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Oriola, Temitope B. (2013) Criminal Resistance? The Politics of Kidnapping Oil Workers,
Aldershot, Ashgate, pp 243. HB.
Reviewed by Biko Agozino
As the Series Editor of the Ashgate Publishers Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender
and Class Relations in which Dr. Temitope Oriola’s book was published, I
was pleased and honored to be invited to review this original contribution to
knowledge during the public presentation of the book at Alberta University,
Canada where the doctoral research that led to the book was done and where the
award-winning author was soon lured back, as an Assistant Professor, from a major
US university.
As the Series Editor who recommended the innovative manuscript
for publication, I was tempted to decline the invitation to be a reviewer of
the book but I relish the challenge to replace my editor’s cap with that of the
critic and reflect on the book in a way that a Series Editor’s preface may not
have permitted. For full disclosure, I must also confess that the author, Dr.
Oriola, caught my attention in 2005 as a graduate student when he hailed my
book, Counter-Colonial Criminology: A
Critique of Imperialist Reason, as laying the foundation for what he called
a ‘Post-Colonial Criminology’ in a review essay that I published in the African Journal of Criminology and Justice
Studies that I served as the founding editor for the African Criminology
and Justice Association. It is clear that his own new book is a major
contribution to that paradigm of post-colonial criminology.
Following the guidelines for book reviews provided by one of
my undergraduate mentors at the University of Calabar, Professor Inya Eteng,
who passed away recently at the University of Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta
terrain of Oriola’s book, I will proceed by critically reviewing the empirical
tenability of the book’s claims, the internal consistency or theoretical
adequacy of the book, and the policy efficacy of the implications of the
conclusions and inferences. I will leave out a summary of the contents because
the author himself has provided one in chapter 8 and because I do not wish to
spoil the fun for those of you yet to read the book.
The empirical tenability of the claims in the book is
without doubt and the attention to the triangulation of data sources, or what
the author called ‘methodological eclecticism’, in the book is very
commendable. The reflexivity of the author in terms of the potential to be
perceived as an outsider because of his Yoruba ethnic identity is equally noteworthy
as a key for understanding the violent ethnic chauvinism that tends to cripple
intellectual excellence and everything else in its wake. Scholarship should be
judged on its merit and not on the basis of the pigeon hole into which the
author’s tongue could be classified but not in Nigeria where who you know is
often more important than what you know. The risks he took to be added to the
mailing list of militants, to interview army generals and observe focus group
discussions of villagers in the creeks of the Niger Delta where he was
‘jokingly’ threatened with kidnapping by a key informant, and the attention
that he paid to the history of gendered and class-specific ethnic violence in
Nigeria makes his book required reading by all who are interested in resolving
the violent crises that plague African societies today.
In this connection, the claim in the book that over 80% of
Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings come from the ‘monocultural’ oil industry of
the Niger Delta may need to be contextualized: The eminent Marxist
economist and another mentor of mine at the University of Calabar, Professor
Eskor Toyo, in his chapter, ‘Revenue
Allocation and the National Question’, in the book edited by Abubakar Momoh and
Said Adejumobi on The National Question
in Nigeria that I published in the same Ashgate Series as Oriola’s
book, estimated the contribution of oil and gas to Nigeria’s GDP to be less than 50%. This appears to be supported by annual data published by the National Bureau of
Statistics which reported
that the contribution of oil and gas to the GDP in the second quarter of 2012
was less than 14% while the contribution from agriculture was 40% http://www.nigerianstat.gov.ng/. The
estimate by Toyo only appears counter-intuitive because Nigerians tend to
extrapolate from the estimate that hundreds of millions of barrels are produced
in the country per day, then multiply them with the price of oil and deduce
what they assume to be the contribution of oil to the national income but
without taking into consideration that Nigeria probably only receives
10% royalties from whatever the oil companies declare as their profits after
production and exploration expenses. In any case, oil and gas being finite
resources should not be the exclusive motive for any social movement organization
to kidnap workers, bomb and kill citizens and sabotage the environment without
turning such an organization into a reactionary anti-social movement
organization.
