[I]f low income and slow growth make a country prone to civil war… why [?]. … low income means poverty, and low growth means hopelessness. Young men, who are the recruits for rebel armies, come pretty cheap … Life is cheap and joining a rebel movement gives these young men a small chance of riches … [People in the Niger Delta] with a sense of grievance were no more likely to take part in violent protest than those who were not aggrieved. So what did make people more likely to engage in political violence? … well, being young, being uneducated, and being without dependents … [There] was no relationship between social amenities that a district possessed and its propensity to political violence. Instead the violence occurs in the districts with oil wells. … [A]lthough the risk of violence jumps sharply if there is at least one oil well, if there are two oil wells in the district it starts to go down. And with twenty oil wells it is lower still … To my mind this looks more like a protection racket than outrage provoked by environmental damage. In the absence of an oil well there is no scope for extortion and so no violent protest. With an oil well the protection racket is in business. But the more oil wells … the greater the incentive for an oil company to pay up and buy peace. … [O]ver time the situation has evolved. There is now a huge amount of money being directed by the Nigerian federal government to the Delta region and the oil companies are desperately paying protection money … Within the region local politicians are fighting it out for control of all this money and violent protest has become an orchestrated part of the political rent seeking. Grievance has evolved, over the course of a decade, into greed (Paul Collier, 2007:30-31, emphasis added).
Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than both (Perry Anderson, New Left Review, 10, 2001:30).
Whether or not all of this warrants the term ‘scramble’, the reality is that oil investment is substantial and growing. Cheney's National Energy Strategy Report highlighted the fact that the region was driven by a ‘huge exploration investment’ contributing over 30 per cent of world liquid hydrocarbon production by 2010. Over the last five years when new oil field discoveries were a scarce commodity, Africa contributed one in every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside of North America. It is the West African Gulf of Guinea, encompassing the rich on and offshore fields stretching from Nigeria to Angola, that are a key plank in Bush's alternative to the increasingly volatile and unpredictable oil states of the Persian Gulf. Oil investment now represents over 50 per cent of all foreign direct investment in the continent (and over 60 per cent of all FDI in the top four FDI recipient countries) and almost 90 per cent of all cross-border mergers and acquisition activity since 2003 has been in the mining and petroleum sector (WIR, 2005:43). Between 1995 and 2001, FDI inflow amounted to $7 billion per year but almost two-thirds of the portfolio was destined for three countries (Angola, Nigeria and South Africa) in which oil FDI accounted for 90 per cent of all FDI inflow. The Gulf of Guinea figures centrally in this new African oil landscape and within the West African oil triangle Nigeria dominates, producing 2.4 million bpd with an ambitious programme to expand output to over 4 million bpd within the next decade.
Running across this picture of dynamic energy capitalism is a deep vein of political volatility. This is seen most dramatically in the Niger Delta which has experienced 15 years of deepening political turbulence and violence that burst open into something like a full blown insurgency almost two years ago. To put the matter as starkly as I can: the Niger Delta is a vast oil basin of some 70,000 sq. kms and composed officially of nine states (Abia, Akwa-Ibom, Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta, Imo, Ondo and Edo), 185 local government areas and a population of roughly 28 millions; it possesses a massive oil infrastructure consisting of 606 fields, 5,284 wells, 7,000 kilometres of pipelines, ten export terminals, 275 flow stations, ten gas plants, four refineries and a massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector. Currently the Delta is, more or less, ungovernable. The litany of indices speak for themselves: remotely detonated car bombs and highly sophisticated arms and equipment are the tools of the trade; over 300 foreign hostages have been abducted in the last 15 months and close to 1,000 Nigerian workers detained or held hostage; major and often spectacular attacks on offshore and onshore facilities are endemic and can be perpetrated at will. Unlike the 1980s or 1990s, militants are willing and able to directly confront federal and state security forces. The vast cache of sophisticated arms are skilfully deployed in an environment of mangrove creeks running for hundreds of miles along the Bight of Benin in which the Nigerian security forces – to quote the new Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan – ‘cannot cope with the situation’ (Daily Trust, 27 February 2007). Pipeline breaks due to vandalisation and sabotage have almost doubled between 1999 and 2004 (from 497 to 895); product loss (in metric tons) due to pipeline ruptures have grown steadily from 179,000 to 396,000 metric tons over the same period (a figure roughly equal to four supertankers; see STATOIL 2006:25). According to UNDP (2007), there are currently 120-150 ‘high risk and active violent conflicts’ in the three key oil producing states. While Nigeria meets its OPEC quota, up to 900,000 barrels per day are deferred (or shut-in) and another 100,000 barrels per day are stolen or ‘bunkered’. Collectively this amounts to over one-third of national output. This is the cost that the oil companies must carry for their ‘licence to operate’ – a licence that is clearly in question.
The costs of this turmoil had been vast. Direct assaults on oil installations and infrastructure cost the Nigerian government $6.8 billion losses in revenue between 1999-2004 but in the last three years the figure has increased dramatically (currently the conflicts cost Nigeria $60 million per day, roughly $4.4 billion per annum in damages and lost revenue (www.strategypage.com/qnd/nigeria/20070630.aspx). In May 2007, Nigeria drew upon $2.7 billion from its ‘domestic excess crude’ (a windfall profits account) to plug revenue shortfalls from oil deferment. In the face of descent into further violence, in mid-2006 President Obasanjo ordered the military to adopt a ‘force for force’ policy in the Delta in a vain effort to gain control of the creeks. In early 2007, the Nigerian navy had embarked upon its biggest sea manoeuvre in two decades deploying 13 warships, four helicopters and four boats to the Bight of Bonny to test ‘operational capability’. May 2007, according to a Norwegian consulting company Bergen Risk Solutions (2007), witnessed the largest monthly tally of attacks since the appearance of a shadowy but militarily well-armed insurgent group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in late 2005.
Standing at the heart of these contested communities is the ‘restive youth problem’1 (as it is known in local parlance), a tectonic shift in inter-generational politics in the region that has occurred over the last two to three decades driven by the consequences of structural adjustment and state authoritarianism, and given a huge boost of adrenaline by the return to civilian rule in 1999. Youth as a social category of great historical and cultural depth, provides an idiom in a gerontocratic and authoritarian setting in which power, secrecy and sometimes violence can be harnessed as a sort of counter-movement, built on the ruins of failed oil development (Watts, 2005). Youth organisations have multiplied and metastasized: they often refigure cultural traditional institutions like egbesu, agaba or mutual support clubs.2 Since the 1980s they have directly attempted to capture organs of community power (for example Community Development Committees), but also challenge directly gerontocratic rule; not least they have adopted an increasingly militant stance acting as the erstwhile liberators – vanguard movements in effect – for the oppressed of the region. As Gore and Pratten (2003:240) properly put it, youth represent ‘shadow structures’:
covert and secret forms of organization … salient to the practices of everyday life. As a basis for access to resources and the distribution of power, these modes of collective youth action are generated at the interesting and interfacing of top-down modes of governance and bottom-up responses to disorder … expressed as counter-movements against marginalization and coercion.
