By Tom O'Neill |
Photographs by Ed Kashi |
The Niger Delta holds some of the world's
richest oil deposits, yet Nigerians living there are poorer than ever,
violence is rampant, and the land and water are fouled. What went wrong? |
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Oil fouls everything in southern Nigeria. It
spills from the pipelines, poisoning soil and water. It stains the hands of
politicians and generals, who siphon off its profits. It taints the ambitions of
the young, who will try anything to scoop up a share of the liquid riches—fire a
gun, sabotage a pipeline, kidnap a foreigner.
Nigeria had all the makings of an uplifting tale: poor African nation blessed
with enormous sudden wealth. Visions of prosperity rose with the same force as
the oil that first gushed from the Niger Delta's marshy ground in 1956. The
world market craved delta crude, a "sweet," low-sulfur liquid called Bonny
Light, easily refined into gasoline and diesel. By the mid-1970s, Nigeria had
joined OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), and the
government's budget bulged with petrodollars.
Everything looked possible—but everything went wrong.
Dense, garbage-heaped slums stretch for miles. Choking black smoke from an
open-air slaughterhouse rolls over housetops. Streets are cratered with potholes
and ruts. Vicious gangs roam school grounds. Peddlers and beggars rush up to
vehicles stalled in gas lines. This is Port Harcourt, Nigeria's oil hub, capital
of Rivers state, smack-dab in the middle of oil reserves bigger than the United
States' and Mexico's combined. Port Harcourt should gleam; instead, it rots.
Beyond the city, within the labyrinth of creeks, rivers, and pipeline channels
that vein the delta—one of the world's largest wetlands—exists a netherworld.
Villages and towns cling to the banks, little more than heaps of mud-walled huts
and rusty shacks. Groups of hungry, half-naked children and sullen, idle adults
wander dirt paths. There is no electricity, no clean water, no medicine, no
schools. Fishing nets hang dry; dugout canoes sit unused on muddy banks. Decades
of oil spills, acid rain from gas flares, and the stripping away of mangroves
for pipelines have killed off fish.
Nigeria has been subverted by the very thing that gave it promise—oil, which
accounts for 95 percent of the country's export earnings and 80 percent of its
revenue. In 1960, agricultural products such as palm oil and cacao beans made up
nearly all Nigeria's exports; today, they barely register as trade items, and
Africa's most populous country, with 130 million people, has gone from being
self-sufficient in food to importing more than it produces. Because its
refineries are constantly breaking down, oil-rich Nigeria must also import the
bulk of its fuel. But even then, gas stations are often closed for want of
supply. A recent United Nations report shows that in quality of life, Nigeria
rates below all other major oil nations, from Libya to Indonesia. Its annual per
capita income of $1,400 is less than that of Senegal, which exports mainly fish
and nuts. The World Bank categorizes Nigeria as a "fragile state," beset by risk
of armed conflict, epidemic disease, and failed governance.
The sense of relentless crisis has deepened
since last year, when a secretive group of armed, hooded rebels operating under
the name of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND,
intensified attacks on oil platforms and pumping stations, most operated by
Shell Nigeria. Militants from MEND and other groups have killed soldiers and
security guards, kidnapped foreign oil workers, set off car bombs in the delta
city of Warri to protest the visit of Chinese oil executives, and, to show off
their reach, overrun an oil rig 40 miles (64 kilometers) offshore in the Gulf of
Guinea. The attacks have shut down the daily flow of more than 500,000 barrels
of oil, leading the country to tap offshore reserves to make up for lost
revenue. With each disruption, the daily price of oil on the world market
climbed. According to the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, escalating
violence in a region teeming with angry, frustrated people is creating a
"militant time bomb."
From a potential model nation, Nigeria has become a dangerous country, addicted
to oil money, with people increasingly willing to turn to corruption, sabotage,
and murder to get a fix of the wealth. The cruelest twist is that half a century
of oil extraction in the delta has failed to make the lives of the people
better. Instead, they are poorer still, and hopeless.
