Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Unlike negotiations with the multinational fi rms, central-government
distribution of oil revenues has been a lightning rod for confl ict internal
to the country. Because Nigeria is a federation, the national government
determines how much petroleum-related revenue will be distributed to
state and local governments around the country. On average, about 48.5
percent of oil receipts today remains with the national government, while
24 percent is allocated to states and about 20 percent fl ows to local
governments (although generally such funds pass through the states).
These percentages have increased in favor of state and local governments
since the advent of civilian rule in 1999. Regardless of the specifi c sums
received, state and local governments alike rely on shared oil receipts for
the major portion of their budgets.
The oil-producing local governments of the Delta now receive approx-
imately 13 percent of the revenues generated by oil production in their
jurisdictions. This has recently translated into making these states among
the richest jurisdictions in the nation. Yet, incomes, education, and health
conditions in the Delta have not improved commensurately (Human
Rights Watch 2007). The contrast of continuing penury amid growing
receipts as a result of the willingness of national civilian governments
since 1999 to return a larger share of oil revenues to Delta area states
and communities raises the question of how such a situation can occur.
The reasons suggest, in keeping with Beck's analysis, the intertwining of
domestic and international factors.
As we noted, in the early 1990s, a popular movement arose in
Ogoniland—an area within the Delta located near Port Harcourt, the
refi nery center for the region—demanding that the federal government
return resources to the region proportionate to those its oil assets were
producing for the nation. Ikporukpo has analyzed this protest movement
(and armed insurrection) in some detail (Ikporukpo 2004). This move-
ment refl ected popular discontent, both with the slowness with which
the oil majors responded to petroleum spills and leakage and with the
companies' unwillingness to curtail fl aring methane gas, a by-product of
the refi ning process. For oil-community activists, environmental justice
came to mean that all government rents received attributable to the area's
resources be returned to the region's state and local governments.
Meanwhile, many citizens saw the oil companies, and not their state
and local governments, as fi nally responsible for the conditions that
troubled them. One Delta representative of Shell Oil Company put the
point this way in 1999: “In many Delta communities, underdevelopment
has led the people to perceive SPDC (Shell Oil in Nigeria) as the only
