Canada-based Professor Launches Book on Oil Theft in Nigeria

A Professor of Criminology at the University of Alberta, Canada, Temitope Oriola, has launched a book on kidnapping of oil workers in Nigeria. The book, In Criminal Resistance? The Politics of Kidnapping Oil Workers, explores circumstances responsible for abducting oil workers, and reasons for it. This brings to the fore another challenge in Nigeria’s oil miseries.

At a media chat before the event, he said, “People think of illegal oil bunkering as the activity of just a few social miscreants, but it’s much more complex. Bunkering involves individuals at the highest levels, and even people who are supposed to maintain security. So you have various elites who are involved, but also everyday people. And for them this is merely a survival mechanism in a perpetually depressed economy.” “Nigeria’s economy is mono-cultural. There is clearly an overreliance on oil, a readily available resource, and that has hampered development of other aspects of the economy. But we’re talking about a finite resource. It’s time to start thinking about a post-oil world, a post-oil Nigeria and certainly diversifying the economy. Scholarly attention needs to shift to what I call resource frustration rather than the resource curse.” “In my book I talk about a collective effervescence of communal disenchantment, the alienation of resource-rich communities and their disengagement from the body politic. If these complaints go unattended it leads to violence, which is what we’ve seen in the Niger Delta,” he explained.  

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This article was first published on 28th October 2013

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