The War for Oil? The Nigerian Civil War, Petroleum, and Foreign Policy

This paper analyzes the interactions between American Cold War foreign policy, Nigerian economic independence, and neocolonialism through the lens of the Biafran War. Nigeria increasingly turned into an extractive economy during the 1960s, and oil revenues were incredibly important for Nigeria and Gowon's Federal Military Government (FMG) as a tool for both economic prosperity and political legitimacy. When the Eastern region (Biafra) seceded from Nigeria under the leadership of Colonel Ojuwku it caused a ripple effect that impacted two major Western powers: the United States and Great Britain. Though U.S. oil companies worked in tandem with British petrol companies in Nigeria, previous miscalculations in Africa, namely the Congo Crisis, caused the American government to assume a conservative, hesitant diplomatic stance during the Biafran War. Instead, State Department documents indicate that the U.S. government let the British take the lead, which resulted in American support for Gowon's FMG and a policy urging Nigerian stability at the expense of Ojukwu's rebellion. Britain, Nigeria's old colonial power, had bestowed independence upon Nigeria in 1960, yet the frailty of the new nation allowed Britain to maintain neocolonial economic control, partially through British oil companies. Ojuwku tried to gain implicit diplomatic recognition for Biafra by holding Nigerian oil reserves hostage and demanding revenues, but ultimately Ojukwu’s government failed to receive support from any major power and lost the war to Gowon’s FMG in 1970. Acting as a prism, the Biafran War illustrates that Cold War interests, above all else, continued to drive American foreign policy, despite the State Department's interest in Nigerian oil. Additionally, the internecine fight for oil revenues in Nigeria denoted the increasing power of oil in a globalizing world, and Britain's neocolonial economic control underscored the difficulties new African nations faced during early independence.