Every day at Bonny Island, oceangoing tankers line up in Cawthorne Channel like
massive parade floats. They're each waiting to fill up with close to a million
barrels of the coveted Bonny Light, drawing the oil from a nearby export
terminal. Ships have been gathering at this 15-mile-long (24 kilometers) barrier
island since the mid-1500s, when slave trading between West Africa and the New
World began. Beneath the contemporary cacophony—the yammer of motorcycle taxis,
the call of Christian preachers from the market stalls, the throb of drums and
guitars from boomboxes inside shacks—strains of anger and sorrow echo the
tragedy of exploitation.
"It's not fair," Felix James Harry muttered in a meetinghouse in the village of
Finima on the western end of the island, close to the oil and gas complex. "We
can hardly catch fish anymore. Surviving is very hard." Harry, a 30-year-old
father of two children, should have been in his canoe this afternoon, throwing
out nets to snare crayfish and sardines. But he was sitting in an airless
concrete-block shelter with half a dozen other fishermen, none of whom had much
to do.
Their fishing community once stood on the other side of a small inlet, where
fuel storage tanks the size of cathedral domes now loom, and where the
superstructure of a liquefied natural gas plant juts higher than any tree in the
forest. The relocation of Finima in the early 1990s jarred loose the community's
economic moorings. "We can't support our families anymore," Harry said.
Houses in the new village are tightly packed, leaving little room for gardens.
Windows look out on walls. In this claustrophobic setting, the men talked about
nature. "The forest where the gas plant is protected us from the east wind,"
Solomon David, the community chairman, said. "Now, the rain and wind ruin our
thatched roofs every three months. They lasted more than twice as long before."
Another fisherman mentioned how construction and increased ship traffic changed
local wave patterns, causing shore erosion and forcing fish into deeper water.
"We would need a 55-horsepower engine to get to those places." No one in the
room could afford such an engine.
The meetinghouse had no electricity, but a battery-powered wall clock, the only
decoration, showed that another day was ebbing away. Forced to give up fishing,
the young men of the village put their hope in landing a job with the oil
industry. But offers are scarce. "People from the outside get all the jobs,"
Harry said, alluding to members of Nigeria's majority ethnic groups—the Igbo,
Yoruba, Hausa, and Fulani—who are the country's political and economic elite.
"We have diploma holders, but they have nothing to do."
Grievances crowded the dim room. Bernard Cosmos, a strapping young man in a
striped polo shirt, spoke out: "I have a degree in petrochemical engineering
from Rivers State University in Port Harcourt. I've applied many times with the
oil companies for a good job. It's always no. They tell me that I can work in an
oil field as an unskilled laborer but not as an engineer. I have no money to get
other training."
Isaac Asume Osuoka, director of Social Action, Nigeria, believes that
callousness toward the people of the delta stems from their economic
irrelevance. "With all the oil money coming in, the state doesn't need taxes
from people. Rather than being a resource for the state, the people are
impediments. There is no incentive anymore for the government to build schools
or hospitals.
"I can say this," Osuoka said firmly. "Nigeria was a much better place without
oil."
Such a stark indictment would surely draw reaction from the government and oil
companies. But repeated efforts to arrange on-the-record interviews with
officialdom—oil company executives, the governor of Rivers state, the commander
of the Joint Task Force, which is the military arm responsible for security in
the delta—were foiled. Shell and Total, a French company, had offered tours of
their facilities, but soon after I arrived in the delta, a spate of kidnappings
of foreign oil workers, especially around Port Harcourt, prompted the
multinationals to restrict the movements of personnel. Amid the violence, the
oil companies have hunkered down in silence.
At the Finima meetinghouse, the men grew
restless and, one by one, drifted into the dusk. Before he left, Felix Harry
declared that faith in God would reward the community. That belief must be deep
on Bonny Island, judging from the barrage of signs for revival meetings and
church services along island roads. One church promoted PUSH: Pray Until
Something Happens. Christianity has found fertile ground in the delta after
Protestant missionaries arrived in force in the mid-1800s, and it is now the
dominant faith.
Harry recited Psalm 91, praising God with a flourish: "He is my refuge and my
fortress." We walked outside. There, stranded on the shore, were the village
fishing boats, several dozen of them. Only a miracle would get them into the
water.
