Nigerian armed militants have escalated attacks on oil facilities over the last several months. The country is no longer the largest petroleum producer in Africa.
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Poverty Could Imperil the Amnesty in Niger Delta
By ADAM NOSSITER
New York Times
ALUU, Nigeria — A wary peace has settled over this strategic region, a major world oil supplier and for years a combustible nexus of third world militancy, deprivation and government corruption.
But just two months after Nigeria’s leaders declared an amnesty program for armed vigilantes a success, there already are signs that the relative quiet may not last long.
Although civilians and others are no longer being killed in the confused crossfire between militants, thugs and the army, and militants are no longer regularly blowing up oil pipelines, former fighters recently rampaged near a university here, beating and raping students, according to a government spokesman and residents in the area.
One of the top rebel commanders who disarmed his militia is already expressing impatience with the government’s pace of bringing jobs and development money to the region. And the country’s leaders remain vague about how they plan to solve the complex, underlying problems that have kept the people of the Niger Delta impoverished and angry.
Analysts who study the region and activists say it is unclear if a majority of militants gave up their guns and suggest that the government will need to act quickly to find legal sources of income for the fighters, who were making big money stealing oil from the blown-up pipelines and kidnapping oil workers for ransom. Barring that, they say, they expect renewed violence to once again imperil the Delta’s people and an industry that supplies as much as 12 percent of the United States’ oil.
One diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity, following protocol, said, “Kidnappings and other violent incidents are still occurring quite regularly, but are not reported in the local or national press.”
Even Bestman Nnwoka, the state coordinator for the amnesty program here, acknowledged that it had gotten off to a slow start. “We should match the acceptance by the militants with actions to show commitment by the government,” he said.
Aluu and other nearby towns are suburbs of Port Harcourt, the Delta’s oil center, where major corporations ship out oil pumped from offshore and onshore wells that earn them a fortune every year. Billions of dollars flow to Nigeria’s state governments, but most of the money is siphoned off by corrupt officials, leaving markets and roads here as decrepit as anywhere else in West Africa, and the beggars just as needy.
And while the oil pumped here will provide other countries with energy, residents get sporadic electricity and wait in interminably long lines for gasoline, which is in short supply.
The glaring inequities, as well as simple thuggery, have fueled the violence here for years. Just last May, the military responded to the violence with an offensive that reportedly left hundreds dead in a half-dozen villages. Then, over the summer, the government changed tack, making expansive promises of cash — $13 a day for each fighter who disarmed — as well as job training and $1.3 billion to build roads, schools and hospitals.
When prominent militants agreed to the amnesty plan, President Umaru Yar’Adua was ecstatic, saying the government would do everything it could to ensure that the region’s oil riches became “a source of blessing rather than a curse.”
But after the recent attacks on students in this dusty dirt-road suburb of Port Harcourt, terrified residents say they were safer before the government enticed the militants to leave their hide-outs along the creeks that weave through the area.
“They have turned them outside, and it is very risky to our lives,” said Julius Ebierefa, 23, a student at the University of Port Harcourt, who said he avoided being beaten by running away and hiding.
The rioters also ransacked stores, and this week, wary government troops patrolled Aluu Street, where some stores remained empty and smashed cars dotted the road.
“They were grabbing women,” said Rita Briggs, a store owner whose shelves were picked bare. “The girls came back with their bras torn.”
The men who attacked the town came from a nearby camp where the government is running a rehabilitation center for former militants at a onetime government training institute. They became violent because they were angry that their government payments were late.
From the camp’s periphery this week, a band of young men could be seen drifting aimlessly on the grounds. Government officials would not allow a tour inside the camp, and when journalists tried to visit, soldiers angrily waved guns, shouting, “You are spies!”
An activist from Port Harcourt who has been allowed inside, Annkio Briggs, was not impressed. “They’re definitely not prepared,” said Ms. Briggs, of United Niger Delta Energy Development Security Strategy. Although the government had said it would provide job training and other skills to help the men adjust to more normal lives, she said the men she saw were just hanging around and living in squalid conditions. “If their payment doesn’t come, they don’t eat,” she said.
Timiebi Koripamo-Agary, spokeswoman for the presidential panel on amnesty, blamed militant leaders for the delays, saying they were supposed to devise their own plans for rehabilitating their men. And she argued that the amnesty had still been a “huge success” because the attacks had stopped. In the first nine months of last year alone, the International Crisis Group reported that 1,000 people had been killed.
Ateke Tom, one of the best-known vigilante leaders, blamed the government for delays in getting help to the area.
Miles away from here, in a compound of stucco buildings, he expressed anger and impatience.
“They said they would give our boys work, and that’s why we accepted,” said Mr. Tom, whose group is widely believed to have been involved in numerous bloody gun battles. Stern-faced young men lined the wall behind him in the compound’s landscaped courtyard.
“For now they have not given us anything,” Mr. Tom said from behind mirrored sunglasses. “We are still watching. We want to know how it will end.” With that he flung away the remains of a glass of gin and began drinking beer.
Mr. Tom said he had engaged in only one kidnapping during his vigilante career, and only because “that day I was very much annoyed.”
“The government shot one of my boys,” he said.
Although his relative wealth is obvious — he said he owned “about” eight houses — he denied stealing oil.
Like other vigilante leaders, he readily invoked the region’s deprivation — academic studies suggest that 80 percent of Nigeria’s oil wealth goes to 1 percent of its population — as a reason for his militancy. But analysts who acknowledge the inequities say the area’s problems are much more complex: a mix of corporate self-interest and greed, not only by the government but also by militants, who are sometimes driven less by idealism than by the promise of riches.
“My overwhelming sense is, not much has happened at all,” said Michael Watts, an expert on the region at the University of California, Berkeley. “They got off to a bad start, a typical political move in Nigeria, you throw money at the problem.”
He added that so far he had seen little evidence of a “post-amnesty plan.” Perhaps more troubling, he said, is that he has seen little proof that a majority of militants disarmed; he estimates that as many as 15,000 may not have.
Patrick Naagbanton, an activist with the Center for Environment, Human Rights and Development, a nonprofit group in Port Harcourt, said that he believed that not all the weapons had been surrendered and that he worried that the government was never serious about rehabilitation.
“They’ve succeeded in getting the boys out of the way,” he said. “It’s not about rehabilitating anyone.”
Mr. Tom, the former vigilante, voiced similar suspicions.
“They’ve taken all our weapons,” he said, “and maybe that’s why they’ve decided to slow down. Because they’ve taken everything from us.”
Ahamefula Ogbu contributed reporting from Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
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