Oil Transnational Corporations and the Legacy of Corporate-Community Conflicts: The Case of SEEPCO in Nigeria

This paper examines the nature, impact, ramifications, and root causes of the corporate-community resource conflict in Anambra’s oil-bearing communities. It approaches this objective from the standpoint that such a conflict may be appropriately termed “a legacy of oil transnational corporations” in Nigeria, given their antecedents in the Niger Delta region. Unlike the existing literature that blames such conflicts for the most part on environmental, socio-economic, and political factors, with limited emphasis on the legal factors, this paper takes the position that an unhealthy legal apparatus of the Nigerian state and regulatory gaps in Nigeria’s oil industry provide the enabling environment that makes the conflict inevitable. Essentially, this paper tweaks the “resource curse” theory as espoused by mainstream political economists by demonstrating that, apart from greed and grievance, the “curse” is equally underpinned by inept legal structures and regulatory gaps that show little regard for good governance and the well-being of the local people in host communities. But two possible solutions are proffered. One is the institutionalization of a statutory scheme for consultation with the local communities before appropriation of their lands for oil production projects, and the other is encouraging the participation of indigenous peoples or indigenous entities in the development of their natural resources, following the example of Orient Petroleum Resources Plc.