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Document MTPW000020060523e25n0046u
Nigeria's Deadly Days
Robinson, Simon

3,090 words

22 May 2006

Time International Atlantic Ed.

TMAT

20

Volume 167; Issue 21;

English

Copyright (c) 2006 ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved.
The country's poverty-stricken, oil-rich south is accustomed to vandalism and pipeline explosions, but a new threat is raising the stakes. Inside the Delta's insurgency.
TEEMING WITH BIRD AND MARINE LIFE, GIANT FERNS AND TOWERING mangrove plants whose roots straddle land and water like the legs of lumbering animals, the creeks and swamps of the Niger Delta lie over one of the biggest reserves of oil on the planet: 34 billion bbl. of black gold. The region, a watery maze flung across 50,000 sq km in southern Nigeria, is also home to some of Africa's poorest people, and some of its worst environmental destruction. There are villages without power, water, health clinics or schools; pipelines that scar the earth; oil slicks that shimmer on rivers; flares that blaze bright and loud, burning off the gas that gushes to the surface along with the sweet crude. So poor are most who live in the Delta that some are prepared to risk their lives for a bucketful of fuel. Last week, more than 150 people died when an oil pipeline on the outskirts of Nigeria's biggest city, Lagos, west of the Delta, exploded in a massive fireball. The inferno left dozens of bodies charred beyond recognition. Police say that the explosion was most likely caused by vandalism. The pipeline, which ran under a beach, had been uncovered. Small holes had been drilled in it through which thieves could tap off fuel. The leaking pipeline had attracted local villagers who were filling containers when it blew. Nigeria's Red Cross said that the explosion ignited hundreds of cans full of fuel.
Yet incidents like last week's tragedy are not the greatest danger to Nigeria's oil industry. Nigerians have long vandalized pipelines, and some of the operations are organized and professional. In the Delta, gangs of bandits have prowled the brackish swamps for years, stealing oil, harassing oil workers and making millions of dollars. But over the past few months an even deadlier threat has emerged. Frustrated that they remain poor after decades of oil production, locals have begun attacking foreign oil companies, their workers and the Nigerian soldiers who protect them--not, as in the past, for money, but as part of an armed campaign. Unless there is change, they say, there will be war. The government and oil companies "don't listen to words," Delta militia member Richard, 27, told TIME three weeks ago, the dull roar of a gas flare in the background. "So perhaps they will understand the language of the gun."
The nascent insurgency has made Nigeria's oil fields among the most dangerous in the world--and helped push global oil prices past $72 bbl. Nigeria was meant to be part of the solution to the insatiable demands for more oil from the U.S. and fast-growing China and India. When the country returned to civilian rule under President Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999, it was pumping around 1.8 million bbl. a day. Daily capacity had expanded to 2.5 million bbl. before the recent attacks; Nigeria is now the sixth biggest oil exporter in the world. Western oil companies, eager for a supply from outside the Middle East, want to increase production from Africa.
On a visit to Nigeria three weeks ago, Chinese President Hu Jintao signed deals to increase Chinese exploration and production. But Nigeria's role as a stable producer has taken a hammering of late. Militant attacks have cut production by 20%, hitting companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, and costing the oil majors and Nigeria hundreds of millions of dollars. "There used to be clashes and other problems, but in the past five or six months things have gotten much more serious," says Manouchehr Takin, senior analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies, a London-based consultancy. While it's impossible to work out exactly how much that contributes to rising oil prices compared to the crisis over Iran and increasing demand, Takin says production losses in the Delta are "a major factor" in the high price of gas.
The militants' campaign kicked off on Jan. 11 when three speedboats packed with gun-toting men attacked a Nigerian navy boat and a vessel leased by Shell. No one was killed. But the attackers, who said they were part of a new group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), kidnapped four foreign contractors. Since then the group, which numbers just a few hundred people, according to a local human-rights campaigner and militant members, has kidnapped at least eight more foreign oil workers and attacked several oil installations, killing some 14 Nigerian soldiers posted to guard them. In the past month, militants have also exploded two car bombs as "warnings" of coming chaos. When I set off with three guides in a cigar-shaped fiberglass boat into the swamps last month, a Nigerian naval officer aboard a warship in the port city of Warri warned me not to go on. "Even we don't go there," he said, motioning along the Warri River. Then he slowly drew a finger across his throat.
