Contingent relations, cult(ure)s of respectability and youth mobilisation in the oil rich Niger Delta

This paper examines the subtle influences that respectability and contingent action exert on the self imagination and social mobilisation of youth. Placing the analysis within the context of the politics of oil extraction in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the paper uses field data to show how the temporalities of ageing currently shape respectability within Delta youthscapes and how provisionality serves as a central vehicle for social navigation

Slipping through the net: everyday agency of youth and the politics of amnesty in Nigeria’s Niger Delta (2009–2015)

Using the 2009 Amnesty in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, this paper explores youth manipulation of neopatrimonial systems of coercion and cooptation. It makes three arguments. First, the violence preceding the amnesty declaration was as much a youth-led insurgency to protest social and environmental justice issues as it was a crisis within Nigeria’s neopatrimonial system. Second, the amnesty programme was designed to re-constitute the collapsed neopatrimonial system, linking youth to patrons both within the Delta and in the broader Nigerian society. Finally, the paper argues that a counter hegemonic process through which youth express their agency by manipulating the amnesty in innovative ways is going on simultaneously. These arguments indicate a need to reconsider familiar tropes of ethnicity, culture and institutional deficits in the way we think about governance projects in post-colonial Africa and the tendency to exaggerate the relevance of the ‘bigman’

Gender and Identity in the Nigerian Media

This paper examines the construction of gender identity and roles in the Media in Nigeria. It seeks to draw attention to the connection between cultural values and the gendered choices made by the media practitioners. It interrogates the gender discourse in the context of power and disempowerment and situates this within the political economy of Nigeria and its place in the global system. By demonstrating the linkage between the nature of economic production and the problematics of disempowerment, the paper argues that gender identity is best understood for its utility as an agency of political action and mass mobilization. This utility, it contends, is however being appropriated by primary identities, in this case, ethnicity, to the extent that the gender discourse is subsumed within the contestations for power which is conducted primarily through loose ethnic coalitions in Nigeria. The media easily reflect this situation by making choices that demonstrate their immersion into the ethnic conflict and their conscious manipulation of gender identities in a way that highlights their ethnic character. This situation, the paper notes, has implications for transcultural communication. For Nigeria, the inability of the gender discourse to be couched in transcultural language reflects the salience of the National Question. It also highlights the challenge of democratizing Nigeria and of finding transcultural convergence in an era of globalization. In concluding, it questions the ability of the media in Nigeria to effectively promote gender identities that will be inclusive and at the same time recognize the organic evolutionary process of social cultures in Nigeria

New Spaces, New Interactions? Young People’s Online Social Networks and Gender Relations in Africa

This article explores the implications of online social networks for gender relations in Africa. It questions whether these networks are impacting the stereotypes and biases that drive offline interaction. To answer this question, the article relies on targeted surveys in Nigeria and Ghana. These surveys not only generate data for the central enquiry, but also highlight the role of class in shaping the nature of interactions with and within the new spaces emerging with new media. This raises questions about the gender dimensions of the much touted democratic utility of new media, and how other important social interactions, such as, economic and cultural, can frame it. It also questions the overall inclusiveness of new media. The article concludes by drawing attention to the possibilities of new media in creating gender-blind societies but also highlights the crucial, and often neglected, role of other social categories in framing access to these possibilities and in configuring how they interact with the political space

Youth networks and violence in the Niger delta

This study provides an alternative explanation for the nature of politics in the Niger Delta by focussing on the forms and contents of relationships within youth networks. While not repudiating previous narratives around historical and contemporary grievances, the study argues that a lot can be learnt from interrogating how social codes like respectability and self organizational tactics like provisionality, shape, not just the nature of youth politics, but also the ways in which youth imagine themselves and their place in fluid and extractive contexts like the Niger Delta. The implication of focussing on issues such as these, the study argues, is that it becomes possible to tease out the critical, yet often ignored, micro-politics of social categories which ultimately frame the way actors articulate their macro level grievances and aspirations. This study is driven by three main research questions. First, what pathways facilitate youth engagement with politics in the Niger Delta? Second, how do Niger Delta youth imagine and organize themselves as actors navigating its dynamic oil political economy? And finally, how has the Amnesty which was declared in 2009 for youth insurgents changed the nature of relationships within youth networks and how has it impacted on their roles as actors in the Niger Delta? As a way of engaging with these questions, the study used the 2009 Amnesty as a historical marker to periodize state interventions in the region and also to illustrate the impact and limits that formal interventions have when seeking to shape the politics of social shifters like youth. The study's main contributions include a rethinking of the notion of youth which asks for a conscious analytical disaggregation of politically active youth from the general pool of the young. This implies that the idea of youth is dependent on acts of doing rather than of being. The study also challenged the idea that youth is marginal and argues that even the fact of marginality can be a useful resource for navigating uncertain social contexts like the Niger Delta. Through its engagement with the changing notion of respectability as well as the innovative deployment of provisionality as an organizing strategy by youth, the study provides new ways of analyzing the Niger Delta that can move it away from a fixation on rational choice narratives of scarcity, greed or grievance. Finally, the study provides the first comprehensive mapping of youth networks in the Niger Delta and does so across three pathways, showing how these complex relationships shape and are also shaped by the broader political economy of oil. The study concludes by arguing for new questions to be asked about how the shifting forms and geographies of the Niger Delta’s youth networks flow out to other areas of national and transnational life in ways that recognize the regions fluidity, uncertainty and permanence.</p

Crisis as opportunity: youth, social media and the renegotiation of power in Africa

This paper conceptualises ‘global financial crisis’ as primarily political and focuses on the way it impacts on the ability of youth to renegotiate their place and space with patterns of authority and control in Africa, using the instrumentality of new media. Three main arguments are made. First is that, even though the crisis occurred within the economy, non-economic causal factors were key triggers. Second, the intersection between youth protest, the pressures of a global system in crisis and the opportunities being provided by globalised social media has been critical not only to the deepening of resistance, but also to the ability of youth to appropriate the discourses and channel grievance. Third, youth appropriation of protest discourses surrounding the pressures of the recent global crisis has forced a renegotiation of patterns of authority and control and is deepening stability challenges in different ways. This paper concludes by examining how the state has responded to this emerging youth ability to not only demand but also impose discourses within the public space

Oil, Youth, and Networks of the “Unconnected” in Nigeria's Niger Delta

This article draws on fieldwork data to argue that while the reality of widespread privations does indeed play a role in generating legitimate grievances upon which social action in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta is based, those who are able to violently animate their grievances are invariably part of a very complex network of clientelism that is both intimately connected to the structures of state power at the same time and opposed to its very logic. It therefore challenges notions of Niger Delta militants as members of a disempowered and marginalized social category. It highlights the importance of social networks to the ability of youth to take advantage of perverse incentives of the oil economy and calls for policy frameworks that recognize their embeddeness within the overall architectures of power in the country