Nigeria's Perfect Storm
The rise of Nigeria as a strategic player in the world of oil geopolitics has been dramatic and has occurred largely in the wake the civil war that ended in 1970. In the late 1950s petroleum products were insignificant, amounting to less than 2 per cent of total exports. Between 1960 and 1973 oil output exploded from just over 5 million barrels to over 600 million barrels. Government oil-revenues in turn accelerated from N66 million (naira) in 1970 to over N10 billion in 1980. A multibillion dollar oil sector has, however, proven to be a little more than a nightmare. To inventory the ‘achievements’ of Nigerian oil development is a salutary exercise: 85 per cent of oil revenues accrue to 1 per cent of the population; perhaps $100 billion of $400 billion in revenues since 1970 have simply gone ‘missing’. The anti-corruption chief Nuhu Ribadu, claimed that in 2003, 70 per cent of the country's oil wealth was stolen or wasted; by 2005 it was ‘only’ 40 per cent. Over the period 1965-2004, the per capita income fell from $250 to $212; income distribution deteriorated markedly over the same period. Between 1970 and 2000 the number of people subsisting on less than $1 a day grew from 36 per cent to more than 70 per cent, from 19 million to a staggering 90 million. According to the IMF, oil ‘did not seem to add to the standard of living’ and ‘could have contributed to a decline in the standard of living’ (Martin & Subramanian, 2003:4). Over the last decade, GDP per capita and life expectancy have, according to World Bank both fallen.
Petro-development offers the terrifying and catastrophic failure of secular nationalist development (ICG, 2006; UNDP, 2005). It is sometimes hard to grasp the full consequences and depth of such a claim. From the vantage point of the Niger Delta – but no less from the vast slum worlds of Kano or Lagos – development oil wealth is a cruel joke. But the costs of oil are experienced not only in class terms but equally importantly geographically. These paradoxes and contradictions of oil are nowhere greater than on the oilfields of the Niger Delta. In the oil rich states of Bayelsa and Delta there is only one doctor for every 150,000 inhabitants. Oil has wrought only poverty, state violence and a dying ecosystem (Okonta, 2005). By conservative estimates there have been over 6,000 oil spills since 1970 and according to the World Wildlife Fund report released in 2006, the Delta is one of the most polluted places on the face of the earth. The government's presence, Okonta notes, ‘is only felt in the form of the machine gun and jackboots’ (2005:206). The recent UNDP report on human development in the Delta (UNDP, 2005) was unflinching in its assessment: the ‘appalling development situation’ (p.2) reflects the uncontestable and shameful fact that after a half century of oil development, ‘the vast resources from an international industry have barely touched pervasive local poverty’ (p.1). A muchpublicised Commission of Nobel Laureates on Peace, Equity and Development in the Niger Delta Region concluded that the ‘wealth earmarked for the region’ was ‘largely stolen by politicians’; the frustration and violence, they concluded, was ‘rising … and getting worse’ (Vanguard, 2 December 2006, p.1). It is all too easy to be apocalyptic in tone – and to endorse a certain sort of catastrophism that afflicts so much writing about the continent – but if truth be told, Executive Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC), Nuhu Ribadu, was right when he observed that the Niger Delta situation was ‘not being taken seriously’ and might ‘end up like … Somalia’ (This Day, 11 March 2007, http://allafrica.com/stories/ 200703110090.html).
The heart of the Nigerian petro-state state is unearned income, and its central dynamic is the fiscal sociology of the distribution of and access to oil rents. The oil revenue distribution question – whether in a federal system like Nigeria or in an autocratic monarchy like Saudi Arabia – is an indispensable part of understanding the combustible politics of imperial oil. In Nigeria there are four key distribution mechanisms: the federal account (rents appropriated directly by the federal state), a state derivation principle (the right of each state to a proportion of the taxes that its inhabitants are assumed to have contributed to the federal exchequer), the Federation Account (or States Joint Account) which allocates revenue to the states on the basis of need, population and other criteria, and a Special Grants Account (which includes monies designated directly for the Niger Delta, for example through the allegedly corrupt designated entities such as OMPADEC (Oil Mineral Producing Areas Development Commission), abandoned in 2001, and the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). Over time, the derivation revenues have fallen (and thereby revenues directly controlled by the oil-rich Niger Delta states have shrivelled) and the States Joint Account has grown vastly. In short, in the post-1960 period there has been a process of radical fiscal centralism in which the oil-producing states (composed largely of ethnic minorities) have lost and the non-oil producing ethnic majorities have gained – by fair means or foul. The process has not been linear and since 2001 there has been the beginning of an important reversal in the sense that the oil producing states have expanded their control (in theory) over national oil income. The history, nevertheless of post-colonial Nigeria is in a sense the history of the reconfiguration and contestation over revenue allocation.
The shifting politics of fiscal centralisation, and decentralisation, provides the ground on which three important aspects of the ‘new’ Nigerian political economy: first, the decentralisation of corruption (associated with, in the case of the Delta, the vast increase in revenue flows associated with the increase of derivation to 13 per cent after 1999); second, the democratisation of the means of violence (or the extent to which the state monopoly of the violence means of destruction has been undercut by the widespread deployment of arms locally by militia and other militants); and third, the rise (in part associated with changing revenue allocation) of enormous power and wealth at the level of the state governors who become not only counterweights to the federal centre but machine politicians (‘Godfathers’) in their own right (HRW, 2007). This trio of forces frames any discussion of what is called the resource control debate in the Delta and a political movement with a deep history dating back at least to the issues raised by the Willink Commission on the plight of the ethnic minorities in the Delta during the 1950s. It assumes great visibility as it was propelled by youth and other movements since the 1980s – and indeed captured by many governors from the oil producing states as a means of providing political pressure on the revenue allocation process. Since Obasanjo's return to power in order to maintain a balancing act – balancing a growing Niger Delta clamour for resource control backed by an insurgency against the array of political forces rooted in the hegemony of powerful northern and southern political interests – the Federal centre has increased derivation to 13 per cent. It drew a line in the sand in its refusal to meet the Delta's demands of 25 per cent derivation or more – an echo of the 50 per cent derivation of the 1960s – during the 2005 National CONFAB and in the struggle over offshore control of oil resources (which following a Supreme Court decision affirmed Federal control over oil resources in 2002). Nonetheless, it is incontrovertible that as a consequence the oil boom since the late 1990s and the vast windfall oil profits as prices rose to $90 per barrel, has produced a vast influx of monies into the Delta through the state and local government structures. (This is despite the fact that it is perfectly clear the actual disbursement of monies and the flow of oil revenues from Abuja to the oil producing states is marked by massive malfeasance and diversion). Currently Rivers and Delta States for example receive in excess of $1 billion in federal revenues each year. Since 2004 (until the present), the four largest oil producing states have received at least $2 billion annually such that, to take one example, in the first six months of 2006 the 23 local governments in Rivers State received more than $115 million in federal allocations (including derivation). There is a sense in which the Delta is awash in oil monies. This is in sharp contrast with say the 1980s and it is notwithstanding the fact that nobody believes the full complement of statutory allocations are received in their entirety by the oilproducing states (HRW, 2006).
