The prime concern by the Nigerian state in the management of the oil conflicts in the Niger Delta has been to maximise oil revenues. What is probably most confounding about this strategy is the evolving tendency to twist and treat every conflict in the Niger Delta, including some episodic ‘epi-oil’ conflicts abetted or orchestrated by the state itself, as oil conflicts. In other words, there is a tendency on the part of the state to wittingly ‘oilify’ some apparently extra-oil conflicts. Compared to other regimes before it, the present civilian administration has probably contributed most to the fast-tracking of this evolving phenomenon. This article unravels and analyses the evolving politics of oilification of extra-oil conflicts in the Niger Delta, its underlying rationale and consequences. Oilification, as the study demonstrates, is yet another in the series of dangerous contradictions engendered by the Nigerian state. How this and other dangerous contradictions could possibly be solved is a research conundrum for the relevant cognoscenti of state-society relations and conflicts in Nigeria. But would the Nigerian state take on board any useful and promising solutions materialising from such studies? This is most unlikely in the present conjuncture given the prevailing configuration of interests in the state.

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This study derives from a concern with the Nigerian oil conflict. It focuses on the paradigm shift and various methods of conflict management practised in the oil industry, especially among the more dominant transnational oil companies (TNOCs). The article is primarily based on a field study of the three largest TNOCs in Nigeria – Shell, Mobil and Chevron. The study reveals that different oil companies operating in the Niger Delta adopt different conflict management strategies depending on the precise nature and intensity of the threats concerned, which are, in turn, largely related to the locational spread or concentration of the individual firm's oil operations. The upsurge and intensification of violent anti-oil protests in the oil-bearing communities since the 1990s have compelled petrobusiness to explore new paradigms of security communitization, security privatization, security corporatization and securitization of development. The paradigm shift, as the study demonstrates, has considerable implications for both the oil conflict and security in the Nigerian oil region.

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