Page:Niger Delta Ecosystems- the ERA Handbook, 1998.djvu/178

Environmental Impact of the Oil Industry

Income Inequality

Because most people in the Niger Delta have very low or no disposable income while workers in the oil industry receive comparatively high incomes. For instance a flow station supervisor may receive up to N80,000 a month (about US$800 in 1997) compared with a well paid security guard who gets about N4,000 or a University lecturer, about N6,000. Civil servants are particularly badly paid compared to oil industry workers, which encourages corruption.

Unjust Provision of Services and Housing in Urban Areas

Because of the income inequality, which is exacerbated by corruption (whereby a very few people are extremely rich), only the top few percent of the population have access to services such as water electricity and education because they can pay for them. Everyone else more or less does without because public provision is so bad. Also because public housing is severely limited and because the house building industry concentrates on building for the rich, housing provision for the middle classes and the poor is of a very low standard. This is discussed in the final chapter on the special problems of Port Harcourt.

Social Discontent

Which arises from income inequality and the unjust provision of services and housing in urban areas. This ranges from a general awareness of the injustices of life to an anger that can occasionally flare up into mass political action. But perhaps the worst manifestation is the general air of depression that the condition lends to life as a whole in the Niger Delta.

All members of society appear to suffer from frustration both for themselves and for their children. This arises from poor agricultural yields, the lack of education and opportunities and the apparent abandonment by the government. But above all, it arises from the manifestation of the oil industry in the midst of the community which seems to represent huge wealth and yet has given nothing to it, except for the impoverishment of their land. This sense of frustration is most apparent amongst the young men and women who crave a better education but if they get it find that they can do little with it. The young men particularly, hang aimlessly around their communities (sometime helping their mothers on the farm) or migrate to the court-yard or water-side slums of Port Harcourt in search of work and something better...

To an outsider, the diametric contrast between hopeless people scratching about in the degraded landscape and the high technology of the oil installations, the chemical plants of Onne and the expensive cars passing by on the Federal highway, suggests an unbalanced and unstable society.

Re-worded from an ERA report of 1993

Political Instability

Caused by social discontent which gives rise to political tensions and to the subsequent strong military influence which is characteristic of civil society in the Niger Delta.

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