Across the delta, people are hoping that someone will pay attention to the
region's problems and intervene. The U.S. and western Europe, the major
consumers of Nigerian oil, are watching closely. With the U.S. consulate in
Lagos warning of a possible rebel attack on Bonny Island, diplomats are urging
greater military security. Stockholders of the oil companies are asking why the
situation has turned so perilous. Who is to blame? The answers are as
complicated and murky as the water trails in the delta.
When the oil curse began with that first great gusher in the creekside village
of Oloibiri, 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Port Harcourt, Nigeria was still a
British colony. At independence in 1960, few observers expected that Nigeria
would mature into an oil giant. But in subsequent decades, the oil companies,
led by five multinational firms—Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Italy's Agip, and
ExxonMobil and Chevron from the U.S.—transformed a remote, nearly inaccessible
wetland into industrial wilderness. The imprint: 4,500 miles (7,200 kilometers)
of pipelines, 159 oil fields, and 275 flow stations, their gas flares visible
day and night from miles away.
No one can deny the sheer technological achievement of building an
infrastructure to extract oil from a waterlogged equatorial forest. Intense
swampy heat, nearly impenetrable mangrove thickets, swarming insects, and
torrential downpours bedevil operations to this day. But mastering the physical
environment has proved almost simple compared with dealing with the social and
cultural landscape. The oil firms entered a region splintered by ethnic
rivalries. More than two dozen ethnic groups inhabit the delta, among them the
Ijaw, the largest group, and the Igbo, Itsekiri, Ogoni, Isoko, and Urhobo. These
groups have a history of fighting over the spoils of the delta, from slaves to
palm oil—and now, crude oil. The companies disturbed a fragile landscape that
supported fishing and farming. Engineers and project managers constructing
pipelines through a mangrove swamp, or laying roads through marshland, could
disrupt spawning grounds or change the course of a stream, threatening a
village's livelihood.
Recent reports by the United Nations Development Program and the International
Crisis Group identify some of the questionable strategies employed by oil
companies: paying off village chiefs for drilling rights; building a road or
dredging a canal without an adequate environmental impact study; tying up
compensation cases—for resource damages or land purchases—for years in court;
dispatching security forces to violently break up protests; patching up oil
leaks without cleaning up sites.
"After 50 years, the oil companies are still searching for a way to operate
successfully with communities," says Antony Goldman, a London-based risk
consultant. The delta is littered with failed projects started by oil companies
and government agencies—water tanks without operating pumps, clinics with no
medicine, schools with no teachers or books, fishponds with no fish.
"The companies didn't consult with villagers," says Michael Watts, director of
the African Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. "They
basically handed out cash to chiefs. It wasn't effective at all."
Last summer, skittish oil prices hit $78 a barrel, partly because of an attack
on a Shell flow station. The high prices more than offset production losses
caused by the growing instability, helping earn Shell and the other
multinationals record profits in 2006. Meanwhile, more oil fields continue to
open, many of them offshore where the infrastructure, though far more expensive
than on land, is much safer from sabotage and theft. The deepwater fields are
attracting aggressive new investors as well. China, India, and South Korea, all
energy-hungry, have begun buying stakes in Nigeria's offshore blocks. "Most
Western companies in Nigeria will find it difficult to compete, especially with
China," Goldman says. That's because oil purchases by the Chinese come with
their commitment to finance large infrastructure projects, such as
rehabilitating a railroad line.
The largest new petroleum endeavor on the delta is taking shape along the Nun
River, a tributary of the Niger. Operated by Shell, the Gbaran Integrated Oil
and Gas Project, scheduled to begin producing in 2008, will encompass 15 new oil
and gas fields, more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) of pipeline, and a sizable
gas-gathering plant. New roads are already gashing the forest. Mounds of long
black pipes await burial. Near a bank of the Nun, Nigerian soldiers crouch
behind a ring of sandbags, a .60-caliber machine gun facing the road as they
guard the entrance to the construction site of the gas plant. Cranes and
bulldozers crawl over a cleared space large enough to fit two shopping malls.
From the air, it must look as if a patch of skin has been removed from the face
of the forest.
