GOVERNANCE FOR RESILIENCE IN RESOURCE-RICH DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: A CASE STUDY OF THE NIGER DELTA REGION OF NIGERIA

The problems of sustainable development and capacity building in the developing economies especially those of the Sub-Saharan Africa pose a huge policy dilemma. For the economies to advance from a subsistence and impoverished state to self-sustaining economies requires extensive human and natural resource management strategies.

The discovery of oil in commercial quantities in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria in the 1950s has brought with it both benefits and adverse consequences, with prevalent violence resulting in loss of lives and properties. The inability of Nigeria to achieve sustainable development in the face of extensive human, capital and natural resource endowments opens a new dimension to the analysis of underdevelopment. It clearly indicates the need to shift the emphasis away from the traditional premise of a lack of resources as a platform on which underdevelopment are analyzed. There is a need to focus on the management and use of resource endowment and attended impacts on the ecological systems and communities.

This study focuses on Nigeria and examines the impacts of decades of oil exploration on its overall economic development, and the effects of oil exploration activities by oil multi-nationals on the host communities of the Niger Delta. It draws on two interrelated research areas: socio-ecology and resilience as a guide to the conceptual development and analysis.

The Niger Delta region is a gigantic economic reservoir of both national and international importance. It is richly endowed with oil and gas reserves, which feed directly into the nations’ international economic system in exchange for massive revenues that carry the promise of rapid socio-economic transformation within the region. This research study explores and analyses the various dimensions of the development the Niger Delta, with a view to formulating a people-centered resilience framework for effective management of Nigeria’s enormous human and natural capital endowments. In so doing, the study also explores the role of governance in the process of liquidating natural capital for socio-economic and political developments and doing so by analyzing the Niger Delta Region through the lens of the Willink Commission Report. The study concludes highlighting factors imperative to resilient governance and sustainable development in Nigeria and the Niger Delta in particular.