Overlaid upon the Nigerian petro-state is a volatile mix of forces that give shape to what one can call ‘the oil complex’. First, the geo-strategic interest in oil means that military (foreign, local, private and state) and other security forces are part of the local oil complex. Second, local and global civil society enters into the oil complex either through transnational advocacy groups concerned with human rights and the transparency of the entire oil sector, or through local social movements and NGOs fighting over the consequences of the oil industry and the accountability of the petro-state. Third, the transnational oil business – the majors, the independents, the indigenous operators, the national oil companies, and the vast service industry – are actively involved in the process of local development through community development, corporate social responsibility and ‘stakeholder inclusion’. Fourth, the inevitable struggle over oil wealth – who controls and owns it, who has rights over it, and how the wealth is to be deployed and used – inserts a panoply of local political forces (ethnic militias, paramilitaries, separatist movements and so on) into the operations of the oil complex (the conditions in Colombia are an exemplary case). Fifth, multilateral development agencies (the IMF and the IBRD) and financial corporations like the export credit agencies appear as key ‘brokers’ in the construction and expansion of the energy sectors in oil-producing states (and latterly the multilaterals are pressured to become the enforcers of transparency among governments and oil companies). And not least, there is the relationship between oil and the shady world of drugs, illicit wealth (oil theft for example), mercenaries and the black economy.
It would be wrong-headed to see in the Caspian, in Colombia or in the Gulf of Guinea identical oil complexes at work – they differ obviously in their historical, cultural and political specificities. Yet they do all operate as enclaves of economic and political calculation – in essence a form of governmentality or rule – characterised by enormous turbulence and wealth creation. In short, the oil complex looks very much like an embattled zone of the most primitive accumulation (Harvey, 2005). Empirically, the current operations of the oil complex have been radically shaped by the twin forces of post-9/11 politics, the failure of postwar US oil policy, and the tightness of global oil markets (Barnes, 2005). In the face of support by neo-conservative promoters and opportunistic Washington lobbyists, strategists at the Pentagon have invented a new security threat to increase funding for the European Command (EUCOM's) footprint in Africa (Lubeck, Watts & Lipschitz, 2007; Klare & Vollman, 2006). Recently, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs Teresa Whelan announced the discovery of a ‘new threat paradigm’ – the threat of ‘ungoverned spaces’ in Northwest and West Africa (http://www.jhuapl.edu/POW/rethinking/video.cfm#whelan ). In practice, all four of the military services – including an Africa Clearing House on security information, supported by a Pentagon think-tank, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies housed at the National Defense University – are now involved and implicated in the new scramble for the continent. Against a backdrop of spiralling militancy across the Delta, US interests have met up with European strategic concerns in the Gulf in the establishment of the ‘Gulf of Guinea Energy Security Strategy’ (GGESS). By December 2005, the American Ambassador to Nigeria and the Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) agreed ‘to establish four special committees to co-ordinate action against trafficking in small arms in the Niger Delta, bolster maritime and coastal security in the region, promote community development and poverty reduction, and combat money laundering and other financial crimes’ (This Day, 9 December 2005). US military activity increased from almost no activity in 2004 to ‘104 ship days’ in 2006 (Skorka, 2007:9). The establishment of a new African command (AFRICOM) in February 2007, and the appointment of its first head William ‘Kip’ Ward, is the final capstone in the militarisation of American energy security policy in Africa.
Energy security is a terrifying hybrid, a perplexing ‘doubleness’, containing the old and the new: primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to the ‘war on terror’ (Harvey, 2003; RETORT, 2005; Barnes, 2005). Into this vortex of forces are set of other global and imperial forces: on the one side, the presence of aggressive Chinese (and other Asian) oil companies – coupled to Asian oil service and construction companies – and the new imperial intentions of the South African energy companies on the other. Put into the mix the resurgence of Islamism in northern Nigeria, and across the Sahelian belt, and the political clout of urban evangelical Christianity across the southern oil producing conurbations and one has the makings of a perfect storm of violence and conflict.
An Ungovernable Delta?
It is a measure of a certain sort of notoriety when Nigerian politics reaches the pages of Vanity Fair, penned no less by a prize winning journalist and writer who, to the best of my knowledge, knows nothing of Africa or in this case the Niger Delta (Unger, 2007). Sebastian Unger's account of Ijaw militants operating in the oil-rich creeks of the Niger Delta is little more than tabloid journalism but the realities to which it speaks have been since 2006 an extraordinary combination of the theatrical and the incendiary, worthy perhaps of any tabloid's scrutiny. On 15 September 2005, the Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha of Bayelsa State, a major oil producing state in the heart of the Ijaw homeland, was arrested by the British security agencies at London airport on three counts of money laundering to the tune of one £1.8 million. The Governor's arrest was designed to send a signal to unruly Governor's everywhere in the run up to the 2007 elections and Obasanjo's ultimately fruitless effort to run for a third term. Released on $1.25 million bail in early October, Alamieyeseigha dramatically escaped from house detention in central London (disguised as an old woman) and appeared rather magically in the capital of Bayelsa, Yenagoa, on 20 November to adoring crowds after, as far as we can tell, an extraordinary escape via Paris, Yaounde and finally by small boat along the creeks along the Cameroon-Nigeria border. On 9 December amidst considerable political confusion, he was seized by police in Government House after the State House of Assembly had voted 17-24 to impeach him – all under tight security presence of the Joint Task Force and the State Security Services (SSS).
Shortly after the London arrest, on 21 September 2005, against a backdrop of deepening militancy and oil-supply disruption and undemocratic manoeuvres by President Obasanjo to quite literally purchase the support from the senate for his third term ambitions, Alhaji Asari-Dokubo, the charismatic and savvy leader of the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF) – an insurgent militia force fighting, by its own account, for resource control and self-determination in the eastern Delta – was arrested by Federal forces on treason charges. Asari, a former Ijaw Youth Congress (IYC) President was arrested by police in the River State's Governor's house in a sting operation and was taken to Abuja in spite of the fact that ostensibly a peace settlement, between some of the Niger Delta militants and government, had been brokered in 2004 by Obasanjo himself. Asari has been held in Abuja in SSS custody and appeared in February 2007 to stand trial amidst claims that his previous unruly behaviour in court justified the decision to hold the proceedings with him in absentia. In something of a circus atmosphere, Asari referred to the Judge as ‘an idiot’ and the 80 security agents in the courtroom were unclear as to whether and how the accused was to be removed from the courtroom.
