Document(s) 3 of 9

Watch and listen to the audio slideshow

 

Hometown: Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria

University: University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Award: University of Peace–IDRC Doctoral Research Award

PhD thesis topic: Oil Companies and Implementation of Government Environmental Policy in the Niger Delta

Research location: Niger Delta region of Nigeria

“My research was born out of a deep concern to understand the choice of violence on the part of certain actors. Poverty, unemployment, loss of livelihoods, feelings of exclusion, domination, marginalization, depredation, and neglect […] lead to violence.” 
 – Fidelis Allen

Fidelis Allen has spent most of his life in Nigeria’s Rivers State, leaving only to study abroad. Currently a doctoral candidate at the South African University of KwaZulu-Natal, Allen finds himself back in the oil-rich region he has long called home. He is contemplating the failure to implement environmental policies, and its contribution to the area’s long-standing unrest, as well as possible routes toward peace.

Allen turned his professional attention to the strife in his homeland while taking part in a security and development research project coordinated by King’s College in London in 2006. His personal connection with this work, however, runs deep.

“I was born in 1969, during the Civil War in Nigeria,” he explains. “The stories my parents told me about the war and the difficulties associated with it always remind me of the evils of violent conflict.”

Research rooted in the landscape

When images of environmental destruction in the Niger Delta made international headlines in the 1990s, much of the world assumed that the environmental impacts of oil production had led to violent revolt. But Allen believes that the roots of the crisis are more tangled and complex.

With the support of an IDRC award managed by the Africa Programme of the United Nations’ University for Peace in Ethiopia, Allen is getting to the heart of the story. He has conducted extensive interviews with a range of affected parties: oil workers, members of armed groups, community leaders, and officials in various branches of government. It is difficult and dangerous work.

“The problem of security in the Niger Delta is a concern for any researcher,” he says. “The regular incidence of attack by armed groups creates a state of fear.” Allen must win the trust of his sources and guarantee their anonymity before they will talk to him.

From those first-hand testimonials, as well as historical research, the scholar has pieced together a story that casts oil exploration in a key role, although not as the primary cause of hostilities in the region.

Oil and old hostilities collide

“The conflict in the Niger Delta did not start yesterday,” he says. “People in the region expressed fears about political marginalization before independence in 1957.” When oil, discovered in commercial quantities also in 1957, was exploited with little concern for the natural environment, it lit the fuse on a pre-existing powder keg.

Allen believes the primary explanation for the region’s descent into violence is not environmental destruction per se—but rather the government’s failure to enact its own laws designed to foster sustainable development. Oil spills and routine natural gas flaring (which still occur at 117 of the Niger Delta’s 139 oil fields) have largely destroyed traditional agriculture, creating deepening poverty in the midst of vast oil wealth. This has underscored local populations’ historical sense of grievance—and in the 1980s and ’90s led many groups to take up arms.

The search for new solutions 

Fast-forward to the current day, when the logic of conflict itself appears to be driving the hostilities. Some segments of government rely on continued conflict to leverage political and budgetary support. On the rebel side, meanwhile, selling stolen oil and ransoming kidnapped oil workers has become almost a growth industry—a solid source of financing in an area where traditional economic activities have virtually vanished. Allen believes the reversal of this cycle of violence must start with political reforms to give the Niger Delta’s ethnic minorities an effective political voice, and implementation of sustainable development policies to ensure economic growth.

In the future, Allen is looking to extend the lessons of the Niger Delta to other cases of resource-fueled conflict across Africa. Through his teaching at the University of Port Harcourt, Allen has come into contact with other scholars also interested in these questions. He hopes the two-fold outcome of his future work will be “to assist other doctoral candidates while contributing to improved governance on the continent.”

Stephen Dale, the author of this profile, is a writer in Ottawa.

Document(s) 3 of 9