The empirical tenability of the claims in the book could be
challenged on the ground that the author left out some of the important details
but in fairness to the author, no book ever covers everything and so the author
should be commended for narrowing down his topic to a manageable scale under the
able supervision of his dissertation advisers. Yet, the empirical tenability of
the claims in the book could have been greatly enhanced through a more historical-materialist
epistemological approach or through a post-structuralist discourse analysis with
more coverage of the narratives of trade unionists and kidnapped workers whose
voices appear drowned out by those of militants, villagers and soldiers in the
book.
I flag up the relative erasure of the narratives of workers
in the book as a loophole that could be filled by future researchers or during
the anticipated follow-up by the author towards advancing, revising or
challenging some of the arguments and conclusions in Criminal Resistance? The Kidnapping of Oil Workers. I
also suspect that the relative neglect of the workers’ perspective may have
resulted from the choice of theoretical frameworks that are eclectic while
privileging the symbolic interactionist perspectives of Ervin Goffman and the
interpretive perspective of Max Weber rather uncritically unlike the reluctant
application of the historical materialist theory of social banditry, according
to the Africa-born Eric Hobsbawm, that eventually formed the explanations for
kidnapping found in chapter seven. The author initially questioned its relevance
in chapter two because of criticism that Hobsbawm restricted the concept to
rural bandits even while predicting that social bandits would become more
common in Africa whereas Oriola found that the Niger Delta insurgents operated
in both rural and urban locations.
Oriola’s theoretical originality lies in the application of
the theories of dramaturgy and frame-making that were developed in micro or
messo sociological studies of radically individualist Euro-American societies
to a macro sociology of power struggles with local and global implications in
African societies that the author described as still ‘very much communalistic’.
The book is internally consistent to the extent that the author sticks with
the chosen frameworks even after briefly considering competing perspectives.
The difficulty with the chosen analytical frameworks, in my opinion, is that a
less skillful writer could have ended up with ahistorical and disjointed
analysis given that frame-making tends to focus on a bird’s eye-view of one
frame at a time and dramaturgy implies the beginning, climax and end of
conflict whereas the historically specific nature of politically-motivated
violence in Africa requires deeper social structural and more systemic
analysis.
The question that arises for all African researchers is
this; how suitable are theoretical perspectives developed for advanced
capitalist societies in the West for the study of more communalistic societies
in Africa? Oriola answered this question by borrowing metaphorical terms from
his rich Yoruba vocabulary to explain the intricate Althusserian ‘interpellation’
of space and social process in the Niger Delta with implications for all and
sundry. Perhaps the author should have considered the theory of African Fractals
which has been found by Ron Eglash (African
Fractals: Indigenous Design and Modern Computer Engineering), Abdul Bangura
(Fractal Complexity in thoughts of
African Writers), Horace Campbell (on the 2008 organization of Barack
Obama’s presidential campaign) and as illustrated in my conclusion to Counter-Colonial Criminology - a common
framework employed by Africans from different cultural backgrounds to emphasize
the interconnectedness of society, culture and nature in contrast to the lineal
analysis of much of Cartesian European frameworks or paradigms.
Given the nature of the subject matter, I believe that a
historical materialist approach synthesized with the African Fractals-influenced
perspective of deconstruction (see Derrida, Specters
Of Marx) and chaos theory (as Hal Pepinsky attempted but without reference
to the African roots in the Geometry of
Violence and Democracy) could have complicated the analysis and raised more
challenging implications of the study as Stephen Pfohl recommended (Images of Deviance and Social Control) than
through the liberalist and apparently pluralist perspectives chosen for the
analysis of what is obviously a systemic and post-structural violence.
