Niger Delta: Behind The Mask
By
Ike Okonta
source: http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/38005
October 26, 2006
As the crisis in the Niger
Delta brews, Ike Okonta looks behind the fragile truce between the
Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta and Nigeria's central
government.Pambazuka News publishes here the first instalment of a
substantive paper prepared following a recent visit to the blood and
oil-soaked region.
The fragile truce brokered between Nigeria’s central government and the
Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in April 2006,
jerked to a bloody halt on 20th August. On that afternoon, soldiers of
the Joint Task Force, a contingent of the Nigerian Army, Navy and Air
Force deployed by the government to enforce its authority on the restive
oil-bearing Niger Delta, ambushed fifteen members of the MEND militia in
the creeks of western delta and murdered them. The dead men had gone to
negotiate the release of a Shell Oil worker kidnapped by youth in
Letugbene, a neighbouring community. The Shell staff also died in the
massacre.
The incident occurred five days after Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s
President, instructed armed forces commanders in the region to resort to
force and quickly ‘pacify’ the region. This marked a sharp turn-around
from the promise Obasanjo gave to representatives of the MEND militia in
Nigeria’s capital Abuja, in early April that he would utilise dialogue
and carefully targeted development projects to return peace, law and
good government to the impoverished Niger Delta.
The streets of Warri, the city where Shell and ChevronTexaco’s western
delta operations are based, were thick with tension on the morning of 2
September when Ijo youth converged on Warri Central Hospital in the
suburbs to retrieve the corpses of their colleagues and commence the
burial ceremonies. The Ijaw are the largest ethnic group in the Niger
Delta. The MEND militia draws the bulk of its membership from the Ijaw.
Significantly, there were several prominent Ijaw political and civic
leaders at the ceremony. Ordinary people, mainly Ijaw peasant farmers
and fisher folk, had left their hoes and fishing nets and travelled from
their hamlets in the creeks to pay their last respects to the slain.
Spokesmen of the Nigerian government had sought to represent the fifteen
militias as ‘irresponsible hostage-takers’ in the wake of the slaughter.
But those massed at the hospital that morning spoke only of heroes who
had fallen in the battle for ‘Ijaw liberation.’ MEND, it was clear to
observers, was firmly embedded in the Ijaw communities from which it
emerged in February 2006. MEND continues to enjoy the support of youth
and impoverished peasants whose farm lands and fishing creeks – their
sole source of livelihood - have been destroyed by half a century of
uncontrolled oil production and whose cause they took up arms to
champion.
Even so, members of the MEND militia have never seen armed force as a
suitable and effective weapon, but only as a tactical tool. They were
forced to wield this tool as a last resort after three decades of
peaceful entreaty was replied with cynical indifference, from the
central government and the oil companies. Leaders of the Federated Niger
Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC), a civic group with headquarters in
Gbaramatu, an Ijaw clan in which MEND’s activities are very pronounced,
have served as informal representatives of the MEND militia in
negotiations with President Obasanjo and Nigeria’s central government
following the abduction of nine foreign oil workers in the creeks of the
delta in February. When the author interviewed Oboko Bello, President of
FNDIC in Warri in early August, two weeks before the Letugbene massacre,
he spoke warmly about the peace meeting he and other Ijaw leaders had
had in Abuja with Obasanjo and other government officials on April 5 and
18 2006. He even assured that MEND militants would put their weapons
permanently beyond use if the government went some way to address the
long-standing grievances of his people. [1]
But it was a sorrowful and stone-faced Bello who addressed his fellow
Ijaw during the burial ceremony that afternoon in Warri. He said: “Shell
officials were privy to the arrangements Ijaw patriots had made as part
of the Joint Investigation and Verification exercise to free the
captured company worker and also facilitate the re-opening of the
company’s facilities in the creeks. Shell was in direct communication
with the commanders of the Joint Task Force, even up to the time our
young men set out in their boats to rescue the Shell worker in Letugbene.
These young men were not hostage takers. They were Ijaw patriots,
selflessly working to repair the damaged peace between the oil company
and our people. For this they were ambushed and murdered by soldiers in
the service of Shell.” [2]
Oboko Bello ended his one-hour speech on a note of conciliation, arguing
that the peace process between the MEND militia and the government begun
on 12 March following a meeting between President Obasanjo and prominent
Ijaw leaders must not be derailed. But angry voices are rising all over
the creeks vowing revenge. These are young men - the volatile, striking
arm of the Ijaw political and civic resurgence. Whether moderate voices
will be able to rein them in remain to be seen.
