Energy, security and understanding the human terrain of West Africa

Hess plans to continue its string of exploratory successes offshore Ghana, at its Deepwater Tano/Cape Three Points Block. Photo courtesy of Hess Corporation.

As the Gulf of Guinea beyond Nigeria is set to become another global center of energy production, there are already warning signs that the industry there will face major challenges. While Ghana has certainly demonstrated a capacity to manage its entry into the market with confidence, the counter example of Nigeria’s oil history serves as a constant reminder that politics and oil can be a lethal mixture.

Often lost in the discussions about the promise of new finds in the Gulf is the question of how the affected communities are going to respond to the presence of foreign operators, and how both operators and governments are going to respond to the inevitable demand for jobs and oil revenue distribution. Operators new to the region will have to learn a great deal about a diverse range of cultures and systems of power and influence that will be a part of the negotiation from day one. Failure to establish a solid presence in the community, even if the bulk of an operation is offshore, will likely lead to contention and costly delays, but there are ways to avoid these through careful planning and understanding of the human terrain.

WHAT IS HUMAN TERRAIN?

Simply put, the human terrain is the complex set of social characteristics, behavioral norms, cultural forms, and power and influence networks that animate any community. Think of it as a kind of map of all types of interactions, a kind of geology of human behavior.

When an operator enters into the human terrain of any community, it becomes part of that community and part of the overall social network. No matter how much an operator may want to distance itself from dealing directly with the community, either by keeping a small footprint or by the use of intermediaries, the fact is that, at some point, the operator will have to engage. An operator’s ability to grasp the complexity of the human terrain, and to devise strategies to mitigate negative behaviors and influences, will be a critical success factor for operating in the region.

SMART SECURITY

No industry knows security like the energy industry. Many oil and gas operators have vast security departments, extensive procedures and private intelligence firms to help them react to whatever threats emerge from the environment. But how ’smart’ is this type of security? More importantly, how much money is being wasted on infrastructure and personnel investments that may not be yielding true benefit?

The Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu said that “the supreme art of war is to win without fighting. The successful warrior wins first and then goes to war, while the defeated goes to war and then tries to win.”

In the realm of operational security, this suggests that you can put up all the barbed wire you like, but, in the end, this will only result in escalating cost and the deterioration of good-will, as the community will interpret hard security as exclusive and threatening. Maintain an inappropriately weak reactive security posture, and your operation is at risk from security threats. Maintain an inappropriately high reactive security posture, and your operation risks alienating local communities. Smart security is the appropriate level, and that has to be based on a deep understanding of the human terrain surrounding the operation.

The only way to achieve smart security, and to reduce these costs and triggers of conflict, is to do the necessary mapping of the human terrain, and to make sure that everyone on the team, ex-pats and locals alike, are acting from the same deep understanding of who, and what, lies outside the wire. If done properly, it may even make the wire irrelevant.

IT STARTS WITH THE CONTRACT

More likely than not, an operator will enter into a contract with a government ministry or agency. They may have come into the country through contact with a national investment agency, but it is the ministries of finance and energy that will set the terms of the negotiation from the country’s side. It is at this moment that an operator has the most leverage, and the decisions made in this phase of the project will have a waterfall effect that will influence every aspect of upstream investment. Due diligence is an absolute necessity here.

The problem is that, without a deep understanding of the communities in question, these initial discussions may prove irrelevant, as it is often the case that bureaucrats in the capital lack human terrain knowledge or, in some cases, simply do not care. How, and when, that money reaches the community is another matter, and there are many cases where large investments of good-will on the part of operators have bought them very little. If we recall the case of the ill-fated Chad-Cameroon pipeline project, social dollars were converted into weapons purchases by the Chadian government, without the slightest hesitation. Even the World Bank, the project’s major supporter, could only stand by wringing its hands, as the communities along the pipeline’s route vented their anger and frustration, while the Chadian government launched a war into neighboring Sudan.

TAKING CUES FROM KENYA

In the fall of 2013, British E&P Tullow Oil had to suspend operations for two weeks due to community anger in the Turkana region of northern Kenya. The story is a classic example of an oil company being left on its own by a national government to deal with a restive community that was ill-informed about the project scope. Despite Tullow’s best intentions, difficulties in grasping many of the underlying socio-cultural dynamics that animate political life in that part of Kenya proved costly.

The underlying issue in Kenya is that there is no clear government policy on how operators have to deal with local communities. In fact, that is the case throughout most of Africa. Community engagement—often managed by people with no understanding of the human terrain complexities described here—is simply improvising and reacting to immediate circumstances, rather than applying appropriate interventions based on excellent human terrain understanding.

These kinds of improvisations can prove costly to the industry, as companies climb the ladder of best practice escalation. These best practices are often random and not particularly based on real community needs and interests. In fact, there is often the problem of “elite capture” of the benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, whereby companies unwittingly exclude the local population from the benefits of development.

AN INTEGRATED APPROACH

There is no better slogan to describe how an operator should move into West Africa than “trust but verify.” But how is this really accomplished? There is certainly no shortage of political risk data concerning the long-term viability of governments, despite the fact that these basic facts are often wrong, as evidenced by the demonstrated lack of understanding of the power dynamics that led to the coup in Mali, or the blindness to ethnic rivalries throughout Nigeria. Due to the demands of the globalized economy, countries are now required to publish as much macroeconomic data as they can to attract investors. But how much of the story does all of this public-domain knowledge actually reveal?

The reality, as case-study after case-study reveals, is: not much. Without a persistent, long-term commitment to understanding the human terrain in a given operating environment, operators are not likely to have anything resembling smooth sailing.

In order to achieve smart security—security that does not rely on gates, guards and guns to protect project assets—operators will have to make upfront investments in human terrain mapping. The science here is a blend of social psychology, ethnography, cybernetics, political economy and communication theory combined with old-fashioned intelligence gathering and common-sense. On first consideration, this may seem overly complicated for an operator that simply wants to spend a reasonable amount on CSR payments and hope that the situation remains calm. 

Now that every country bordering the Gulf of Guinea has become of target for exploration, the industry leaders should encourage every firm along the value chain to get smart about the human terrain in West Africa. Traditional stove-pipe approaches that separate security planning from social investment and community engagement have to be revised to reflect the new reality that they all have to work in harmony, have to be implemented way before the first shovel hits the earth and have to be carried on in a persistent manner. 

There is a better way to navigate the human terrain and the companies that embrace it will yield the benefits. Using outmoded approaches to security and engagement will only yield hits to the bottom line.

As the oil patch looks into the next decade of E&P activity, West Africa stands out as one of the most promising, yet problematic, areas. Fulfilling its promise will be neither quick nor easy, but all sides who deeply understand the human terrain can surely “win without fighting.”