Thirdly, how efficacious, policy-wise, can the conclusions
and implications of the book be said to be? This is a question that haunts the
reader right from the preface by Professor Patrick Bond where it was almost gleefully
stated that the book proves that the ‘romanticization of non-violence’ by
African scholars was debunked by the book. The author repeats this theoretical
claim without endorsing it in the book and reports the belief of the insurgents
that non-violence failed and so, presumably, violent armed struggles were more
successful. I invite readers to engage the ex-insurgents in debates on this
conclusion that the author stated alongside the views that contested the
presumed efficacy of violence because violence deserves more explicit critique
given the high frequency of futile violence in Nigeria:
First, the claim by ex-insurgents that non-violence has
failed and by implication only violence led to their success appears spurious
given that the history of Africa is enveloped in permanent violence since the
intrusion of Arabs and Europeans starting with Trans Saharan and then Trans
Atlantic slavery and continuing in the post-colonial situation under the
domination of imperialism as Oriola himself pointed out and as Toyin Falola
detailed in Colonialism and Violence in
Nigeria. If violence is a successful strategy, then Nigeria would have
since joined the ranks of developed democracies given its recent history of a
genocidal war in which an estimated three million people were killed presumably
to guarantee access to the oil of the Niger Delta for members of the ruling
class and yet another mentor of mine from the University of Calabar, Professor Herbert
Ekwe-Ekwe (Biafra Revisited) never
tires of reminding us that the Igbo genocide is the foundation of the genocidal
state in post-colonial Africa. Similarly, the genocidal states in Sudan,
Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Congo have all failed to
record significant success despite the abundance of violence and despotism. The
failure of insurgent violence and violent military repression cannot be
overemphasized but all Nigerians need to extend their concern to the poor throughout
Nigeria who appear to be deliberately deprived of the benefits of modern
education, healthcare and jobs in the midst of plenty of national resources.
Secondly, it is dubious to cite Fanon as an evangelist of
violence because Fanon used his psychiatric skills to explain why people resort
to violence under violent domination but not why they should do so. On the
contrary, Fanon repeatedly pointed out the violent pitfalls of national
consciousness by people who may fall upon each other and continue to kill even
after the foreigner has been forced to withdraw as he predicted in Ivory Coast
which lived up to the prediction with the fanatical blood-thirsty ideology of
Ivorite or the search for who is more purely Ivorian than others. Fanon saw
violence more accurately as a sign of mental disorder displayed by the torture
victim who runs down the street screaming that he was going to kill a settler
with a kitchen knife only to be gunned down, on the one hand, and equally by
the torturer who goes home after work to torture his wife and kids, on the
other. What he offered was an explanation of violence and not a prescription of
violence and he concluded by inviting us to find a different path that avoids
the abomination of humanity everywhere by Europeans who were nevertheless
tirelessly theorizing about humanity. Had the insurgents adopted the African philosophy of non-violence they would not have resorted to the superstitious dehumanization of younger women who were expelled from their camps whenever they had their periods with the belief that such crude sexism was necessary to avoid polluting the 'warriors' who nevertheless welcomed post-menopausal women to come and 'fortify' them spiritually for victory.
Ali Mazrui may have inadvertently validated the Eurocentric
wanton adoration of militarism only four years after the genocidal war in
Biafra by positing that Africa was reviving a glorious ‘Warrior tradition’. He
completely neglected the much more vibrant tradition of non-violence and
participatory democracy that relatively survived European conquest and
distortion even among the African Diaspora where Martin Luther King Jr. led a successful
non-violent revolution while the Rasta philosophy of Peace and Love remains
lively. Not surprisingly, Oriola found vocal condemnation of violence and
kidnapping even by a major insurgent commander who complained that the tactic
of kidnapping had been hijacked by purely criminal elements and rejected especially
by communities that did not have a ‘benevolent insurgent commander’ who could
rationalize such violence by providing infrastructures and patronage in the
vacuum created by those that Fanon called the unproductive phantom Bourgeoisie
of post-colonial Africa.