For its apart, the central government has adopted a new defiant,
militaristic posture, publicly announcing in late August that it was now
collaborating closely with the US and British governments to deploy more
naval personnel and new hardware to “root out oil rustlers, kidnappers
and other undesirable elements from the Niger Delta and the wider Gulf
of Guinea.” [3] The MEND militants hunkered down in their heavily
fortified redoubts in the creeks, this sounded ominously like an open
declaration of war.
FNDIC leaders who spoke to the author shortly after the burial ceremony
expressed the concern that the government’s belligerent posture could be
an attempt to generate political turbulence in the Niger delta during
the general elections, due in April 2007. This turbulence would provide
an opportunity for Obasanjo to impose an interim government and extend
his tenure beyond the constitutionally stipulated two terms. The
elections had been massively rigged in the region (and even more so in
the Ijaw areas) by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 1999 and
again in 2003. But FNDIC officials continue to hold out hope that fair
elections in which the Ijaw would be fairly represented will provide the
solution to the political and economic crisis in which they are trapped.
They insist they will continue to work zealously to thwart any attempt
to prevent free elections from taking place in Ijaw communities next
April.
However, elections in Nigeria and the Niger Delta in particular, are
usually turbulent affairs, sometimes descending into the bloody and
violent. As was the case in the past, politicians are replenishing their
arms caches and resuscitating the network of thugs they rely on to
intimidate their rivals, coerce voters to do their bidding, or stuff the
ballot boxes outright. The region is awash with small arms and hard cash
yet again, and the already volatile cocktail of local resentment of the
oppressive activities of the government and the oil companies looks set
to blend with guns for hire prowling the creeks and sire another bloody
inferno.
Spectacle
The MEND militia and its political sponsors set out in the early months
of the year to draw the attention of the world to the parlous condition
of the Ijaw people, deploying spectacle as a powerful weapon. Images of
armed youth in masks wielding sub-machine guns in the creeks and
helpless oil workers at their mercy, squatting in the bowels of
speedboats, were beamed to the media all over the world through a
skilful use of the internet.
These graphic images generated intense emotions in government circles as
well as in the environmental and human rights community in the West.
Global oil prices surged and fell with the tone of MEND’s press
statements and the physical condition of the captives, whose photographs
they put out on the net. But the drama invariably ended on a peaceful
note, with MEND setting the oil workers free unharmed. After a spate of
armed attacks on the facilities of Shell and two other oil companies in
the western delta followed MEND’s emergence in February, the militants
and the government seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement that
this drama could go on. The actors would be permitted to air their
grievances on the world stage, as long as the oil workers periodically
taken hostage were not harmed.
The outrage with which the Letugbene murders were greeted by Ijaw youth
in the creeks, and rising political tensions all over the country, means
there is no knowing whose voice will command allegiance in the coming
months: the moderates counselling patience and political participation,
or the young hotheads eager to return to the creeks and take on the
government and the oil companies they are allied with.
Prelude to an uprising
Before the emergence of MEND, the last time the Ijaw took up arms
against the Nigerian government in an organised effort to assert their
political rights was forty years ago. In February 1966, Isaac Adaka Boro,
a graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, formed the Niger Delta
Volunteer Service (NDVS), a militia comprising of several young and
educated Ijaw men, and declared the Ijaw-speaking areas of Nigeria’s
then ‘Eastern Region’ an independent ‘Niger Delta Republic.’ In an
eleven-point declaration of independence, Boro stated that “all former
agreements as regards the crude oil of the people undertaken by the now
defunct ‘Nigerian’ government in the territory have been declared
invalid,” and that “ll oil companies are commanded …to stop exploration
and renew agreements with the new Republic. Defiance of this order will
result in dislocation of the company’s exploration and forfeiture of
their rights of renewal of such agreements.” [4]
Although Federal troops, directed from the regional capital Enugu soon
quashed Isaac Boro’s uprising, the twelve-day revolt jolted the nation.
It focussed attention on the travails of the riverbank communities of
the Eastern Region, and re-opened debate about their demand (since the
Willincks hearing in 1958) to be separated from the Eastern Region in an
independent state of their own. At the time the Eastern Region was
dominated by the more populous Igbo ethnic group, obliging the Ijaw,
Ibibio, Ogoni and other smaller groups to band together and ask for a
new ‘Rivers State.’
Boro and his two associates, Sam Owonaro and Notthingham Dick, were
arrested and imprisoned. Developments elsewhere in the country were soon
to alter the fortunes of the three militants in a dramatic manner.
