Resource Governance and Protracted Conflict in Nigeria’s Niger Delta offers a breathtaking analysis of the enigma that is contemporary Nigeria. In this timely study, Idamkue offers readers more than a glimpse of what he had witnessed as a young community organizer and activist who worked alongside the venerable Ken Saro Wiwa to put environmental justice, good governance and resource control at the top of Nigeria’s national agenda in the 1990s. His argument, driven largely by data, that resource governance is both at the heart of the resource conflicts in the Niger Delta and the ideal place to find solutions deserves the attention of scholars, activists and policy makers in this time of tremendous flux.

Clement Eme Adibe, DePaul University

Idamkue’s book is a searchlight into the labyrinthine intricacies of Nigeria’s political economy that reveals how a resource presents itself as boom in a section of the polity and as doom in another. The analysis conducted into the conflict precipitated by this irony covers the antecedences, the present situation and what needs to be done to achieve equity in resource management in a multi-ethnic state. Every architect of statehood interested in building a stable and harmonious socio-economic structure needs to read and apply both the stated and implied solutions prescribed in the present book.

Meshach N. Karanwi, University of Port Harcourt