ABSTRACT
Over the last four decades, natural resource-rich frontier economies have experienced a paradoxical interaction of wealth, poverty, and deprivation. In Africa, government revenues driven through taxation and royalties have created an illusory sense of abundant wealth at the expense of resource-bearing communities whose daily-lived experiences have proved the opposite. In Nigeria’s Niger Delta, decades of sustained human rights violations, environmental degradation, and sociopolitical exclusion have occasioned petro-violence among the communities, the state, and oil multinationals. This power imbalance and the Nigerian state’s historical stranglehold on the oil resource form the basis of this chapter’s analysis. From a theoretico-practical transformational approach to human rights and environmental justice for Niger Delta’s oil communities, it draws on Saro-Wiwa’s Genocide in Nigeria: the Ogoni Tragedy. The methodology it adopts is narrative inquiry and textual analysis; and as theoretical foregrounding, it adopts Luhmann’s systems theory to unravel the extent and impact of hydrocarbon exploration on the Niger Delta ecosystem. The chapter enquires how Nigeria’s current hydrocarbons governance can be recalibrated to protect oil communities’ human and environmental rights and promote sustainability. The answer, the chapter finds in the institutionalisation of human rights and environmental justice as psychosocial and transcendental in human systems. Although Rawls highlighted the impossibility of giving a systematic analysis of justice as a concept, it is presented in this chapter as a psychosocial construction of good. This should operate both retroactively and retrospectively to ameliorate affected communities’ experiences of environmental degradation and human rights violations.
