**3. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Obufia**

Transnational corporations in the Niger Delta have been involved in CSR from the inception of oil business in the resource rich zone. This has evolved through three main phases namely; the pay-as-you-go, community assistance/community development, and corporate-community involvement phases [3, 18]. In the pay-as-you-go

phase, oil companies gave local communities a one-time gift as they deemed fit. Such gifts were restricted to communities in which oil wells are located or through which oil pipelines passed. The idea was not only to fulfill their social welfare obligation but also to keep the communities as far from the activities of the companies as possible.

With regard to the community assistance/community development phase, oil companies assisted communities with the provision of basic social amenities such as potable water, electricity supply, road construction, school blocks construction, healthcare facilities, skill acquisition centres, etc. The idea behind this was to curtail the vicious cycle of protests, repression and conflict that was generated by a long period of pay-as-you-go with the local communities not receiving any substantial benefits from it. This second approach did not solve the problem because, its poor community participation, lack of project sustainability and tendency to generate intra-community and inter-community violence necessitated a third approach. Although the third phase—corporate-community involvement—provides for more local participation, it is yet to go round and even in the areas it has been implemented, questions of authentic participation still loom large.

This approach involves the formation of some central coordinating councils that will be liaising with oil multinationals, where as some NGOs are engaged, sometimes to play the negotiating and monitoring role in a process that ends up producing a Global Memorandum of Understanding (GMoU).

The CSR approach begins with the identification of communities in which oil deposits are found—oil bearing communities—or in which heavy exploration impact is made—communities suffering either directly or remotely from oil exploration2 . The NGO will assist in identifying the communities that qualify as such. These communities are assisted to form a cluster of communities by way of regionalization. The communities then work out a plan of development in which they indicate the projects they would want to be assisted to accomplish. This plan is then presented to the oil multinationals operating in the communities for approval and endorsement. The emerging document becomes the global memorandum of understanding. Once a GMoU is signed, a Regional Development Council (RDC) or the Cluster Trust Board (CTB) is formed. This council or board becomes the liaison between the oil multinationals and the communities.

In the next section, I will demonstrate in detail via ethnographic findings how these CSR approaches have impacted on the local communities and how the local communities creatively responded to cushion the backlashes of the CSR approaches. I will show that the emergence of Obufia autonomous community from Egbema was the result of the people's creative capacity in a bid to cushion the backlash of CSR. This creativity was a bricolage whereby state policy reforms on the local government and legendary migration traditions form useful tools.

In sum, the different phases of CSR in the Niger Delta have had the potential to generate violent conflicts due mainly to their democratic deficiency. Feeding into this deficiency are some of the forces implicated in the oil complex, which become manifest in varied ways in the corporate-community relations or in the state-community relations. However, the tendency of CSR to generate conflict is curtailed by the capacity of some communities especially among the Igbo of Niger Delta to be creative. This creative capacity needs to be emphasized as a conflict reduction strategy and due credit accorded the creative community choosing it as an option.

<sup>2</sup> Communities which have oil pipelines passing through them and those whose rivers and creeks have been affected by oil spills are examples of the impacted communities [19].

*Responding Creatively to Faulty Corporate Social Responsibility Practices: The Case of Nigeria's… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106249*
