On 10 July 2025 the AFREXTRACT project in collaboration with the Centre for Niger Delta Studies and Sustainability (CNDSS), Federal University Otuoke (FUO), convened a Townhall Meeting on Entanglements with Oil Extraction in the Niger Delta. The Townhall Meeting was strategically held at the Federal University Otuoke, located in Ogbia local government area of Bayelsa state, an area that birthed Nigeria’s oil industry through the discovery of crude oil in commercial quantities in the village of Otuabagi in 1956. The Townhall Meeting, which pioneered the Town-Gown engagement of this magnitude, brought together traditional rulers, civil society organizations, media organizations, and academia from Bayelsa and Rivers states. Attended by over 500 persons, including students, the meeting provided a participatory platform where participants reflected on their lived experiences with crude oil extraction and environmental pollution, while also amplifying localized community-based responses, and entanglements with oil extraction.

Oily Entanglements

The Townhall Meeting began with a presentation by Dr Jackson Tamunosaki Jack, postdoctoral researcher in the AFREXTRACT project. The presentation, entitled ‘Oily Lifeworlds’: Entanglements with Oil Extraction in the Niger Delta, introduced the AFREXTRACT project and highlighted the state of the art on scholarship on localized responses to crude oil extraction in the Niger Delta. Based on preliminary findings from fieldwork conducted in March 2025 in Ogboinbiri community, Bayelsa state and Ogbakiri community, Rivers state, Dr Jack foregrounded that beyond armed resistance, litigation, and protests, communities in the Niger Delta have responded to crude oil extraction and pollution in a plurality of ways. The presentation demonstrated how decades of crude oil extraction in the region have engendered new ‘oil-cultures’ which are embedded in everyday life and enable communities to reanimate crude oil and gas as symbols of geo-cultural identity and resources for economic, medicinal, and spiritual purposes.

Crude Oil - Crude Life

The research presentation was followed by an open dialogue session which enabled participants to address key questions, particularly on how entanglements with crude oil have enabled communities to live with oil pollution. For most participants, while entanglements with oil have enabled communities to negotiate their daily lives with the toxicity of crude oil extraction, this in itself reflects the crudity of oil. Participants notably argued that oil, in addition to its deleterious effects on the environment and livelihoods, initiated crude ways of living in the Niger Delta. The Vice Chancellor of the Federal University Otuoke, Professor Teddy Charles Adias, represented by the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor Chris Onyema, reiterated this point, when he remarked that ‘the oil is being taken away by the oil companies, what is left behind is the crude which the Niger Delta people are entangled with. We are left with the crude life’. This highlights the longstanding paradoxical relationship of the Niger Delta people with crude oil extraction, having being alienated and excluded from oil wealth by oil companies and the Nigerian state. On his part, HRM King Bubaraye Dakolo (The Ibenana-owei of Ekpetiama Kingdom and Chairman of the Bayelsa State Council of Traditional Rulers) noted that widespread infrastructural developmental deficits and illiteracy in the creeks of the Niger Delta account for these forms of oily entanglements. He reiterated that the Niger Delta is on the verge of extinction, following decades of crude oil pollution and deliberate state repression, which kept the people impoverished and made them prone to adopting crude survival mechanisms, such as ingesting crude oil as medicine. On the subject of ‘Kpo-Fire’, i.e. artisanal crude oil refining through the adoption of a local technology used to distil local gin from palm wine, participants including King Dakolo attributed its proliferation to the perennial scarcity of petroleum products in the creeks of the Niger Delta, resource ownership contestations, and localized responses to longstanding discontent in the region.

Of Spirits and Crude Oil Extraction

The place of spirits and local deities was a prominent theme at the Townhall dialogue. HRH Engr. Eseimokumo Benson Okosughe (The Paramount Ruler of Ogboinbiri Community, Bayelsa state), recounting the experience of his community with oil extraction, noted that oil extraction could only happen in the early 1990s after community cleansing rituals were conducted to appease the local deities who hitherto hindered oil discovery. Interestingly, subsequent interviews revealed that extractive rituals are not recent, but date back to the origin of oil extraction in the country. In 1955 a ritual was conducted at the Onem shrine in Otuogidi community, which enabled the flow of oil from Oil Well 1 in Otuobagi community. Undoubtedly, these historical and experiential knowledge systems and practices account for the emergent spiritual, livelihood, and socio-cultural entanglements with crude oil, that have enabled people living in localities of extraction to co-exist with oil and the associated extractive activities as part of their everyday life.