Downriver, it's easy to see the cause of this deadly hostility. Since the 1950s, when oil was first found in recoverable quantities, the Delta and the waters off Nigeria's coast in the Gulf of Guinea have made the country and oil majors such as Chevron, Agip, ExxonMobil and Shell hundreds of billions of dollars. Nigeria currently earns more than $3 billion a month from oil--which accounts for some 95% of its export earnings and 40% of its GDP. But the vast majority of the people of the Delta still live in severe and visible poverty.
One of the first activists to speak out against this imbalance was businessman, TV writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, from the Ogoni region, east of Nigeria's oil capital Port Harcourt. Saro-Wiwa preached nonviolence, but Nigeria's then military government charged him with having "counseled and procured" the murder of four Ogoni elders, and in 1995 hanged him, to international condemnation. Despite the return to democracy and government promises to improve the lives of Delta dwellers, little has changed. Today in Oporoza--the traditional center of the Gbaramatu kingdom in whose backwaters, locals say, MEND has its bases--villagers gather in a meeting hall and list their grievances. "Poverty is the major problem we are facing here," says Odiki Miebi, a local chief.
True, some of the houses in the village are built of brick and concrete--much more substantial dwellings than the flimsy reed huts that are home to many people in the region. And there is a school, though it has been seriously vandalized, its rooms emptied of furniture donated by Shell. But the village, about 90 minutes from Warri by fast speedboat, is hardly thriving. A water tank installed about a decade ago doesn't work, forcing people to scoop their water from a muddy hole. Worst of all, complains Macaulay Elekute, another elder, there are no local jobs.
Violence in the Delta is nothing new. Tribal conflict has plagued the region for years. Well-armed and organized gangs have been present almost as long as the oil companies, making tens of millions of dollars in "bunkering" operations in which oil is illegally siphoned off (and causing, oil companies have long maintained, most of the local environmental damage as a result). The gangsters have also extorted money by kidnapping oil workers and supplying "security" services in exchange for not attacking installations. In some ways, the situation has been exacerbated since Nigeria's return to civilian rule. According to local lawyers and international human-rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and the London-based Stakeholder Democracy Network, ruling-party politicians have armed local youths--many of them gang members--to ensure that votes go their way. Weapons flooded the region before the 2003 poll, which in many parts of the Delta was less an election than an armed contest. Commonwealth observers found that in the Rivers state and other areas there was "serious violence, intimidation and vote rigging." Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, one of the youth leaders armed by politicians, later turned on Nigeria's security forces and engaged them in gun battles in the streets of Port Harcourt. After Dokubo-Asari called for the breakup of Nigeria last year he was arrested for treason--a charge he denies. Some of his followers are also MEND members, according to activists in Port Harcourt and Onengiya Erekosima, spokesman for the political wing of Dokubo-Asari's organization.
The latest wave of attacks, though, is different. The government dismisses MEND and similar groups as the same criminal gangs responsible for bunkering and past attacks--and there is undoubtedly some crossover of membership. The region is awash with unemployed men; weapons are easy to find, either left over from the 2003 election or smuggled in by boat from neighboring countries. But the latest attacks appear to have been driven more by frustration and an ideology of armed resistance than by thoughts of criminal gain. While it is "very difficult to draw a line between the criminals and the so-called liberators," according to Anyakwee Nsirimovu, a human-rights lawyer in Port Harcourt, "You do now have groups that articulate certain policies and ideas and principles." Those principles--the oil belongs to us; give us development and compensation or get out--have been cemented by the Nigerian government's handling of the crisis. Dokubo-Asari was little known when he began, say activists in Port Harcourt. But when he turned on the government he became a self-styled liberation leader. By jailing him, the government risks making him the martyr he says he is. MEND has demanded his release.
A new ideological coloring to the attacks has been backed by increasingly sophisticated tactics. A car bomb just over two weeks ago, at an oil-truck stop in Warri, was activated by a cell phone and came just days after China's Hu met with Nigeria's leaders. The bomb was "the final warning" before fresh attacks on oil workers, storage facilities, bridges, offices and other "soft, oil-industry targets," a MEND official wrote in an e-mail to news organizations. But it was also, the e-mail said, a message to "the Chinese government and its oil companies to steer well clear of the Niger Delta. The Chinese government by investing in stolen crude places its citizens in our line of fire."