Activists with human rights groups are pressuring Shell to learn from past
mistakes and treat this high-profile project, which affects 90 villages, as a
chance to work better with communities. Michael Watts is advising NGOs on how to
educate the local people about their rights. "For Shell to conduct business as
usual would be a public relations disaster," Watts says. "Folks say, 'Look,
these oil companies are making billions by taking out this black stuff from our
territory—they should have some ethical and social responsibilities.'"
A cautionary tale unfolds at Oloibiri, where a
wellhead, or "Christmas tree," stands in an overgrown plot. Nothing has flowed
from it for years. A weathered sign states the facts: "Oloibiri Well No. 1.
Drilled June, 1956. Depth: 12,000 feet (3,700 meters)." Nearby, a plaque dating
from 2001 commemorates a presidential visit and the laying of a foundation stone
for the Oloibiri Oil and Gas Research Institute, a projected government-funded
museum and library. The stone is still there, but nothing else. A few local
youths guard the site, not so much to protect it as to demand money from anyone
who wants to snap a picture.
In the town of Oloibiri, whose population has dropped from 10,000 to fewer than
1,000 in the past 30 years, a dirt road passes between rough-hewn houses, some
roofed with thatch, others with sheets of corroding metal. A small shop offers a
few bananas and yams. Inside the only freshly painted structure, a lemon yellow,
two-story house, Chief Osobere Inengite of the Ijaw tribe apologizes for the
appearance of his town: "Oloibiri is supposed to be compared to Texas," he said.
"I ask you, in Texas have the people in 50 years seen one second of darkness?
But look here, we have no light, no water, no food, no jobs."
The chief looked prosperous. He was wearing an ornate black-and-purple robe, a
chunky coral necklace, and a black derby, his outfit for a neighboring chief's
coronation downriver in Nembe later that day. Like most chiefs, Inengite has a
business—dredging sand from the river for roadbuilding. He always keeps an eye
out for visitors to Nigeria's historic Well No. 1. He wants them to leave
Oloibiri with a message for Shell, which owns the local oil fields. "Tell them
to help us. Tell them to train 50 boys and girls from here for jobs," the chief
pleaded. Then he sighed, "If we had never seen oil, we would have been better
off."
Where does all the oil money go? That question is asked in every village, town,
and city in the Niger Delta. The blame spreads, moving from the oil companies to
a bigger, more elusive, target: the Nigerian government. Ever since it
nationalized the oil industry in 1971, the government has controlled the energy
purse. In a joint venture arrangement, the state, in the name of the Nigerian
National Petroleum Corporation, owns 55 to 60 percent of multinational oil
operations onshore. The windfall in revenues from this arrangement has grown in
real dollars from 250 million a year to more than 60 billion in 2005. During
that time, even though the government has evolved from a military dictatorship
to a democracy (the latest attempt at civil governance began in 1999), what has
not changed is what an International Crisis Group report calls a "cancer of
corruption." A Western diplomat quoted in the report was even more direct,
referring to "the institutionalized looting of national wealth." The money
involved is staggering. The head of Nigeria's anticorruption agency estimated
that in 2003, 70 percent of oil revenues, more than 14 billion dollars, was
stolen or wasted.
On paper, a mechanism does exist for distributing oil revenues somewhat fairly.
The federal government retains roughly half and gives out the rest each month,
on a sliding scale, to the 36 state governments. The core oil producers—Rivers,
Delta, Bayelsa, and Akwa Ibom—receive the most. During the month I was in the
delta, those four states divided up more than 650 million dollars.
But there is no discernible trickle down.
Newspaper articles and court cases document spectacular misuses of the money by
military men and public office holders—such as the now imprisoned former Bayelsa
governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha—who stash hundreds of millions of dollars in
foreign bank accounts to buy mansions in the U.S. and send their children to
private schools in London. For the delta's 30 million people—most of whom
struggle on less than a dollar a day—seeing this kind of money coming into their
states with essentially none of it reaching them has created conditions for
insurrection.
Nigeria's oil money won't keep coming, of course—perhaps another 40 years, the
experts say. Natural gas is a fallback. Nigeria's reserves are estimated at 184
trillion cubic feet (five trillion cubic meters), good for an estimated 240
years of production at current levels. In the meantime, Antony Goldman says,
"The government is following a simple plan for oil extraction: We've got to get
what we can now, now."