Nigeria had been convulsed in political crisis following independence
from Britain in October 1960. At the heart of the dispute was the
unwieldy three-region structure that the departing colonialists
bequeathed to the country, ensuring that the Northern region, led by
Muslim feudal lords who had cooperated with British administrators in
governing the country, were given the largest slice, bigger than the
Western and Eastern Region combined.
Northern politicians were quick to turn this numerical advantage into
political and economic rewards, introducing a corrupt and authoritarian
mode of rule in the country that enabled them to transfer wealth derived
from the south to their own region. In January 1966 five young army
majors, the bulk of Igbo extraction, staged a military coup in an
attempt to overthrow the civilian government and put an end to the drift
towards misgovernment. Several leading politicians and senior Army
officers, including the Prime Minister and the Premier of the Northern
Region, were killed. The bulk of those that lost their lives were
northerners. Casualty figures in the East were light, leading to
accusation by northern officers that the January coup was a plot by Igbo
officers and politicians to take over the government of the country by
force.
Six months later, in July 1966, northern officers staged a counter-coup,
attempted to pull the North out of the Federation, but then changed
their mind at the last minute (under pressure from the British High
Commissioner and the American Ambassador). Leaders of the coup had
killed the military Head of State, General Ironsi, an Igbo who had taken
over the reins of government after the January coup had collapsed as the
most senior officer in the Army. Over three hundred other officers, the
bulk of them from the Eastern Region, were also murdered. The coup
leaders appointed Yakubu Gowon, a lieutenant colonel and fellow
northerner, Head of State and declared that the Ironsi government had
been overthrown.
The military administrator of the Eastern Region, Col. Emeka Ojukwu,
refused to recognise Gowon as Head of State, and insisted that the late
Ironsi’s second in command, Brigadier Ogundipe take over. Relations
between the two sides deteriorated swiftly. Fearing that the East was
about to secede, the Gowon regime hunkered down in the federal capital
Lagos, and split the country into twelve new states in May 1967, two for
the ethnic minority groups of the Eastern Region. The Ijaw formed the
bulk of the new Rivers State. Ojukwu responded a few days later by
declaring the East as the Republic of Biafra, a new state independent of
Nigeria. Federal troops invaded Biafra and civil war broke out. Isaac
Boro and his compatriots were released from prison by Federal troops
when they overran the riverside parts of Biafra. He subsequently joined
the Federal side as a major and commanded his own unit under the Third
(Marine Commando) Division. Boro was to die in battle a few weeks before
the war ended.
The bloody civil war that raged for thirty months and in which an
estimated three million people died, was to profoundly alter Nigeria’s
political landscape. The war ended in January 1970 with a Federal
victory. Although the Ijaw had reason to be content, having secured the
new state they had been asking for since the 1950s, the euphoria was to
prove short-lived. The central government had passed on to a victorious
federal army the bulk of whose commanders were from the now defunct
Northern Region. These officers quickly turned their attention to the
oil wells of the Niger Delta. In cooperation with civil servants, they
pushed through a number of military edicts nationalising the delta oil
fields, and altering the formula for sharing revenue. Whereas previously
fifty percent of revenue went to the region or state from which it was
derived, all the states now had an equal share, with the central
government in Lagos keeping the lion’s share for itself.
The new fiscal regime, which now left the Ijaw and the other oil-bearing
communities of the Niger Delta at a distinct disadvantage, took nearly
ten years to achieve. The process began in the heat of the civil war,
when the Gowon government enacted Decree 15 of 1969, removing the
control of the oil fields from their states of origin and putting this
in its own control. By the time the soldiers handed over to a new
civilian government in October 1979, a rash of decrees and edicts had
transformed the Niger Delta into a colony whose inhabitants bore the
brunt of the oil production on which the national economy relied heavily
but enjoyed none of the benefits. These edicts included the 1978 Land
Use Act that confiscated the oil-bearing land of the delta communities
and put this under the ‘protection’ of the central government.
The new civilian government, under President Shehu Shagari, a
northerner, was effete, purposeless and corrupt. This ill-fated Second
Republic was overthrown in December 1983 by General M. Buhari. On
Buhari’s watch, the portion of oil revenue that went to the Ijaw and the
other oil-bearing communities of the Niger Delta plunged to a derisory
1.5 per cent, down from 20 two years previously. Meanwhile Shell
Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), the local subsidiary of the
Anglo-Dutch oil giant, and other Western oil companies operating in the
Niger Delta continued to benefit from the legislations that had
successfully reduced the delta communities to squatters on their own
land. Shell had begun to produce oil in 1956, and now accounted for half
of the country’s total oil production of two million barrels per day.