Contrary to the claim in the book that scholars are relatively
silent on the efficacy of violent modes of struggle, left-wing scholars tend to
romanticize violence to the extent of misreading Karl Marx as advocating only a
bloody revolution without realizing that The
Manifesto of the Communist Party was not a call for the establishment of an
army and that Friedrich Engels stated in the preface to Capital that Marx saw England as having the possibilities for a
non-violent revolution. Subsequently, the Bolshevik party of Lenin was called
the Social Democratic Party and his answer to the question of What Is To Be Done was the establishment
of a newspaper for the organization of the masses. Gramsci capped the much misrepresented
Marxist tradition with the observation that even the ruling class cannot afford
to dominate by force alone or even mainly by force but more commonly through
coerced consent or hegemony – the very exact strategy through which the working
class wins the support of other oppressed classes, not by force or mainly by
force but through intellectual and moral leadership - hegemony. Amilcar Cabral
applied this in his national liberation war by emphasizing the need to
understand that culture and even theory is a weapon in the struggle, not just
militarism. Joe Slovo also defended the strategy of the national democratic
revolution in South Africa against enthusiasts of militarism (who preferred to
chant one settler, one bullet) just as Lenin defended the strategies of social
democracy and dismissed the militarists as people suffering from the infantile
disorder of left-wing communism. Mao Tsetung suggested that the contradiction
between violence and non-violence is a false contradiction because the response
depends on the nature of the challenge posed. Malcolm X also stated that any
means necessary was appropriate in the struggle for freedom but Malcolm used
the means of intellectual and moral leadership himself, he never kidnapped or
killed workers for ransom.
Finally, to answer the rhetorical question that Oriola posed
with his very own title: Criminal
Resistance? The Kidnapping of Oil Workers; the unambiguous answer is
affirmatively yes; it is criminal to kidnap and kill workers and this cannot be
justified with the claims to ‘resistance.’ It is completely reactionary
violence to bomb citizens who were gathered to celebrate the independence day
of their country and claim that the militants were doing so ‘with due respect’
because, in their view, there was nothing to celebrate. It is indeed criminal
to bomb an oil refinery and kill or wound dozens of workers as one militant
organization did while this review was being written at the end of October
2013. At last MEND apologized for bombing oil pipelines and thereby spilling
oil to pollute the environment that they pretend to be seeking to protect with
questionable ‘resistance’ strategies that are simply geared towards what Oriola
dismissed as ‘crass opportunism’ designed to extort ransom payments from the
state and from oil companies for the benefit of a few ethnic warlords who would
not hesitate to collude with the state to eliminate scores of their own
supporters who question their leadership style as some members of the community
complained to Oriola during his courageous fieldwork.
Rather than be seduced by violence, readers of the book
should also read Chinua Achebe (There Was
a Country) who condemned the hostage-taking of Italian oil firm workers as a tactical blunder by Biafran troops that cost them a lot of goodwill internationally. He called on all Africans to revive the greatest contribution
of Africans to political strategy and philosophy – the discourse of Ubuntu or Mbari
which Mahatma Gandhi claimed that he learned as non-violence from the war-like
Zulu in South Africa. Martin Luther King Jr. echoed these thoughts in 1967 at the outbreak of the Biafra war which coincided with the climax of the Civil Rights Movement in America, the Vietnam War and the anti-apartheid movement, in three speeches on the theme of a 'World House' that was inherited by distant relatives of different races, religions and classes who must learn to love peace and end violence before violence puts an end to them (Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?)
What the militants in the Niger Delta want more than
anything else is a fair distribution of the revenues from oil and the protection of
the environment but if these can be guaranteed by the Nigerian government and by
the oil companies, there will be no question about the criminality of the kidnapping
of workers for ransom, the killing of citizens with explosives or the damage of
the environment in the name of resistance. The late President Umaru Yaradua
heeded this kind of logic by abandoning the militarist strategy of his
predecessor, General Olusegun Obasanjo whose security forces committed massacres in Odi
in the Niger Delta and in Zaki Ibiam in Benue State, and instead initiated the
50 billion Naira amnesty program for the rehabilitation of the ex-insurgents
who gave up their arms. Such a program of reparative justice should be extended
to the survivors of the mass violence by the state and insurgents alike by
allocating generous resources as a fund for reparations for the continued killing
by militants, terrorists, cultists and by the state all over the country.