Isaac Osuoka remembers the first time he saw frozen fish. It was the late 1970s,
and he was five. A peddler caused a stir as he entered Osuoka's delta town of
Oeliabi (now Akinima) with a carton of what he called ice fish. "We never had
fish brought in from outside," said Osuoka, who now lives in Port Harcourt. "We
had no idea what frozen fish meant. There were rumors that this fish was kept in
a mortuary."
Frozen fish was a harbinger of the changes that would traumatize Osuoka's
community. "As a boy, I could stroll to the rivers or back swamps with a rod and
a net and come back with enough fish to feed my family," he recalled. "There was
usually enough left over to sell, providing income for us to go to school." This
bounty would not survive the coming of oil. Leaks from pipelines and wells, and
the building of roads and canals, have disrupted the wetlands. "The degree and
rate of degradation," the UN report warns, "are pushing the delta towards
ecological disaster."
In 1996, Osuoka joined Environmental Rights Action, an advocacy group that helps
communities defend their resources and learn their legal rights so they can
avoid Oeliabi's fate. "We're seeing that environmental damages often happen
silently, with their effects not coming out until years later," Osuoka said.
"Today, there is not a single person in my community you could describe as a
fisherman. We depend almost totally on frozen fish." At market stalls, a piece
of frozen croaker or mackerel, most of it imported, goes for almost a dollar,
unaffordable for most villagers.
The best environmental studies of the delta
were done at least 30 years ago, according to Jimmy Adegoke, a Nigerian-born
research scientist at the University of Missouri. To help fill the void, he and
a team of researchers conducted fieldwork and a satellite-based study of the
delta. They found that between 1986 and 2003, more than 50,000 acres (20,000
hectares) of mangroves disappeared from the coast, largely because of land
clearing and canal dredging for oil and gas exploration. "That is a significant
amount given how valuable the mangrove ecosystem is," Adegoke said, referring to
the coastal forest's high productivity for fish populations. "I think the loss
of one acre is too much. You're wiping out the means for people to sustain
themselves."
Oil companies operated in the delta for years with little environmental
oversight. There was no federal environmental protection agency until 1988, and
environmental impact assessments weren't mandated until 1992. What pressure the
government exerts now is directed mostly at halting gas flares. Delta oil fields
contain large amounts of natural gas that companies have traditionally elected
to burn off rather than store or reinject into the ground, more costly measures.
Hundreds of flares have burned nonstop for decades, releasing greenhouse gases
and causing acid rain. Communities complain of corroded roofs, crop failures,
and respiratory diseases. After first ordering companies to eliminate flaring by
1984, the government keeps pushing back the deadline. Shell, the main offender,
recently announced that despite making considerable progress, it could not meet
the latest target date of 2008.
On land, there are oil spills, polluting groundwater and ruining cropland. The
government documented 6,817 spills between 1976 and 2001—practically one a day
for 25 years—but analysts suspect that the real number may be ten times higher.
Old, improperly maintained equipment causes many of the leaks, but oil operators
blame sabotage and theft, speculating that disaffected community members
deliberately cause oil spills to collect compensation money.
Well 13 in Shell's Yorla field had been leaking for five days when I got there.
Members of the nearby Ogoni village of Kpean had assembled around a
five-foot-high (1.5 meters) wellhead that stood in the midst of high grass.
Puffs of smoke drifted from the iron structure. Oil dripped from its sides into
a spreading lake.
"We're expecting Shell, but no one has come yet," a villager said. "Soon the oil
will leak into the creek over there and spoil our drinking water."
Shell and Ogoniland share a tragic history. Nigeria's first mass protest against
the oil industry emerged in these tribal lands southeast of Port Harcourt. In
1990, the charismatic writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, outraged by oil spills in Ogoniland,
founded the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People. The organization demanded
control of the oil on Ogoni lands and an end to environmental damage. A quarter
of a million Ogoni, nearly half the population, rallied in early 1993 to support
the cause. Later that year, Shell, citing security concerns, halted production
from its 96 wells in Ogoniland—though oil from wells outside the area continued
to flow in pipelines through Ogoni territory.
