State-corporate environmental crime and human security in the Niger Delta, Nigeria

Abstract

This theoretical paper advanced the argument that all human acts such as oil spills, gas flaring and other forms of environmental degradation in contravention of existing environmental legislation amount to environmental violence; and constitute environmental crime within the context of this paper. Environmental crime in the Nigeria Delta is increasing unabated and huge implication of human security. The environment is life and sustainer of humanity both present and future. But man has become a destroyer instead of a protector and replenisher of the environment on account of the unsustainable drive for capital accumulation for industrialization and development. The outcomes have deepened the poverty and misery of the Niger Delta people instead of ameliorating them. The acts of ecocide and genocide committed by the Multinational Oil Corporations with the tacit connivance Nigerian state had continuously threatened human security, without commensurable commitments to halting the impending Armageddon. The argument of this paper is guided by resource curse, Dutch disease and state failure theories. Data used to advance this argument are purely qualitative and generated from secondary sources. They are subjected to content analysis. Admittedly, environmental crime or green criminology as sub-filed or a separate section of legal jurisprudence is struggling to evolve. Our finding is that the trouble with environmental governance in Nigeria is not the want of regulations, albeit weak, but the problem of enforcement. This implies that the bulk stops at the state. The state must assert its stateness, effectively perform it s regulatory roles, and place environment violation where they belong, as environmental crime.