By Lucy Eyo
There is a particular kind of silence that follows a broken promise. It is not the silence of peace. It is the silence of people who have learned that shouting changes nothing, that the machinery of governance will grind on regardless of whether they speak or stay quiet.I know that silence.
I have sat inside it, on the banks of communities where oil slicks shimmer like false gold on the water, where fishing nets come up empty, and where women gather not to celebrate democracy but to mourn what it was supposed to mean.
This is my democracy story. It does not begin with hope. But I choose to end it there.
Nigeria’s return to democratic rule in 1999 arrived on the wings of enormous expectation. After sixteen years of military dictatorship, the promise was simple and intoxicating: your voice will count. Your government will answer to you. The resources of this land, the oil beneath the Niger Delta creeks, the wealth extracted from your backyard, will finally work for you.
For communities in Akwa Ibom State, those words carried particular weight. Akwa Ibom is one of Nigeria’s highest crude oil-producing state. For decades, oil companies had drilled and piped and profited, while host communities watched their rivers die and their livelihoods vanish. Democracy, they believed, would finally hold the industry accountable.
Twenty-seven years later, the accounting is still outstanding.
What I Saw in Ibeno and Esit Eket
My work with Policy Alert has taken me deep into the oil-producing communities of Akwa Ibom, particularly Ibeno and Esit Eket, through projects, which documents how women in these communities experience the costs and benefits of oil extraction.
What I found was not the Nigeria that democracy promised.
In Ibeno, women who once fished the Atlantic coastline described how oil spills had contaminated their waters repeatedly over the years. In August 2024, a significant spill further devastated an already fragile ecosystem. Nets that used to fill with bream and barracuda now come up coated in crude. The women told us their incomes had collapsed. They told us their children were sick. They told us nobody came.
That last part, nobody came, is what stays with me.
Under Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Act 2021, companies are legally required to establish Host Community Development Trusts (HCDTs) to channel funds back into oil-producing areas. The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) exists to monitor spills and compel remediation. Democratic institutions, local government, state government, federal oversight, exist to ensure all of this actually works.
But when an oil spill hits Ibeno, the women of that community do not experience a responsive democratic state. They experience bureaucratic silence, legal complexity they cannot navigate, and compensation frameworks designed more to protect corporate liability than to restore livelihoods.
The Gender Dimension Nobody Talks About
Democracy’s failures in extractive communities have a gender face, and it is almost never discussed.
When oil contaminates water, the burden falls disproportionately on women — because in these communities, women manage household water, nutrition, and subsistence income from fishing and farming. When a spill kills the creek economy, it is women who absorb the shock with no compensation and no policy safety net.
The Maputo Protocol, the African Union’s landmark instrument on women’s rights, guarantees women’s rights to a healthy environment, to economic participation, and to meaningful involvement in decisions that affect their communities. Nigeria ratified it in 2004. But ratification and implementation are different animals entirely.
In the communities I visit, women are largely absent from the HCDT governance structures meant to manage oil company community funds. They are absent from environmental impact negotiations. They are informed of decisions after they are made, if they are informed at all. This is not democracy.
I do not tell these stories to say that democracy has failed and should be abandoned. I tell them because I believe democracy is the only instrument powerful enough to fix what is broken, if citizens demand it with enough force and enough evidence.
I have seen what happens when advocacy works. I have seen communities organize, document, and present evidence to government bodies, and watched those bodies, however slowly, respond. I have seen young women in Esit Eket learn to read environmental monitoring data and use it in conversations with oil company representatives. I have seen policy documents change because civil society refused to let government rest.
For the women of Ibeno and Esit Eket, democracy is a water source that should be clean. It is a spill that should be cleaned up within days, not years. It is a compensation process that should not require a lawyer and a decade. It is a seat at the table when decisions about their land are being made.
These are not radical demands. They are the baseline of what democracy promised.
My Role, and Yours
As a Communicator. My tools are words, evidence, and the stubborn belief that if you put the right information in front of the right people often enough, something will eventually shift.
But I am also a citizen who grew up watching Nigerian democracy make promises it has been slow to keep. I have sat with women who have given up on the system,not because they do not believe in democracy, but because democracy has not yet believed in them.
This story does not belong only to me. It belongs to every young Nigerian who has asked why the wealth beneath their feet does not improve the road outside their door. It belongs to every woman in a creek community who has attended a public hearing and not been called upon to speak. It belongs to every community that has watched an environmental degradation report gather dust on a government shelf.
Our democracy story is still being written. The question is who gets to hold the pen.