Finally, in what proved to be a trifecta of political crises for the Ijaw community, the Central Bank reported to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on 6 October 2005 that the head of Allstate Trust Bank and Ijaw capitalist, Chief Ebimiti Banigo, was guilty of corruption and failed to meet the capitalisation requirements of $25 billion imposed by the Chairman of the Central Bank. He was subsequently arrested and the bank was, as a consequence, closed (amidst the loss of substantial personal savings by many depositors in River State). All of these events – in effect the arrest and detention of three major Ijaw notables – were inevitably read as a political attack by Obanajo's government on a region (the Niger Delta) and people (the Ijaw) that had been at loggerheads with the federal centre, a hostility marked both by the collapse of the national CONFAB in 2005 on the allocation of oil revenues (in which the Delta representatives walked out) and the rapid descent into by violence and political ungovernability across the oilfields after 2002. The stable and regularised flow of oil, as a consequence, was placed in question in an historically unprecedented way.
Out of this vortex of events – one part soap opera, one part machine politics – there emerged in late 2005, in a most dramatic fashion, a hitherto unknown group of masked insurgents (MEND) claiming to be a ‘union of all relevant militant groups’ (Daily Champion, 2 February 2006) and whose public face is a shifting, and sometimes contentious cadre of leaders (and aliases) including Major-General Godswill Tamuno, Tom Pollo, Oyinye Alaibe, Cynthia White and the eloquent spokesperson Gbomo Jomo. Beginning with a massive attack on the Opobo pipeline in Delta State in December 2005, MEND began calling for the international community to evacuate from the Niger Delta by 12 February, or ‘face violent attacks’. In a fantastically audacious series of attacks, MEND struck an oil vessel belonging to TIDEX Nigeria fifteen kilometres offshore on 11 January 2006 and four workers were kidnapped (and reportedly released for a N120 million ransom) shutting in over 100,000 bpd; on 15 January, 13 members of the Joint Task Force were killed during an attack on the Shell Benisede flow station and in late January an AGIP platform and its riverfront Port Harcourt offices were attacked in which eight policemen were killed. On 18 January an email promised ‘our operations will shift from the creeks to the cities’ and from 1 February 2006 ‘more aggressive tactics aimed at oil company workers’ (Nigerian Tribune, 18 January 2006). Following an earlier ultimatum and a promise to reduce Nigeria export capacity by 30 per cent, on 15 February MEND declared a ‘state of emergency’ and the launch of ‘Operation Black February’ to demonstrate ‘its rugged guerilla wit and dogged intelligence in hunting down every foreign foot’ (Daily Independent, 15 February 2006). Then, in the wake of a purported peace accord held in Yenagoa on 11 February, the Joint Task Force embarked upon a vicious aerial bombardment of Ijaw villages in Okerenkoko territory (ostensibly to bomb oil bunkering barges) which is the heartland of the Gbaramantu clan. In retaliation on 18 February, MEND launched the most audacious and coordinated of its attacks. Forty rebels overpowered guards and military on Willbros barge 318 (nine foreign hostages were taken) and subsequently destroyed the offshore Forcados crude loading platform, the Ekeremore-Yeye manifold and the NNPC Escravos-Lagos gas pipeline in Chanomi Creek. In a single day something like 20 per cent of output was compromised.
The political agenda of MEND was not clear in the weeks of late December 2005 except that it self-identified as a ‘guerilla movement’ whose ‘decisions like its fighters are fluid’. In fact, in a press release by email – this is the modality of their politically savvy subcommandante Marcos-like exhortations and pronouncements – Jomo claimed that MEND was ‘apolitical in structures … fighters were not communists … or revolutionaries. [They] are just very bitter men’ (Bergen Risks, 2007). But in spite of a welter of email denials – calling an Oporoza-based Ijaw militant group the Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC) a ‘tribal assembly’, claiming to have ‘co-opted’ the NDPVF, rejecting any connection with oil bunkering, claiming not to be ‘an Ijaw militia group’ (see Sahara Reporters, 2007), there was in fact a clear political platform. In a signed statement by field commander Tamuno Godswill in early February, MEND's demands were clearly outlined:
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Immediate and unconditional release of Alhaji Asari-Dokubo;
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Immediate and unconditional release of Governor Alamieyeseigha;
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Immediate and unconditional release of youth leader Joshua Macaiva;
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Immediate and unconditional demilitarisation of the Niger Delta;
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Immediate payment of $1.5 billion compensation from Shell approved by the Nigerian National Assembly covering four decades of environmental degradation.4
Into 2006, MEND's claims that it was capable of delivering a ‘crippling blow’ to the oil industry, was increasingly born out. More than 15 Nigerian soldiers were killed and between May and August 2006, and there were at least three kidnappings per month in the first half of 2006 (typically the hostages are all released following the payment of substantial ransoms by the government though it is unclear whether these payments are being made to MEND).5 In the last nine months, the escalation of attacks (44 in 2006, nineteenth in the first three months of 2007) including electronically detonated car bombings, brazen attacks on government and military buildings, massive disruption of oil installations deploying sophisticated military equipment, and the audacious kidnapping of workers of virtually every nationality including Chinese and South Korean sometimes from platforms 40-60kms offshore, have confirmed the worst fears of the oil industry. In a deteriorating environment in which many oil companies have withdrawn personnel and cut back production – by mid-2006 there was 500,000-600,000 barrels per day deferment meeting MEND's earlier goal of a 30 per cent shut-in. Julius Berger, the largest construction company operating in the country, announced its withdrawal from the Niger Delta and many companies began to withdraw personnel as oil workers were increasingly reticent to be posted in the Delta (many of whom were holed up in Lagos hotels). President Obasanjo bolstered the Joint Military Task Force (JMTF) in the Delta but the seeming ease with which MEND can operate – ‘we navigate the creeks in pitch blackness’ crowed Jomo – and overcome local security forces suggests that the MEND ‘freedom fighters’ control the creeks uncontested. It is quite unclear, when located on this larger canvas, what Petroleum Minister Edmund Daukoru could possibly have meant when he announced to OPEC in February 2007 in Greece that ‘the worst is over’, that ‘it is a very, very temporary thing’ (UPI, 28 January 2007, http:// www.upi.com/Energy/analysis_nigeria_hopeful_for_oil_future).
