Gendering Violence: The Oil Paradox, Women and Conflict in the Niger Delta of Nigeria

By: Ojakorotu Victor PhD,  School of Politics, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

The Niger Delta in Nigeria has attracted the attention of human rights activists and environmentalists over the years due to incessant violence arising from the Nigerian state and oil multinationals’ policies towards the local people. The grievances of these communities centre on three fundamental issues of environmental degradation that is by-product of oil exploitation, gross marginalization and total exclusion of the local people from access to oil wealth that has been generated from the region for over four decades.

Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter with billions of dollar accruing to the state yearly but this does not translate to physical development of the Niger Delta which generates more than eighty percent of national wealth. The perceived insensitivity of the state and oil multinationals to the plight of the oil-bearing communities has informed the recurrence of violence in different dimensions with serious consequences on both the women and children of the region. For three decades, the men of the region had adopted the violent method to change the policies of the state and the foreign oil multinationals with little or no success.

However, women in the early 90s began to employ peaceful protest in the Niger Delta, a departure from the thirty-year long male-orchestrated method of resistance. This paper will, inter alia, highlight the circumstances that stimulated women involvement in oil violence in the region, the responses of both the state and oil multinationals to women-led protests and the policy prescriptions which if implemented, could arrest the cycle of violence in the Niger Delta.