Contending Issues in the Niger Delta Crisis of Nigeria - Journal of ...

Dr. William Ehwarieme
community projects that the oil MNCs could address some of the
developmental needs of the people. But from empirical evidence on
ground, this has been minimal. They have always argued that they
had paid the necessary rents, royalties and taxes to the Nigerian state
whose duty it is to provide roads, water, electricity and other basic
amenities. More often than not therefore, the oil MNCs have appealed
to the Nigerian state to use its coercive apparatuses to harass the
people. The worst case in this regard is perhaps to be found in the
relationship between SPDC and the Ogoni people led in a peaceful and
highly intellectual and internationalized organization, the Movement
for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), whose leader, Ken Saro
Wiwa was judicially murdered by the General Sani Abacha military
junta in 1995 against pleas by the international community. In
November 1999, Odi, a community in Bayelsa state was completely
wiped out by the Nigerian military on the orders of President
Olusegun Obasanjo.
The failure of peaceful methods, or more appropriately, violent
response by the Nigerian state and oil MNCs to the peaceful methods
of groups protesting oil-induced environmental degradation and
demanding development, resource control or self determination, led to
the emergence of militant groups and more combatant modes of
engagement in the second half of the 1990s, especially after the killing
of Saro Wiwa. These include the Aleibiri Demonstration in 1997
designed to prevent SPDC from further operations in the area after it
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