This can be partly achieved by setting aside at least 10% of
the budget annually to be awarded to the citizens as grants for them to invest
as they see fit while using the rest to develop basic infrastructures in the
country rather than embezzle the bulk selfishly and use token sums to settle
insurgent commanders. Nigerians should also look beyond their own ethnic
interests and collectively demand that the Nigerian state should atone for the
Igbo genocide that evidently brutalized the consciousness of the nation so much
that the slaughter of students in their dormitories, the killing of worshippers
or the kidnapping of babies and workers for ransom could be seen as legitimate
by some selfish or deluded groups and individuals.
The South American countries that followed the path of
guerrilla warfare for decades have since transitioned power to the former
rebels through the ballot while the violent method has achieved nothing in the
Niger Delta except to force the release of one corrupt politician from detention
or win the release of one insurgent commander from jail. Given the hundreds of
billions that are annually allocated to the Niger Delta states by the Nigerian
federation, the militants could democratically win control over such budgets
and use them to transform their localities rather than encourage the kidnapping
and killing of workers in Nigeria, including foreign employees of oil companies
that they xenophobically call ATM but rarely kill unlike their Nigerian
counterparts that tend to be wasted by their predatory abductors. The fact that
they describe kidnapped workers as ‘enemy combatants’ is an indication of how
much they mimic the ideologies of the war on terror by the international
community.
In the light of the recognition of the exceptional tolerance
that Wole Soyinka (Of Africa)
identified as characteristically African, the Niger Delta ex-insurgents should
renounce their past violent strategies against workers, go beyond their narrow
focus on the Niger Delta and utter neglect of the suffering of other Nigerians
in other parts of the country and other Africans with whom we should unite to
build a more viable Peoples Republic of Africa, and desist from their inexcusable
destruction of the environment as ‘collateral damage’ in the greed for ransom
from oil companies and from the state just to enable a certain ‘Mr. Government’ to offer them patronage
which he is capable of continuing to dish out anyway from the profits of the
pipeline security contracts that were awarded to him as part of the amnesty
agreement. They too should consider the non-violent strategy of Ken Saro-Wiwa
Jr. and the Ogoni who successfully sued a major oil company in the US and won
some damages but without taking workers hostage, bombing them or spilling oil
through the inexcusable and irresponsible damaging of pipelines for profit.
Kidnapping workers and killing some to extort ransoms is bad enough but to
target the members of one of the most radical trade unions in Nigeria, National
Union of Petroleum Energy and Gas employees, who paid huge prices for their
opposition to military rule when most of the so-called militants were nowhere
to be found, deserves to be condemned by scholar activists for the neo-fascist
opportunism that it represents.
This book, in short, demonstrates that there is no heroic
exploit in exploitation – a term that is used interchangeably to refer to the
extraction of natural resources and to the exploitation of workers in the
English language. Oriola carefully avoids using the term, resource
exploitation, preferring to talk about extraction while the villagers and ex-insurgents
were more likely to call the spade of exploitation the spade of exploitation.
The Canadian First Nation people, the Innu, also have a story that Joseph
Campbell included in his classic, The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, about the raven who tricked the native people
and made them run away so that he could have the carcass of a whale cow all to
himself. That was not heroic because the greedy raven could never consume all
that meat by himself and would more likely watch the meat rot and waste to
damage the environment or stuff himself into the chronic illnesses associated
with affluenza or excessive consumption.
The lesson of Criminal
Resistance is that criminologists should not focus exclusively on street
crimes when the macro analysis of political criminality could make more
original contributions to knowledge. The ‘denouement’ that Ken Saro Wiwa warned
against at his conviction and subsequent execution for the murders of Ogoni
chiefs that he did not commit is also a self-fulfilling prophecy of the
brutalization effect of capital punishment which tends to escalate violence
than deter it wherever it is applied and therefore the death penalty should be
abolished. In spite of a damning report by Amnesty International in October
2013 to mark the international day for the abolition of capital punishment,
Nigeria under a president from the Niger Delta, Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe
Jonathan, is pursuing the resumption of capital punishment instead of joining
the enlightened world to abolish the barbaric punishment that contributes to
the normalization of violence in Nigeria.
Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana
Studies, Virginia Tech. Agozino@vt.edu
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