Research
Environmental Terrorism and Poverty in the Niger Delta: The Mosquitoes’ Character of the Multinational Corporations
There is no gainsaying that the Niger Delta is like a beautiful damsel raped severally with her supposed protector pretending to be defending her while collaborating with the rapists exposing her to more violations. The advent of oil extraction in the region has only left it more despoiled than one can imagine. The ungodly and poorly regulated romance of the Multinational Oil Corporations, the Nigerian State and the oil-bearing/producing communities can best be described as dangerous Mosquitoes perching on the very testicle of an old man, and any attempt to kill it spells trouble. Leaving it will equally mean exposing the man to acute malaria. This paper examines the precarious situation of poverty in the Niger Delta induced by the very activities of MNOCs operating without respect to international environmental best practices. Attempts at checking the situation seem to have fallen on deaf ears and in most cases military repression on the part of the government that should protect her citizens whose livelihoods have been bastardized with reckless abandon and impunity.
Development Crises and Peasants Survival Mechanisms in the Niger Delta: the Effects of Illegal Oil Bunkering
Despite the fact that the Niger Delta region contributes a significant amount to the nations GDP, its rural communities are still grossly underdeveloped and her inhabitants considered among the poorest in the country. With an official oil production figure of 2.4 million barrels per day, Nigeria ranks as Africa’s biggest petro-state after South Africa; it ranks in billions of dollars in petroleum revenue. However, as noted by scholars, there is one indication that the nation may be producing more than the official figure while the rest is lost through the illegal activities and manipulations of criminal cartels who engage in oil theft. Using the queer ladder theory as a theoretical roadmap for the study, the research revealed those factors that have engendered the growing incidence of oil bunkering in the region. Based on the findings of the research, the research made recommendations which included that government should clean up the environment as a matter of urgency so that those that depend on it to survive can have a means of livelihood while also contributing to the nation’s economy as the development crisis in the region has been linked to the production of crude.
Critical Infrastructure Decay and Development Crises in Nigeria
This paper investigates comparatively the critical nature of infrastructure to the overall development of nations. It points out that critical infrastructure decay in Nigeria is directly related to major issues of development crises in Nigeria. The methodology adopted for this paper is basically content analysis while making use of secondary data in comparative analysis. The paper tries to find answers to the issues of critical infrastructure decay i.e epileptic power supply, poor road network and transportation/ communication imbalances, failing educational structure, overall unemployment, the disconnect between public and private sectors in sustainable infrastructural development, etc in Nigeria. The paper concludes that critical infrastructure must not be treated with levity and neglect if the nation must break out the dialectical cycle of development crises.