The rise of MEND – and a number of other ‘freedom fighters’ who apparently stand in some sort of ambiguous and often awkward relation to MEND, such as the Martyrs Brigade and the Coalition for Military Action in the Niger Delta (COMA) – marks something of a watershed in the turbulent history of the Delta oil fields. Yet it arises on the back of a long arc of deepening violence and protest across the oilfield, especially since the late 1990s. By any estimation, the costs of the oil insurgency – MEND is its most visible and most violent culmination – are vast. A report prepared for the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) published in 2003 entitled ‘Back from the Brink’ – before the latest insurgency took off – painted a very gloomy ‘risk audit’ for the Delta. NNPC estimated that between 1998 and 2003, there were 400 ‘vandalisations’ on company facilities each year (and 581 between January and September 2004); oil losses amounted to over $1 billion annually. Already by 2003 oil supply had been compromised by 750,000 bpd as a result of attacks on oil installations across the region. In April 2004, another wave of violence erupted around oil installations (at the end of April, Shell lost production of up to 370,000 bpd, largely in the western Delta), this time amid the presence of armed insurgencies. Two so-called ethnic militia led by Ateke Tom – the Niger Delta Vigilante – (NDV) and Alhaji Asari Dokubo, the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF), each driven and partly funded by oil monies and actively deployed (and paid) by high ranking politicians as political thugs during elections, have transformed the political landscape of the Delta. In early 2006 MEND claimed a goal of cutting Nigerian output by 30 per cent and they apparently succeeded. Within the first six months of 2006, there were 19 attacks on foreign oil operations and over $2,18 billion lost in oil revenues; the Department of Petroleum Resources claims this figure represents 32 per cent of the revenue the country generated this year. The Nigerian government claims that between 1999 and 2005 oil losses amounted to $6.8 billion but in November 2006 the managing director of Shell Nigeria reported that the loss of revenues due to ‘unrest and violence’ was $61 million per day (a shut-in of about 800,000 bpd), amounting to a staggering $9 billion since January 2006. By the end of 2006, Minister for Petroleum Resources Edmund Daukoru claimed that the costs of the insurgency was N7.5 billion per day. Against a backdrop of escalating attacks on oil facilities and a proliferation of kidnappings (Figure 1), the Joint Revolutionary Council (apparently an umbrella group for insurgents) threatened ‘black November’ as an ‘all out attack on oil operating companies’ (The Observer, 5 November 2006); a similar call was made in February 2007. The elections of April 2007 – even more fraudulent than the widely condemned elections of 2003 – and the emergence of an Ijaw politician, Goodluck Jonathan, Governor of Bayelsa State, as the Vice President elect has done nothing to dampen the ire of the militants. Between May and June 2007, 42 foreign workers were kidnapped and four pipelines detonated (http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L20301606.htm, 20 May 2007)
Oil Insurgency as Organised Crime?
There have been a raft of new books on African oil in the last year (Ghazvinian, 2007; Shaxson, 2007; Forest & Souza, 2006). Written for the most part by journalists (and in one case by two military men), the books are replete with colourful stories – of the devastating intersection of frontier capitalism and the worst of African kelptocracies – neatly captured by such titles as ‘instant emirates’, ‘the Chinese are coming’, ‘wielding the oil weapon’ in ‘some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional nations on the planet’. None of this work would have been possible without 20 or so years of critical academic research and excellent investigative work by the likes of HRW, Amnesty, Global Witness and Oxfam. Whatever one thinks of the ‘resource curse’ literature (Auty, 1999; Ross, 1999) – and I think it comes close to a sort of commodity determinism – this body of work exposed the pathologies of petro-states, the complex complicities between ‘Big Oil’ and African ‘oiligarchies’, and the disastrous consequences – environmental, political and economic – of rentier political economies driven by a logic of politicised distribution of oil revenues rather than systematic accumulation, or disciplined development or the construction of transparent and accountable institutions of governance. Over the decade, the ‘resource curse’ which, for the most part, examined the political economy of oildependency, was taken up by economists – some concerned with the relations between resource-dependency and poor economic performance and more recently with the politics of oil – not so much at the level of corruption or fiscal mismanagement but rather sub-national conflicts and the relations between oil and civil war and rebellion. The largest and most ambitious programme emerged from the World Bank and the leadership of Paul Collier. His new book The Bottom Billion (2007) turns resource dependency into a field theory of poverty. Oil-dependency in this analysis turns on the relation between petroleum (not so much gas) and the means by which rebellions and insurgencies are economically sustained and financed – and by extension the devastating costs for development of long and protracted conflicts (Collier et al. 2003).
This complex and variegated body of work might be dubbed the predation or rebellion as organised crime theory of oil. Collier focuses on the important question of financing violence politics and offers an argument that oil provides a ground on which rebels can finance rebellions (through looting of oil resources) which are self-interested and criminal movements against the state. Collier and the economics of war position (‘rebellion is large scale predation of productive activities’) draws upon a related and now large body of work that explores the character of oil as a source of predation by focusing on its point (as opposed to diffuse) character and its location (in relation to state power) and the ease with which it can be looted. Different political outcomes can then be deduced from specific resource couplets (Le Billon, 2005): warlordism (distant/diffuse), mass rebellion (proximate/diffuse), coups (proximate/point) and secession (distant/point). Oil is characterised by the latter two (it is a point resource that varies along the axis of its location with respect to power) for which Angola and Chechnya, and Colombia and Yemen are paradigmatic cases. Relatedly, Michael Ross (2003) explores the dynamics of oil politics along two parallel axes: lootability (understood to be ‘easily appropriated [resource] by individuals or small groups of unskilled workers’ (p.47)) and obstructability (that is to say the ease with which its movement or its productive networks can be interrupted or blocked). Oil (onshore and offshore) is unlootable; it is, however, readily obstructable (pipelines can be detonated, flow stations closed) onshore but not offshore. He holds open the possibility that oil (as an unlootable resource) may yield different types of outcomes (separatist in Cabinda), and non-separatist in Sudan), but believes that nonlootability yields general associations; to wit: unlootability is likely to yield separatism (control the territory not the wealth), benefits to government (rather than the poor), reduced duration of conflicts, and enhanced army discipline.
Much could be said about Collier's work in particular: its deep cynicism (‘rebellion … is like organised crime’), its belief that motivation of conflict is unimportant (what matters is whether the organisation can sustain itself financially); its assumption that history can be reduced to rates of economic growth or the existence of prior civil conflict; its deep problems associated with the nature of the data and evidence (and sampling), and its claim that insurgent predation is ‘worse’ than state extortion (or exaction) and so on.6 I simply wish to focus on its foundational claims as a way of grasping the genesis of an oil insurgency across the Niger Delta: namely, that greed is opposed to grievance, that peaceful protest stands in opposition to rebellion, that government opposes rebellion, and that rebellion equals organised crime.7 From these assumptions Collier concluded in 2003 that the Delta resembles an ‘American gangland’ involving a ferocious struggle over drugs; by 2007 it was a vast protection racket run by young, unemployed and poorly educated criminals for whom life is cheap.
