Petro-Insurgency or Criminal Syndicate? Conflict & Violence in the Niger Delta

Abstract

The volatility of world oil markets, and the grumbling of American consumers over rising gas and heating oil prices over the last year, has highlighted a number of key trends in world oil markets: the rapidly growing demand for oil by China and India, the questionable status of some of the mega-oilfields in the Gulf, the aggressive nationalism of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and President Ahmadinejad in Iran, and not least the spill-over effects of the Iraqi insurgency across the Gulf. But there has been another presence contributing to this volatility, namely the deepening conflicts across, indeed the increasing ungovernability of the oil fields of the Niger Delta in Nigeria. A spectacular escalation in violent attacks on oil installations and abduction of oil workers beginning in December 2005 and January-February 2006 by a shadowy and largely unknown militant group MEND (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta), have thrown into dramatic relief the enormous fragility of the Nigeria's oil economy. Among MEND's demands were the release of two key Ijaw leaders but as their operations became more brazen and daring so did their political demands. MEND claimed a goal of cutting Nigerian output by 30 per cent. Within the first three months of 2006, $1 billion in oil revenues had been lost and over 29 Nigerian military had been killed in the uprising. By early July 2007, 700,000 barrels per day were shut (deferred) by growing political instability and insurgent attacks. The situation across the oilfields is now as fraught as at any time since the onset of civil war in 1967. How did this instability and political order arise and does it reflect, as some have suggested, an oil insurgency draped in the garb of organised crime?

Notes

1. Youth is a ‘complex, fluid and permeable category which is historically and socially situated’ (Gore & Pratten, 2003:215) shaped of course in the Niger Delta by the political economy of oil and the cultural economy of chieftainship and customary rule – themselves shaped by long waves of accumulation extending from slavery through palm oil to the discovery and petroleum and natural gas.

2. Egbesu refers to a local diety within the 40 or so Ijaw clans associated with warfare but it has, as one might expect (and here a parallel with jihad is instructive), a complex set of shifting meanings (including a sense of personal or interior truth or purity); agabas are urban dance societies (see Pratten, 2006).

3. For what it is worth the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC in a briefing in April 2007 refer to a five-fold increase in Kalashnikovs in the past 30 months and the profusion of RPGs, night vision equipment and anti-aircraft missiles; the ‘five best armed’ militias have 10,000 combatants and 25,000 weapons. The weapons vary from AK47s to M-16s purportedly smuggled from Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Cameroon but also acquired from Nigerian soldiers (Wellington, 2007; Best and Kemedi, 2005; Kemedi, 2003).

4. A Federal High Court sitting in Port Harcourt in February 2006 ordered SPDC to pay $1.5 billion to ‘Ijaw Aborigines of Bayelsa State’. Justice Okeke rejected a stay of execution by Shell and ordered the company to pay the Central bank of Nigeria the full amount no later than 22 May 2006.

5. The companies and government have typically denied the payments of ransoms to militants but there have been reports in the press, by activists and others, of payments in excess of $250,000. For example, the release of a group of Korean hostages in June 2007, mediated by Asari while still in detention (!), produced a payment of N120 million covered by the company and by River State government (interview with Nigerian mediator, San Francisco, 26 June 2007). On 29 June, a ransom of $102,000 was paid for the release of the three year old son of a politician; the Niger Delta Militant Force Squad (NDMFS) demanded $417,000 for six kidnapped Russians. In fact, the decline in oil bunkering since 2004 has seen militias turning to kidnapping and extortion as sources of revenues as bunkering income has fallen. The ransoms are paid from the so-called state ‘security’ budgets which are vast and largely unaccountable; it is widely reported that government officials cream a significant proportion (up to 50 per cent) of paid ransoms (Briggs, 2007). MEND seems to hold hostages longer than other groups (two Italian hostages were held for 99 days).

6. Parenthetically, this approach is related to Michael Ross's (1999) claim about another aspect of the oil-politics, namely that it hinders democracy through rents (no taxation=no representation), militarisation (oil-funded securitisation), and service employment (as a way of purchasing ideological consent).

7. From this the fact it is claimed, as we shall see, that rebels cannot loot oil and must turn to extortion and through this extortion it is the figure of the warlord (‘the rebel leader’) who appears as the new predator associated with the notion of the ‘end of politics’ in the post-Cold War era.