아프리카ㆍ중동

The Niger Delta’s oil wealth stands in contrast to its severe underdevelopment and instability. The oil sector accounts for almost 95 percent of Nigeria’s export earnings and over 80 percent of federal government revenue, but for two decades the region has been entangled with conflict and violence that has threatened human security and development. Indeed, the conflict in the oil-rich Niger Delta has been triggered by a host of factors. These include but are not limited to the revenue allocation formula and resource control, federalism, environmental scarcities, unequal distribution of resources, state imposed poverty, and political and economic corruption to mention a few. Among diverse and complex roots of conflict in the region, thus, it can largely be categorized into two broad dimensions of diverse factors, including political and institutional ones as well as socio-economic and environmental ones. Owing mainly to highly complex and exceedingly broad and diverse factors fuelling conflict in the region, this paper tries to delimit itself to the former ones, with focusing particularly on the critical issues of federalism, political exclusion and marginalization related with electoral violence, and neopatrimonialism related with massive corruption in Nigeria. Before dealing with the aforementioned subject matter of this paper, it is to discuss theoretical arguments concerning political and institutional perspectives, which will be helpful for understanding and examining the nature, character and style of root causes of conflict in the Niger Delta. Within this context, the section of theoretical discussion will be followed by the unfolding of historical background to the crisis in the Niger Delta.