The first thing that needs to be said is that the very idea of an impermeable membrane separating or opposing two discrete entities – government and rebels – breaks down immediately. The so-called ethnic militias (the NDV and the NDPDF), for example, got their start by being supported (financially and with arms) by politicians in the oil-producing states; the decentralisation of corruption, the rise of powerful gubernatorial machine politicians, and the ‘democratisation of violence’ that mark post-1999 Nigeria all signal how porous is the state/rebel divide. The NDV and the NDPVF were deployed as political thugs to deliver votes and intimidate voters in the notoriously corrupt and violent 2003 elections (although they were also operative in 1999). Furthermore, a number of the arms used by the militias have been acquired from the Nigerian military (directly in relationship to electoral political thuggery and indirectly from a notorious corrupt and undisciplined army). And last but not least, the low level oil theft (bunkering) that is controlled by the rebels as a way of financing their struggle, is organised through a vast state-centred syndicate linking high ranking military, politicians, the security apparatuses, and the Niger Delta special military task forces, and the coast guard. The Nigerian state in its various expressions and the rebels are both oppositional and organically self-sustaining. The head of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Nuhu Ribadu, put the issue with great precision: the state is ‘not even corruption. It is organised crime’ (The Economist, 28 April 2007, p.56). In the same way, Collier's (and Ross's) claim that oil cannot be looted stands in sharp contrast to the existence of a vast oil theft industry. This is not the place to detail the dynamics of its structure (from low level bunkering territories policed by differing sorts of political actors up to the syndicates – global in scope – that orchestrate a vast criminal industry (an estimated 10 per cent of US imports are stolen). My point is that is oil is looted and very effectively – at its peak in 2004/5 some 350,000 barrels per day were stolen perhaps inserting $4-5 billion per year into the system – and while the criminal proceeds are unevenly distributed along the commodity chain, the fact is that both rebels and states (the political classes) benefit from it. There is no question that the oil bunkering trade embraces all manner of agents motivated by all manner of desires (greed, grievance, employment, excitement) but there is no reason in principle why organised crime – but not simply extortion and sabotage as the ‘obstructability’ thesis claims – and grievance cannot co-exist perfectly well. Equally, there is a long history of oil theft in the Delta with no evidence to suggest that there has been, as Collier suggests, a simple shift from grievance to greed (2007:31).
Many of these Delta realities represent an empirical challenge to conceptual claims about lootability. If indeed one were to consider oil in Nigeria unlootable, it is not at all clear that it has contributed to army discipline (arguably one of the most corrupt and undisciplined in the world); it may have contributed to separatism (the Biafran war) but it is equally associated with other non-separatist politics, and it is not at all clear it has reduced the duration of conflicts in any simple way. But the reality is that oil has been looted through theft of various sorts – organised and unorganised (hot tapping of pipelines by the poor). This structure of ‘predation’ has benefited a section of the military-political class, sustained all manner of insurgents (and indirectly sections of the unemployed youth), further contributed to corruption and indiscipline within the military and contributed to a vast and complex field of violence encompassing as well-organised insurgents confronting the state, ethnic militias, vigilante groups resembling the mafia, anti-chieftainship conflicts, interethnic struggles, and criminal activities (sometimes called ‘cultism’). Needless to say the very idea (taken from Ross) that offshore oil cannot be obstructed has been shown to be spectacularly wrong: MEND has taken hostages on a platform 30 miles offshore and MEND's charismatic PR man, Jomo Gbomo, refers to MEND's abode as ‘200 miles offshore’.
The most striking aspect of these articulations of oil politics and civil conflict is that the agency of the oil companies – whether the national oil companies (NOCs) or the supermajors (IOCs) with whom they operate or the oil service/construction companies – have no analytical presence in the models of rebellion or civil war. At most they appear as the unfortunate corporate entities that are predated by rebels (extortion, sabotage, and kidnapping). Corporate practice and agency are conspicuously absent in any account of politics which is astonishing because the companies themselves have acknowledged that they are a central part of the political dynamics of community conflict (most obviously in the internal reports by Shell and Chevron widely leaked in 2003 and 2004; see WAC Global Services, 2003). This is not to suggest that corporations have deliberately instigated or encouraged rebellion. Rather, what passes as community development in the Delta and their related interaction with what are called ‘host communities’ is a central part of conflict dynamics. It is estimated that Shell spends $60 million per year on community development yet cash payments amount to at least double that figure. In total these payments amount to perhaps $200 million per annum, perhaps 10 per cent of the operating budget; some companies spend up to 15-17 per cent on such activities. They represent in practice a massive infusion of cash designed to purchase consent or compliance – but in practice they help generate rebellion and community violence. One the one hand, the companies are constitutionally obliged to pay rents to local communities in which they have operations and have typically cut deals with local chiefs (many of which operate as unaccountable fiefdoms). Community projects and ‘Memoranda of Understanding’ (to the extent that they exist at all) are shrouded in secrecy and ambiguity, and corporate responsibility on the ground often appears as a raft of unfinished community projects all of which have contributed to festering resentments among the youth. And the policy of ‘cash payments’ – used to pay for protection services from local unemployed youth to buy off local opposition and to feed vast networks of illicit payments – have had the effect of generating enormously violent conflicts among youth groups who compete to provide protection services for the company, or who attack corrupt local chiefs (that is to say they upend the system of gerontocratic customary rule at the village level) in order to gain access to the company rents and payments that flow from oil operations in their territories (Kemedi, 2003; Watts, 2005).
A Brief (and Incomplete) History of An Oil Insurgency
How then is it possible to grasp the transformation of the Niger Delta into a space of insurgency, and why is its characterisation as a space of organised crime inadequate? I want to identify a key number of processes generated from within the heart of the oil complex. Each is an expression of a long and deeper geography of exclusion and marginalisation by which the oil-producing Delta came to suffer all of the social and environmental harms of the oil industry and yet receive in return very little of the oil revenues. At the point at which the oil revenues begin to belatedly flow (after 1999), the kleptocratic and venal system of state politics has stolen and squandered what many in the Delta felt to be their rightful heritage. It is from the geopolitical contradiction of oil without and with wealth – a bequest of the oil complex – that the insurgency has drawn enormous sustenance.
What were the forces that emerged from this geo-political contradiction? The first, not surprisingly in a region of 60 or more ethnic groups and a powerful set of institutions of customary rule, was ethno-nationalism. This was central, of course, to the Ogoni movement but the banner has been taken up in the last decade of so by the Ijaw, the largest ethnic (or so-called ‘oil’) minorities in the Delta (the Ijaw are the fourth largest ethnic group occupying the riverine flanks of the Delta and constitute political minorities in five of the six Deltaic states). Their exclusion from the oil wealth (and the federal revenue allocation process) to say nothing of bearing the costs of oil operations across the oilfields, became central to the emergence of a new sort of youth politics. The establishment of the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) in 1998 marked a watershed in this regard (though the mobilisation began much earlier and gained strength in the late 1980s and early 1990s) and it became the vehicle through which a new generation of youth leaders took up the struggle; many were mobilised in and around youth movements. They came to assume local positions of power, including a number who took up an explicitly militant anti-state insurgent stance and these struggles, over tactics, played themselves out in the sometimes internicine struggles with ethnically-based youth movements like the IYC. In the wake of the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Gandhian tactics were, in some quarters, seen to have failed catastrophically.
