SUMMARY

Territorial claims, ideology, colonialism, nationalism, religion and natural resources have typically been the main sources of conflict throughout the world. While the influence of some of these is waning, struggles for the control of valuable natural resources have remained a persistent feature of national and international affairs for decades. In addition to helping some of the most corrupt and oppressive regimes to remain in power, natural resources have been fuelling conflicts within and between African countries. Such conflict situations typically take the form of territorial disputes over the possession of oil-laden border areas, factional struggles among the leaders of oil-rich countries, and major inter-state wars over the control of vital oil and mineral zones.

Africa was largely controlled by indigenous people in the 1870s, but by 1914, it became almost exclusively subjugated and divided into protectorates/colonies by the European powers. The colonial boundaries in these configurations were not established according to the various indigenous groupings. Grouping nations together in some cases and dividing them in others was a common feature as long as it was consistent with the security and economic interests of the colonial powers. After independence, most of Africa became and is still troubled by the legacy of trying to get originally different indigenous groupings to live peacefully in a single country or to get the same ethnic group to live peacefully in different neighbouring countries. As in most of Africa, therefore, the origins of the conflict situation between Cameroon and Nigeria over border issues can be traced to the colonial era and some post-independence political activities.

The dispute over the Bakassi Peninsula can be traced back to the arbitrary process used to create borders in

Africa during times of colonialism. Britain signed a treaty in 1884 with the kings and chiefs of the Kingdom of Old Calabar that had occupied the peninsula since the mid-1400s. In the early 1900s, Germany and Britain signed a series of agreements that created the border between what is now Nigeria and Cameroon. In a key treaty of 1913, Great Britain ceded the Bakassi Peninsula to Germany, which had been governing Cameroon. Cameroon finally won its independence in 1960, and Southern Cameroon merged with it in 1961 bringing the boundary question into the spotlight, particularly because oil was being discovered at this same time. In 1974, the Kano Agreement was signed by heads of state of both countries, putting Bakassi on Cameroon‘s side of the border. In 1975, after the overthrow of the ruling military regime in Nigeria, the post-coup regime claimed that the Kano agreement was invalid. A series of attempts to resolve the boundary issue occurred after that, with mediation by Britain, France, and Togo, but no peaceful resolution was reached.