Untying the State/Oil Company Bundle for Participatory Sustainable Development in the Niger Delta

A participatory institutional framework, which aims at improving the quality of life, both as experienced by individuals, and as an attribute of society, remains an essential ingredient of sustainable development. Commitment to participatory institutional framework, or commitment to democratic efficiency, can be deciphered by the extent to which a national government recognizes and integrates the democratic legitimacy of intermediate institutions, which have functional representation from different sectors of the society. Field observations show that the expansion of resource exploration and market oriented oil economy in Nigeria’s Niger Delta has been greeted with corresponding increase in environmental pollution and restiveness. One of the reasons has been identified as the inadequate recognition of the democratic legitimacy of the local participatory structures in the Delta. The state/oil company partnership has disregarded institutionalized local participatory frameworks, like the local town union – a deliberative forum open to all members of the community, thereby subordinating public participation in the oil economy merely to rent mongering. As a result, the Delta grows increasingly in environmental pollution and intractable restiveness. Communities must adapt endlessly to life in polluted environment, while violently enduring a transition from a human economy to a market economy imposed by the neoliberal globalization process. Using the extended case method, which examines how external factors affect and influence local situation, this paper seeks to lend credence to the suggestion that any design to make the economy more human, and development sustainable, need not be revolutionary. Such a design simply needs to build on what is already there, which only seeks recognition and legitimacy for what people do for themselves. It argues that the current institutional structure, which saddles the state and their profit-oriented oil company partners with decision making in the oil economy of the Delta, is more of a patrimonial response to external influences on the local situation than a conscious effort to improve the quality of life of people. Insisting on the state/company partnership structure synchronic with the patrimonial institutional demands, will only at best, maintain the status quo, rather than restore order in the Delta. In consonance with the principles of subsidiarity that are gaining popularity in governance lately, the paper calls instead, for a local town union/investor institutional framework, on which negotiable taxes may be imposed by the state, as a better alternative that can return the resource exploration in the Niger Delta to the path of sustainable development, while remaining responsive to the quality of life desirable to the people.