Governance and Oil Politics in Nigeria’s Niger Delta: The Question of Distributive Equity

Nigeria’s Niger Delta is the storehouse of petroleum resources, which accounts for more than 80 percent of Nigeria’s revenue and more than 90 percent of the total exports. Unfortunately, the producing region remains poor, ecologically disabled and infrastructurally underdeveloped giving rise to various forms of violent conflicts, kidnappings and restiveness. In this study, we employ the concept of governance to see how oil benefits are distributed as well as its overall impacts on the development of the region. The paper mostly uses statistics from secondary sources to support arguments. The outcome shows that the real oil benefits do not trickle down to the Niger Delta region in a significant amount. We observed that several factors including politicization of benefits, revenue and infrastructural distribution; wrong policies; ethnic domination and absence of transparent and accountable leadership are real deprivers and captors of oil benefits, which continues to keep the region perpetually poor and underdeveloped. Addressing these issues requires thorough understanding of the fundamental questions of governance in Nigeria.