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

Chapter IV: Fishers of Men: The Political Economy of Kidnapping in the
Niger Delta
absence of basic infrastructure and inequality. Efforts by the people of
the Niger Delta to get the Nigerian state to address the issues started
two years before independence in 1960 and initially consisted in
innocuous requests and agitations for creation of separate states for
them but became more decidedly requests for environmental
remediation and demands for access to more of the oil revenues for
the development of the region, especially since the late 1990s.
Fortunately, the first request has been largely met as a result of the
exigencies of keeping the country together in the face of the Biafran
secession in 1967 and by the coincidence of the Niger Delta request
with the objective interests of Nigeria’s majority ethnic groups. It is in
connection with the latter two that both the oil MNCs and the
Nigerian state have shown less than good faith, using the coercive
apparatuses of the state to provoke the emergence of militant youth
groups that have found kidnapping as a veritable weapon to compel
attention and wrest concessions.
Kidnapping has also become a
popular means by which
unemployed youths demand welfare from politicians within the Niger
Delta who may have dumped them after arming and using them as
political thugs in the series of elections since the return to civil rule in
1999 after about 16 years of military rule. It has also become an
expression of the general angst of unemployed youths against the rest
of society and as a way of making a living albeit, criminally. There also
exists a possibility that some kidnappings may have been
118