Alarmed by Saro-Wiwa's popular support, Nigeria's military government brought
charges of murder against him and fellow activists. The government accused them
of instigating the mob killings of four Ogoni leaders from a rival faction. At a
tribunal widely regarded as a sham, and with the alleged complicity of Shell,
Saro-Wiwa and eight others were found guilty and hanged in 1995. Though the
world community reacted with outrage, and Saro-Wiwa's son initiated a lawsuit
against Shell for human rights abuses (which is ongoing), the situation has not
improved. In fact, Isaac Osuoka told me, "things have gotten worse since Ken was
murdered."
To this day, safety concerns and lengthy, often hostile negotiations with
community leaders over access fees and compensation payments hamper Shell's
response to spills. When I heard that the leak at Well 13 had become a fire, I
returned to Kpean. Black smoke was flooding the sky above the palm trees. This
time I couldn't get close to the well—a group of angry Ogoni youths blocked my
vehicle.
"Get out, white man! You work for Shell!" one yelled.
"You want to see it? Give us 100,000 naira," another shouted. He was demanding
$800.
A few days later, I asked Patrick Naagbanton, an Ogoni journalist who had
marched with Saro-Wiwa, to convince the village chief to let us in. Naagbanton
led the way, shoving through the crowd toward the well. A fireball was erupting
from the ground. The flames roared. Within the inferno, the iron Christmas tree
was melting like an effigy thrown on a funeral pyre. Letam Nwinek, one of the
villagers, pulled us away from the heat. "We're afraid that if the fire enters
the pipeline, the whole community could go up," he said. "Shell keeps promising
to come, but they say they need more foam and special equipment because the fire
has grown so large."
Suddenly, the crowd began scattering. A man dressed for the city in a pink shirt
and black beret came up to us.
"You'd better leave. Now!"
Our evictor, Marvin Yobana, was president of the Ogoni Youth Council. As he
spoke, five men surrounded us in a threatening stance.
"Yobana is what passes as an Ogoni leader
today," Naagbanton said as we retreated. "He's a thug. I believe he's
negotiating with Shell to gain a lucrative clean-up contract and doesn't want
journalists around." Taking a last look at the fire, Naagbanton said with
disgust, "He's just part of the predatory, parasitic struggle to get oil money."
Well 13 would burn for two more months before a Shell team arrived to extinguish
it.
"Is anyone listening?" Ken Saro-Wiwa had asked in his final newspaper column.
"The delta people must be allowed to join in the lucrative sale of crude oil,"
he wrote. "Only in this way can the cataclysm that is building up in the delta
be avoided."
The cataclysm is upon the delta. As I write this, 70 militants have just
attacked a Shell convoy in the Cawthorne Channel, taking 25 oil workers hostage.
Rebels have killed nine Nigerian soldiers in a firefight near Brass Island, the
site of a large, vulnerable export terminal. Meanwhile, east of Port Harcourt,
gunmen have raided an ExxonMobil residential compound and abducted four Scottish
oil workers, demanding ten million dollars each for their release.
The number and severity of attacks in the delta have been building, led by youth
groups demanding access to the oil wealth in their territories. This surge in
militancy is emblematic of a continent-wide frustration among the young, says
Michael Watts, of the University of California. "Across Africa you have a huge
number of alienated youths, politically footloose, who thought they could
achieve something with their countries' moves to independence and democracy.
Those hopes have been almost everywhere violently snuffed out. The youth are
pissed off and willing to up the ante."
In the Niger Delta, escalating violence has undermined the country's financial
stability and its ability to supply crude to the Western world. Shipments from
new offshore rigs are making up for some of the oil lost to sabotage, but rebels
identified with MEND have threatened to shut down everything. The day the U.S.
consulate warned of the possible attack on Bonny Island, a spokesman for MEND
boasted to the press: "We will wipe out the Nigerian oil export industry in one
swipe."
Late one night in a darkened neighborhood in central Port Harcourt (the city was
experiencing one of its regular blackouts), an angry young man, who asked for
anonymity, explained his outrage. "Nigeria made its greatest mistake taking the
life of that man Ken Saro-Wiwa. It will not be forgiven. When the Nigerian state
overreacted like that, the thinking became, We have to carry weapons unless we
want to die. Violence begets violence. When someone loses hope, he is
devastated, and he will say, 'Either I fight, or I leave this world.'"
