This article examines the genealogies of the Ìlàjẹ and the narrative of belonging that reinforces claims to ownership of land and natural resources such as oil. The article maps how oil flow stations, pipelines and platforms have come to represent an ancestral promise of wealth to many members of Ìlàjẹ communities. This claim making is embedded in a mythic origin that continuously reinforces a distinct identity that projects an imagined community connected to the Yorùbá of south-west Nigeria as well as the oil-rich Niger Delta region. While many scholars have studied the myth of origin of the Yorùbá, in most cases focusing on rituals and political imagination that intersect with linguistic evidence in determining Yorùbá identity, these scholars have often neglected the centrality of these myths to oil resources. Thus, I investigate how the Ìlàjẹ narrative of belonging creates its own specificity of ‘ownership’ of natural resources through ritual performances connected to migration and dispersal of subject populations. I examine how such narratives create spaces of opportunity for the organization of protests against multinational oil corporations and the Nigerian state.

Abstract:This article examines how multinational corporations, recognizing the symbolic value of oil pipelines, flow stations, and platforms as ancestral promises of wealth to subject populations, work with NGOs and communities (sometimes in collaboration with the latter, but sometimes in a more adversarial manner) in setting up governance structures that often compete with, and sometimes oppose, the state in struggles over territorial control and resource extraction. These forms of contestations, it argues, create new sites of power in which NGOs aid multinational oil corporations in negotiating new sites of governance that in themselves create new structures of power.

In the last few years, there has been a significant increase in the number of Chinese businesses operating in Nigeria. The transition to civil rule in 1999 and the eventual consolidation of a liberalized economy by successive administrations have resulted in the signing of several business deals with the Chinese government and Chinese enterprises. In line with the Federalist structure of the Nigerian government, many of these new enterprises have arisen from collaborations between Chinese companies and state and local governments in Nigeria. While central government efforts to shift the economy away from oil dependency have largely failed, state and local governments, at least on the surface seem committed in working with Chinese firms to increase investment in enterprises that will help generate a growth-oriented diversified economy. However, Chinese interests in Nigeria appear to continue to focus on oil extraction and related industries. Among other things, this chapter will look specifically at the construction of a Free Trade Zones in Lagos and Ogun States with emphasis on evaluating the extractive practices within these two zones. The chapter will focus on documenting and assessing the nature and impact of Chinese investment projects in different regions of Nigeria to see if the shapes of Chinese projects are in the image of Prometheus or Leviathan.

This article interrogates the introduction of special economic zones (SEZs) in Nigeria with an emphasis on the establishment of the Lekki free trade zone (FTZ) in May 2006 by the Lagos State government in partnership with a Chinese consortium, and of the Ogun-Guandong FTZ in Igbesa, Ogun State by the Ogun State government. The aim of the Lekki FTZ, Ogun-Guandong FTZ and other SEZs is to transform Lagos and Ogun states into the manufacturing hub of West Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. These economic zones in Nigeria encompass oil and gas, manufacturing, retail, real estate, and other ancillary companies. Based on interviews and participant observations, this article investigates how differing notions of land ownership circulate within communities affected by the FTZs. I ask how it is that indigenous populations, who fear displacement from their living spaces and socio-economic livelihoods, have begun to utilize claims to ancestral land ownership as symbolic expressions of cultural meanings and belonging that run counter to the property regimes associated with the FTZ project. How does the production of such cultural meanings intersect with the claims and counter-claims of indigeneity, communal ownership, and belonging to a space with a rich history that predates the postcolonial state and the inheritors of state power in Lagos? How is it that FTZs, framed as infrastructure projects designed to make life better for the people, end up displacing populations? In drawing out the connections between large-scale development and displacement, this article examines how communities employ both the tangible and intangible past to show how contestations over land ownership are reshaping new forms of community history and culture.

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