The second force was the inability and unwillingness of the Nigerian state in its military and civilian guises to address this political mobilisation in the Delta without resorting to state-imposed violence by undisciplined military, police and security forces. In this sense the history of the Ogoni struggle was a watershed too insofar as it bequeathed a generation of militants for whom MOSOP represented a failure of non-violent politics. The return to civilian rule in 1999 saw a further militarisation of the region in which communities were violated and experienced the undisciplined violence of state security forces. The appalling destruction of Odi (1999) and Odiama (2001) by military forces, and the violence meted out by the Joint Military Task Force based in Warri were the most dramatic instances of state intimidation. This unrelenting militarisation of the region to secure ‘national oil assets’ further propelled the frustrations of a generation of youth who, in the period since the 1980s, had grown in their organisational capacities.
Third, the militant groups themselves represented the intersection of two important forces. On the one hand, the rise of youth politics in which a younger generation whose economic and political prospects were stymied began to challenge both customary forms of chiefly power, and the corruption of the petro-state (whether military or civilian). These twin processes have a long history dating back at least to the famous Twelve Day Republic in which in 1966 a group of young Ijaw men led by Isaac Adaka Boro proclaimed, against a backdrop of expanding oil output, an independent Ijaw state. But the political mobilisation of the youth turned from a sort of peaceful civic nationalism increasingly toward militancy and this in turn was driven by the violence of the Nigerian military forces but also by the politicians, especially the increasingly powerful governors, who sought to make use of the youth movements for their own electoral purposes (that is to say political thugs to intimidate voters). Paradoxically a number of the militias often got their start by being bankrolled by the state and politicians and indeed the NDF and NPDVF were both fuelled by machine politicians during the notoriously corrupt 1999 and 2003 elections.
Fourth, the existence and proliferation of oil theft, known locally as ‘oil bunkering’ (Figure 2), provided a financial mechanism through which militants could (after being abandoned by their political patrons) finance their operations and attract recruits. The organisation of the oil theft trade, which by 2004 was a multi-billion dollar industry involving high ranking military, government official and merchants, drew upon the local militia to organise and protect the tapping of pipelines and the movement of barges through the creeks and ultimately offshore to large tankers. This is, on its face, a case of the sort of organised crime that Collier invokes in his account of the economics of rebellion – and indeed there are explicitly criminal elements and syndicates at work in the operations of a vast bunkering business in Nigeria – yet the theft of oil provided a lubricant for a ready existing set of grievances. Rebel organisations and insurgents were, in this sense, not merely criminal gangs.
And finally, the operations of the oil companies (Omeje, 2006; Zalik, 2004) – in their funding of youth groups as security forces, in their willingness to use military and security forces against protestors and militants alike, and the their corrupt practices of distributing rents to local community elites – all contributed to an environment in which military activity was in effect encouraged and facilitated. A number of companies used organised (and armed) youth groups to protect their facilities (see WACS, 2003). Corporate practice, and community development in particular, had the net effect of inserting millions of dollars of so-called ‘cash payments’ into the local economy by paying corrupt chiefs, violent youth groups or corrupt local officials in the hope that the oil would keep flowing. In practice, the uneven record of community development projects and the corrupt forms in which cash payments were made, produced a growing hostility (expressed in the growth of oil platform occupations, attacks on pipelines, and more recently hostage taking) to the companies. Directly and indirectly corporate practice were essential to the dynamics of local violence and the escalation of insurgent activity.
The emergence of MEND in 2005 represents the almost inevitable end-point of a process of marginalisation, alienation and political mobilisation that reached a watershed moment with the 1998 Kaiama declaration. The declaration carried more than a faint echo of Boro's 12 Day Revolution launched in 1966 in which he reminded his followers, like the IYC leadership, to ‘remember too your petroleum which is being pumped out daily from your veins and then fight for your freedom’ (1982:117). Boro's much vaunted ‘Ijaw Republic’ lasted less than two weeks ending with his arrest by Federal troops in Oloibiri –ironically the site of the first discovery and commercial exploitation of oil in Nigeria – and his untimely death fighting for Federal forces against Biafra. Kaiama was more than the foundation stone of the IYC: it marked a massive cross-Delta (and cross-ethnic) mobilisation through mobile parliaments and an explicit recognition to diversify the tactics associated with the struggle. The question of militancy was always an object of debate within IYC – and indeed preceded IYC since the so-called ‘first Egbesu war’ in which Bayelsa youth took on security forces occurred in the late Abacha years – particularly in the face of state brutality and especially the slaughter perpetrated by Federal troops in Odi. The ‘second’ Egbesu war emerged from the deliberate attempts of the state – then under General Abubakar who had succeeded Abacha in 1999 – to suppress the political project expressed at Kaiama (Ibeanu & Luckham, 2007). Militants in turn, as they had in the first war, occupied flow stations and provided protection for oil companies, the proceeds of which were invested in arms. While Asari Dokubo's rise to the Presidency of IYC was much more than the victory of IYC militants – it was very much wrapped up with efforts by the Governor of Rivers to control a powerful new political force – the reality is that his ascendancy was symptomatic of a movement – he founded the NDPDF in 2003 – that saw not just occupations and seizures of oil installations as necessary but of armed struggle against the state and the companies as the only response to continued state violence and corporate irresponsibility.
The rise of various militias funded as political thugs during the 2003 elections is a very complex story that by 2004 had produced a situation in which Asari's group was at war with Ateke Tom's Niger Delta Vigilante (NDV). These struggles were in part over oil bunkering territory but drew upon many disaffected youth groups in such places at Okrika, Eleme, and Nembe in a shifting set of alliances in which the borders between criminality, mafia-like vigilante groups, and politically organised insurgents was difficult to discern. The Asari and Ateke stories were very much wrapped up with the politics and struggles in eastern Ijaw, and along the Cawthorne channel.
The emergence of MEND shifted the struggle dramatically to the western Delta – the so-called Warri axis. Here a similar set of grievances and struggles were playing out wrapped up with the complex ethnic politics of Warri city, the failures of the companies to provide meaningful benefits to host communities, and the militancy of women most famously against Chevon in Ugborodu in 2003. As Ukiwo (2007) has shown, Ijaw marginalisation stemmed from a long history of struggle over trade during the nineteenth century in which Itsekeri peoples emerged as a comprador class to the European trading houses (and thereby cutting off the Ijaw). The Western Ijaw built up a reputation as ‘truculent’ and ‘pirates’ and reactively resisted colonial rule until the 1920s when they were into a Western Ijaw Division cut out of the Warri Division. By the 1940s the Gbaramantu Clan – which is central to MEND's political dynamics – was involved directly in claims over land (with the Itsekeri) and by the 1970s (in the wake of the establishment of oil operations by Chevron and Shell in the mid-1960s), violent conflicts had occurred over the oil-bearing lands near Ugborodo. It was from this axis that MEND dramatically emerged in late 2005. MEND has grown from an earlier history of increasingly militant youth embracing, for example, the ‘Egbesu Boys of Africa’, the ‘Meinbutu Boys’ and others (Feibagha Ogbo, Dolphin Obo, Torudigha Ogbo) in the Warri region dating back to the early 1990s and before (Courson, 2007).