According to the provisions of the legal regime guiding oil production,
oil companies were not required to obtain the permission of the local
communities on whose land and creeks they explored for, and mined oil.
They were only answerable to government officials far away in the
capital. All that the oil companies were asked to do was pay
‘compensation’ to local people for crops and other valuables destroyed
in the course of oil production. Estimation was largely left to the
discretion of Shell officials, and they were quick to take advantage of
this and undercut the local people. Environmental protection laws were
also flagrantly breached by all the companies, resulting in the
devastation of the farm lands and fishing creeks on which the Ijaw and
the other communities had relied for livelihood for millennia. [5]
Previous decades of government neglect had reduced the delta communities
to excruciating poverty, but now their very existence was threatened.
General Ibrahim Babangida overthrew General Buhari in a palace coup in
August 1985, and introduced a Structural Adjustment Programme,
supervised by the IMF. Ostensibly designed to ameliorate the financial
crisis into which decades of corrupt and inefficient government had
plunged the country, Babangida’s new economic policies only succeeded in
plunging the people into worse poverty. The currency was devalued,
hiking up the price of imported necessities. Social services were cut.
Millions were retrenched from jobs in government and the private sector.
The already impoverished Delta communities felt the new harsh economic
climate particularly keenly. There were neither factories nor government
jobs in the region. The enclave oil economy employed a handful of local
people even as it left environmental destruction in its wake. Hospitals,
roads, piped water, schools, paved roads and electric power were
non-existent, and where they were supplied, grossly inadequate. As
thousands of Ijaw, retrenched from their jobs in the cities and towns
began to stream home in late 1980s, the Niger Delta region began to
heave. It was clear to the discerning that a political storm was about
to break.
The first storm came in the shape of an attempted military putsch, led
by Ijaw and other Delta elements in the Army. In April 1990 these young
military officers stormed Dodan Barracks, seat of the central
government, and reduced its perimeter walls to rubble with mortars and
AK47s. But General Babangida managed to escape, rallied senior
commanders to his side and mounted a counter-attack. Outflanked and
outgunned the coup plotters surrendered. After a hasty trial, closed to
the public, they were executed.
The defiant utterances of the young officers as they faced the firing
squad, declaring that they had ‘struck a blow for the oppressed people
of the Niger Delta in the spirit of Isaac Boro’, and the economic
upheavals in the delta and the wider country that led to this bloody
episode, were to prepare the ground for the emergence of the Movement
for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) sixteen years later. [6]
• Dr Ike Okonta is a research fellow in contemporary African politics at
the University of Oxford. He is co-author of Where Vultures Feast:
Shell, Human Rights and Oil, Verso, New York, 2003.
• Please send comments to
editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at
www.pambazuka.org
References
[1] Ike Okonta, interview with Oboko Bello, President of Federated Niger
Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC), Warri, 14th August 2006. In summary,
Ijaw representatives asked for the creation of two states, in addition
to Bayelsa state, for their people to be carved out of the existing
states of Edo, Ondo, Cross Rivers, Rivers, and Akwa Ibom. They also
asked that fifty per cent of oil revenue derived from the Niger Delta be
given to the communities, that Ijaw businessmen be given a greater pie
in the oil industry, and that the central government withdraw armed
troops from the region and compel Shell and the other oil companies to
put an end to incessant oil spills and gas flaring.
[2] Oboko Bello, ‘FNDIC Presentation During Burial Ceremony of Nine out
of Fifteen Illustrious Sons Killed While Serving the Purpose of SPDC in
Letugbene Community,’ Presented in Warri, Delta State, 2 September,
2006.
[3] Onyebuchi Ezigbo, ‘Niger Delta: Britain, US Offer Assistance to
Nigeria,’ ThisDay, Lagos, 31 August, 2006.
[4] See Tony Tebekaemi, The Twelve Day Revolution, Ethiope Publishing
Company, Benin City, 1982, p. 12. See also Kathryn N. Nwajiaku, ‘Oil
Politics and Identity Transformation in Nigeria: The Case of the Ijaw in
the Niger Delta,’ Unpublished DPhil thesis, Department of Politics,
University of Oxford, 2005, for an excellent scholarly study of the
political context of Isaac Boro’s revolt in 1966.
[5] For a comprehensive treatment of the social and environmental
consequences of oil production in the Niger Delta, see Ike Okonta and
Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil,
Sierra Club, San Francisco, 2001.
[6] Ihuoma Iwegbu, ‘Why they Struck,’ National Concord, Lagos, 24 April,
1990.