This young Nigerian is a university lecturer, who says the time for talking has
passed. "When the situation in the delta threatens to turn into another Middle
East, then the world will finally intervene."
Another night in Port Harcourt, a prolonged gun battle erupted outside my
compound. Volleys from AK-47s, answered by the booms of pump-action shotguns,
sent me running to barricade my door. The gunmen abducted four expatriates from
Goodfellas, a nightclub nearby. (It was this incident that led the oil companies
to cancel their tours.) A Dutch oil worker on contract to Shell, who makes
$80,000 a year as a pipeline construction supervisor, told me he has to travel
everywhere with an armed escort. "You must keep it in your mind that people out
there may kill you," he said.
With every assault by the insurgents, the Nigerian military seems to answer with
devastation. One evening, a gang of kidnappers dressed in army camouflage came
by boat to a waterside neighborhood called Aker Base on the outskirts of Port
Harcourt, stormed into a bar, and snatched an Italian construction worker
employed by Saipem, an oil-servicing company. During the grab, the assailants
killed a soldier. Within hours, troops swept into the shantytown and burned down
every structure except a bank. Days later, stunned residents wandered through
the charred ruins like ghosts; some 3,000 had lost their homes.
A woman clutching her melted cell phone moaned, "I have to tell my mother, my
brothers and sisters what happened. I don't know where to start and where to
end." In front of a collapsed church, the village chief implored a crowd to "Let
God fight this case." A lawyer hired by the village provided little comfort when
he said that Saipem would meet with the community "maybe in a week" and ask for
a list of everything lost.
"I blame the government," said Caroline Mathias, the owner of the bar, staring
at a pile of melted bottles and the crumpled metal roof where her business had
stood. "The government should help us. I'm begging them. We are not the ones who
killed that soldier."
The Italian worker was freed five days after the sack of Aker Base. That month,
18 foreigners were abducted; all were released, reportedly after hefty ransom
payments.
No one is sure how many delta people have picked up the gun to fight for their
rights. Estimates range from the low hundreds to the low thousands. What is
certain is that each time the military reacts with extreme measures, the number
rises.
The rebels seem unafraid, as when a hundred or so MEND members and supporters
gathered openly at a morgue in the city of Warri for the funeral service of nine
militants killed on the water in an ambush by the Nigerian military. Afterward,
MEND leaders invited the press to accompany boats taking the caskets to villages
for burial. Along the way, men waved guns from jetties, and white flags flew
from huts. The men wore conspicuous red-and-white ties knotted around their
arms. The ties and flags were symbols of Egbesu, the Ijaw god of war. Warriors
wear the knots as protection against death, believing that having taken an oath
to Egbesu, nothing metal—neither bullet nor machete—can harm them. Farther on, a
rebel camp sat brazenly on a riverbank, the blue roofs of its barracks plainly
visible to oil company helicopters.
No solution seems in sight for the Niger Delta. The oil companies are keeping
their heads down, desperate to safeguard their employees and the flow of oil.
The military, ordered to meet force with force, have stepped up patrols in
cities and on waterways. The militants are intensifying a deadly guerrilla
offensive, hoping that rising casualties and oil prices will force the
government to negotiate. National elections in April could exacerbate the
violence, especially if politicians resort to the practice of hiring youth gangs
to deliver votes at gunpoint.
Optimism is as scarce as blue sky in the sodden delta. "Everyone was sure they
would be blessed with the coming of the black gold and live as well as people in
other parts of the world," said Patrick Amaopusanibo, a retired businessman who
now farms near the village of Oloama. He had to speak loudly to compete with the
"black noise," the hissing and roaring of a gas flare near his cassava field.
"But we have nothing. I feel cheated."
In some parts of the Niger Delta, oil still looks like a miracle. In the
run-down fishing village of Oweikorogba on the Nun River, where families of ten
sleep in a single room under leaky thatch roofs, hope materialized a year ago in
the form of Chinese prospectors. They left without finding oil, but the people
of Oweikorogba want them back, confident that they'll find a pot of gold. And if
a stranger warns these villagers that oil is a curse in Nigeria, they will look
at him and say: "We want oil here. It will make everything better."