MEND cannot be understood outside of the operation of the quartet of forces that I briefly outlined, and yet at the same time MEND is inextricably linked to local politics: struggles among and between two key Ijaw clans (Gbaramantu and Egbema) over access to oil monies, struggles with Chevron over the lack of a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ for so-called ‘host communities’ in the clan territory, control of oil bunkering territories, and not least the complex politics of Warri city, the large oil town to the north. Here is a multi-ethnic city than has imploded since 1997 as warring ethnic groups (fuelled by machine politics) have fought for the establishment of new local government authorities as a basis for laying claim to federal oil monies (HRW, 1999; 2005). Into this mix was the catalytic effect of the Nigerian special military task force (‘Operation Hope’) that came to quell the growing militancy across the region in which the Gbarmantu clan territory was repeatedly attacked and bombed (Courson, 2007).
The appearance of MEND marked a new phase both in terms of strategic capacity but also in the franchise character of the insurgency, linking to and speaking for a number of militias and rebels. Whether it is, as Okonta (2006) suggests, not an organisation but ‘an idea’ is difficult to assess. Certainly the MEND militias operate with ease in and around Warri; the leadership appears, as Okonta says, articulate and politically very savvy. But MEND emerged, and is inseparable from, a number of local and regional issues – the most important of which are the longstanding antagonisms between the oil companies (especially Chevron) in the Gbaramantu and Egbema clan territories and the crisis and struggle over the creation of local government councils in Warri (itself a long festering inter-ethnic struggle) that broke open in 1997. MEND has of course been framed by a wider and pan-ethnic struggle for resource control and at the same time detonated, so to speak, by what Ijaw see as a deepening assault on their aspirations – what Oboko Bello calls ‘being cut off from being a nation’ – under President Obasanjo. The extraordinarily violent gunship and helicopter attacks on Okerenkoko in February 2006 and the attacks by the Joint Task Force on MEND in the wake of a truce brokered between MEND and the government in August of the same year, were consistent with a much longer history of state violence across the Warri axis. In this sense, Okonta is surely right to say that MEND is
the violent child of the deliberate and long running constriction of the public space in the Niger Delta … Behind the mask of MEND is a political subject forced to pick up an KA47 to restore his rights (2006:20).
This profusion is inextricably wrapped up with the intersection of generational politics, a corrupt and violent petro-state, irresponsible and short sighted oil company practice, and the existence of a vast oil bunkering network. As Kalyvas (2001:113) suggests, viewed from the micro-level these sorts of insurgencies – an oil insurgency in this case – resemble ‘welters of complex struggles’ in which the notion that the rebels are criminals who operate against law abiding states fails to capture the dynamics at work. Group interests are often ‘localistic and region-specific’ (Kalyvas 2001:112) yet, as I have tried to argue, their specificity emerges from the structured totality of the national and regional oil complex. It all makes for an enormously unstable and volatile mix of political, economic, political and social forces, now located on a larger, and more intimidating, canvas of global oil instability and the ‘global war on terror’.
A New Dispensation?
And what of the future? The April 2007 elections were widely held to involve massive electoral fraud and ballot rigging – almost certainly worse than in the notorious 2003 electoral process. As a friend in Port Harcourt put it recently, 2003 was ‘child's play’ compared to 2007. Nowhere were the fraud and intimidation more pronounced than in the Delta. Nonetheless, the elections have produced an Ijaw Vice President, Goodluck Jonathan, from Bayelsa State, with strong connections to a younger generation of activists and civic groups. This is potentially a step forward. Yar’Adua, the new Nigerian president, is a machine politician from an influential Katsina political family in northern Nigeria; but he has clearly put some stock in his Delta running mate's capacity to address the insurgency. Whether the President can sell the northern powerbrokers on increased ‘derivation’, that is, allocating additional oil revenues to states of origin in order to appease the angry citizens of the Delta, is another matter. There are some positive signs: talk of a Niger Delta summit, the release from detention on 14 June of Asari Dokubo, and the 27 July freeing of Chief Alamieyeseigha met key demands of many of the militants. Despite their dubious political records, both are held in esteem in some quarters of the Ijaw community as freedom fighters. The possibility of a Marshall Plan for the Delta, first voiced in March 2007 by President Olusegun Obasanjo, Yar Adua's predecessor, as the ‘Niger Delta Master Plan’ can also be read as a measure of the centrality of the Niger Delta in current Nigerian politics. However, the sordid history of large state interventions in the Delta, with their heavy focus on force and repression, would hardly lead one to be optimistic about the consequences of pouring vast petrodollars into special development agencies. A one-month truce was declared by MEND and the Joint Revolutionary Council, a group that purportedly speaks for all militant groups, on 15 June. Within days, however, there were a number of occupations of flow stations and a spike in hostage taking. In the last two months, the Soku-Buguma pipeline alone has been attacked on 16 occasions.
That said, the presence of Goodluck at the centre of power in Abuja, together with the depth of the crisis, have pushed the new government into negotiations with the insurgents – that is to say groups who have a political project, often embracing a panoply of local, regional and national grievances. These in turn have persuaded a number of key actors to come together under the umbrella of MEND. The Grand Commander of MEND, Tompolo, garners enormous respect and authority across the creeks and across virtually all of the militant organisations and networks. Several all night meetings were held in July and August 2007 in the creeks. Senator David Brigidi and other representatives of the oil states’ Peace and Rehabilitation Committees were present; the Vice President himself met with a number of key actors in the Warri creeks in June. While the government has in principle agreed to the insurgents’ preconditions for negotiations – including not only the release of Alamieyeseigha, but also the rebuilding of Odi and Odiama, two towns destroyed by federal forces, as well as the demilitarisation of the Delta on the part of federal forces – one has to say that the prospects for some sort of resolution remain unclear at best. In the last few weeks, we have witnessed the spectacle of the Rivers State Peace and Rehabilitation Committee doling out one million Naira to anyone who professes to be a ‘cultist’, a term which covers a multitude of sins but implies gang membership, and rejects the life of the ‘cultism’. Gang leaders and thugs were subsequently reported in the local press as parading in the Government House chapel clutching bibles and preaching redemption. The gravity and depth of their new-found religiosity is a rather large question.
The descent of the region into its current state of violence, and pent up political rage in the region, mean that radical changes will be required if there is to be lasting peace. Some of these, such as large-scale training programmes and mass employment schemes, major infrastructure projects, and environmental rehabilitation, will take many years, perhaps even generations. To confront resource control – not as a matter of money or percentage of revenues but as a legal and political project – will require a radical rethinking, and perhaps a restructuring, of both the constitution and institutions of governance. This effort will of course need to address questions like corruption, the reform of the electoral commission, and transparency within a notoriously ineffective and pathologically unaccountable system of local government, which in the oil producing states is awash with federally allocated monies.