more deeply and without prompting, about the influence of codes of masculinity, coming of age and survival that mediate violence in the region. According to him:

The theme of masculinity is evident in his use of phrases like ‘strong men’ and ‘street credibility’, which in the Nigerian pidgin refers to daring, risk taking and violent young men who are, at the very least, feared and respected by the public. Duriesmith (Reference Duriesmith2013) underlines the critical role of notions of manhood and masculinity in the performative aspects of violence and draws attention to how this was central to the Revolutionary United Front's (RUF) mobilisation of young fighters in Sierra Leone. This model has resonance in the Niger Delta as expressed by Tarela and many other young people interviewed in the course of research for this article. Tarela's comment also indicates the influence of the need to get away from adult control. To him and many other respondents I spoke with, the ability to take care of one's self, to earn one's keep, was critical to coming of age and had little to do with biological maturity. Hansen's (Reference Hansen2005: 13) concern about ‘the socio-spatial experiences of youth’ which are ‘delaying their entry into adulthood’ in the case of young people in Lusaka, could have been set among these ‘ex-militants’. The notion of youth as a ‘socially constructed or constituted category’ (Abbink Reference Abbink, Abbink and Kessel2005: 5; also see Honwanna & de Boeck Reference Honwanna and de Boeck2005; Christiansen et al. Reference Christiansen, Utas and Vigh2006) is, in the context of the Delta, given meaning by the disempowering character of the badly managed oil political economy and rationalises the instrumentalisation of violence as well as the very fact of marginality as a means of accumulation.

Interestingly, the theme of ‘survival’ that appears so much in the discourse of youths (Ukeje Reference Ukeje2001; Obi Reference Obi2006) in the Delta does not refer to physical safety from the pervasive violence in the region but rather the successful navigation of the economic constraints that the distortions of the local economies by the oil industry had created and which are deepened by the structural marginalisation of young people. In Tarela's statement quoted above, it is clear that economic reproduction was a central motivating factor that animated his youthful engagement with violence, in spite of the risks involved. He evidently saw joining a violent cult group as essential to his chances of social mobility and, finding no other alternative, figured that if he joined them and they engaged in ‘one or two activities’ he would ‘get some money to take care’ of himself.

Tarela's expression of these themes is echoed by the voice of many other young men in the oil-producing region. For instance, Peter, a young ex-militant of about 26 years from Tsekelewu in Bayelsa State, a member of the NDV with evident physical scars of a long life of violence and risk taking, responded to a question about his dreams for his future by noting that:

Even though there is no doubt that the marginalisation of young people from the oil economy and the general state of infrastructure provides an entry point to resistance politics and grass roots social mobilisation against the state and multinational oil companies, it is important that the actual role of political grievance be disaggregated in ways that allow us to account for individual internal motivations. The fixation on the rational choice narratives of ‘greed and grievance’ (Collier & Hoeffler Reference Collier and Hoeffler2005) prevents analysts from accounting for the way social codes like masculinity can influence life choices. While the political economy of oil and the kind of incentives and constraints that it produces is what creates a violent context, it does not account for why young people, in spite of similar social circumstances, do not necessarily engage with violence in the same way. More importantly, it offers no explanation for how young people actually get sucked into the vortex of ‘militancy’.

The implications of the social codes briefly addressed above are not so much in the way they contribute to our understanding of why young men get involved in violence, as was pointed out, for example, in Peters & Richards’ (Reference Peters and Richards1998) work on youth combatants in Sierra Leone which was aptly titled ‘Why we Fight’, but rather in the way they demonstrate the internal motivations that allow them to seek escape in the opportunities that clientelistic networks provide. They are in effect the grease around which the wheels of clientelism turn. Young people seek out the benefits of clientelistic networks because of a drive to feed these social codes. This may explain why social movements organised solely around protests (for instance the fuel subsidy protests of 2012 or the 12 June pro-democracy protests of 1993, both in Nigeria), that are not also simultaneously linked to underground economic activities such as oil bunkering, extortion and kidnappings (Ugor Reference Ugor2013), have been rare in the Delta region. Where these have appeared, for example the Ogoni movement in the 1990s, they have generally not been led by young people. As a consequence of these by no means exhaustive social codes of ‘becoming’ analysed above, young people or people appropriating the social category of youth, are far more likely to become involved with violence in the Delta in the ways captured by the lives of Tarela, Bereni, Tony and Peter and through the kinds of networks that were the entry points for these young men.

The life stories of these young men also highlight one of the missing links in the investigation of social processes in the Niger Delta region. This is the role that values such as respectability play in everyday violence and how this seeps into the governance of clientelistic networks. Of course what it means to be respectable is itself constantly changing and often historically and spatially specific, however, these young men whose life stories are analysed here all indicate that gaining legitimacy is critical to attaining social adulthood. It is precisely this crucial infrastructure in a young person's life that clientelistic networks provide. In the case of a highly militarised Niger Delta in which decades of state violence and violent social mobilisation have desensitised young people to social disorder, the incentives clearly favour violent rather than peaceful networks.

The themes addressed above underline the reality that social networks are complex constructs that have to be understood within a framework that is capable of accounting for the interfaces between multiple fields of power (in this case controlled both by patrons and by clients) and fragmented sets of identities constructed for the purpose of creating, according to Lindell (Reference Lindell2010), ‘proximities and distance’. We must also grapple with the questions surrounding the specific ways in which social networks are deployed in the service of individuals, groups and ideals as well as their embeddedness within local realities. It is by taking note of these complexities that clientelist networks can be a useful framework for exploring broader questions relating to the politics of youth and violence.

In the case of the Delta, it is also important that the constant shifts in personal motivations for joining up with violent groups as well as the shifts in the contours of the social networks of privilege through which these motivations are animated must be duly acknowledged. While the themes of masculinity, becoming and survival may provide the initial motivation or even serve as an ongoing need for many young people, it is acknowledged here that it sometimes evolves into a genuine concern for broader questions of power, empowerment and social justice in the region. This is why Smith's (Reference Smith2011) notion of the political youth as sometimes being ‘rebels without a cause’ is particularly attractive here. It highlights the complex interaction between personal needs and broader social issues of power around which young people are mobilised. As Smith (Reference Smith2011: 107) notes, ‘youth has no specific cause in terms of collective action and it would be hazardous to ascribe to youth a “natural” intrinsic prodemocracy agenda’. Yet, the very fact of collective marginality, as well as the globalised awareness of this reality and the specific ways in which it is articulated and experienced in local contexts like the Delta seem to have created a relationship between the individual's self-defined interests and the way s/he imagines that it intersects with broader social issues.