The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, The Open University

THE FERGUSON CENTRE FOR
AFRICAN AND ASIAN STUDIES

Roehampton Conference Abstracts

20. Cyril Obi (Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Nigeria):
From Homeland to Hopeland? Economic Globalisation and Ogoni Migration in the 1990s

Cyril Obi is a Senior Research Fellow. His many publications include The Changing Forms of Identity Politics in Nigeria under Economic Adjustment: The Case of Oil Minorities Movements of the Niger Delta (2001).

After the hanging of Nine Ogoni minority and environmental rights activists in November 1995, and in the wake of a major military campaign directed at repressing Ogoni resistance, thousands of Ogoni fled across the Nigerian borders to seek refuge in all parts of the world. Ogoni refugees fled to UNHCR camps in West Africa, as well as countries in Europe and North America. This was against the background of a well-organised local and global campaign by the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) for the protection of the rights of the Ogoni people against the expropriation and pollution of their land by the Nigerian federal government and the oil multinational- Shell. MOSOP had successfully welded its local protests and claims to global rights discourses.

This paper explores the linkages between economic globalisation – represented by oil multinationals operating in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta region, the politics of local resistance, and the migration of the victims of environmental conflict and military repression. It seeks to establish the connection between the global expropriation of an oil-rich locale, the politics of resistance – involving resistance by minority and environmental rights groups and repression by state security forces. In this regard, it is possible to discern a linkage between the pressures and contradictions unleashed by globalisation in a locale, and the Ogoni search for another life outside Nigeria’s borders – as represented by metaphors of ‘escape’ ‘refuge’ and ‘protest.’ The linkage is important to a critical understanding of Ogoni migration, its causes, trajectory and destination(s), and the ways it contributes to 'distanced resistance' in global-local terms.

In the course of the analysis, the following questions are pertinent. How then have political and economic discourses empowered Ogoni migration, and can the Ogoni Diaspora be captured in cultural and resistance terms? How is migration organised and negotiated in trans-boundary terms? How do the Ogoni migrant communities organise themselves and converse in trans-global terms? How do these communities survive and thrive "out there"? Are they environmental refugees or economic refugees in the age of globalisation?

The paper is divided into four broad sections. The first examines the roots of migration-the expropriation of the fragile Ogoni environment by oil multinationals and a campaign of military terror by the Nigerian State directed a repressing Ogoni activism and protests against the state-oil alliance. The second examines the various approaches to migration in the current phase of globalisation, and seeks to locate Ogoni migration in the interface of the environmental-economic and the political. This is followed by the analytical fulcrum of the paper that explores the ramification of economic globalisation and Ogoni migration as a form of 'distanced' resistance. In the fourth and concluding section, the paper brings in 'snapshots' of Ogoni refugee life at the global level, and shows how it simultaneously empowers and weakens solidaristic ties with a distanced home, and nurtures the hope of a return to the promised land of a free Ogoni.

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