Oil Wealth, Democratic Governanace and Development in Nigeria: The Predicaments of a Rentier State

This paper examines the syndrome of rentier state and the seeming ‘curse’ of oil which is supposed to be a blessing and how it encourages and strengthens bad governance at the detriment of democratic ethos and undermining developmental programmes in Nigerian. Paradoxically, both renewable and non-renewable oil resources that are predominantly found in the Niger Delta areas of the Nigeria, has tremendously contributed to the high rate of poverty in that region, due largely to the ecologically unfriendly exploitation of oil and the politics associated with the exploitation and governance of the oil resource in Nigeria. Thus, oil rents and institutional weakness has continuing to form a vicious cycle in the Nigerian state. The available evidence suggests that the extent of corruption is higher in the country and since the 1990s, the Niger Delta region where Nigeria oil large domicile has become a theatre of violent conflicts; manifesting in the form of kidnapping of oil workers, illegal oil bunkering, vandalization of oil pipeline and high level of militancy involving lots of small arms and light weapons. By implication, the country has not been able to escape from the rentier state syndrome as huge sunk of the oil wealth are derived from rent seeking with grave implications on democratic governance and socio-economic development of the Nigerian state.