Western companies have grown used to working with the threat of attack. But the dangers are increasing. U.S. oil executive Ricky Wiginton, 51, was shot dead in Port Harcourt by assailants riding a motorbike as he drove to work at drilling-equipment maker Baker Hughes last week, and a day later three oil workers with Italian oil contractor Saipem were kidnapped in the same city but later released. MEND says it was not responsible for either act, but whoever is doing the killing has spooked the oil companies. Shell, which is by the far the largest operator in Nigeria, has been forced to evacuate staff and scale back operations in the past few months. TIME asked representatives of a number of oil companies to comment for this story, but all declined interviews. In an e-mailed statement, a Chevron spokesman said, "We take the security of our people and facilities seriously, and for obvious reasons cannot discuss the measures we implement to mitigate these risks." A Shell spokeswoman pointed to the company's 2004 report entitled People and the Environment, which details the steps the company is taking to clean up environmental damage, train local employees in the Delta, build schools and health centers for local communities, and end the wasteful and destructive "flaring" of gas, as Nigeria's government requires it to do by 2008. But a letter in the report from Shell's local managing director Basil Omiyi conceded that the people of the Niger Delta "see few of the benefits" from oil.
NIGERIA'S FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS been promising to help the Delta for decades. But government bodies have come and gone with little progress. The latest, the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), was set up in 2000 to coordinate development activities in the region. Funded by the oil companies, which are required to give 3% of their local budgets to the NDDC, and by Nigeria's federal government, the Commission has about $235 million to spend every year. "That is peanuts compared to the problems of the area," says the NDDC's head of corporate affairs, Anietie Usen. Projects are often delayed, he says, because the federal government is slow to cough up its share. Grandiose announcements, such as the unveiling by Obasanjo last month of plans to construct a $1.8 billion highway through the region and create 20,000 new jobs in the military, police and state oil companies, do little to appease feelings of neglect. "We have not received money from the federal government since last September. It makes things very difficult," Usen told TIME last month. Many see the NDDC as mere window dressing. In March, a bomb was thrown into the car park of its Port Harcourt office, and plastic explosives were later smuggled into the building in an apparent attempt to blow it up.
Corruption doesn't help. A Nigerian government audit of the oil industry last month showed discrepancies worth hundreds of millions of dollars between what oil companies say they paid the government and what authorities say they received. The federal government says it is tightening up its oversight. And there's the problem of what state governments do with the money they receive from Abuja. Thanks to high oil prices, Rivers, one of the biggest oil-producing states, has seen its revenues increase. But many schools still don't have furniture and roads are crumbling. Rivers' Information Commissioner Magnus Abe says that "there are lots of things we are doing" to develop the state. "Things are changing--whether rapidly depends on how you look at it." A copy of the 2006 state budget obtained by TIME shows Government House overheads increasing from $38.6 million in 2005 to $81.1 million this year, while spending on salaries for state employees went up by less than the rate of inflation. Last year the state government bought two corporate jets (it says one of them is an air ambulance available for rent). Abe says that "it's not nice to suggest" Rivers may be spending too much in certain areas. "I don't think we can fight poverty by going back to live in caves," he says. "We need aircraft for a variety of reasons."
It would help matters if there was an effective opposition to enforce accountability. But in Rivers, Obasanjo's ruling People's Democratic Party fills every seat at both state and local level. Many frustrated citizens see next year's elections as a chance to get rid of the party. But the poll could prove bloody. Human-rights lawyer Nsirimovu says opposition groups have realized "that AK-47s are a necessary ingredient in elections in the Niger Delta," and will try to arm their own supporters in an attempt to counter ruling-party intimidation. "Then things will get really ugly."
MEND, too, is looking toward the election. A militant from the group who spoke with TIME on condition of anonymity said that it would fight efforts by supporters of Obasanjo to change the constitution to allow the President to run for a third term--moves that last week looked as if they may be blocked by Nigerian lawmakers. But even if the war that Dokubo-Asari and others have threatened never comes to pass, the violence could get bad enough to force oil companies to close down more of their land-based installations and concentrate production offshore.
The militants' campaign has widespread local support. One of the most popular new songs in the Delta describes a police raid on a house. A young man tells the police that he won't go with them to the station and warns: "If you fire [shoot at] me, I fire you." "There is overwhelming community sympathy for what they are doing," says Ledum Mitee, a human-rights campaigner in Port Harcourt, who describes the Delta's problems as "a crisis of frustration," which he hopes can be solved without violence. "[The militants] are seen as people who can stand up to the oppressors."
Mitee heads the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), the group founded by Saro-Wiwa. In January, he was asked to negotiate the release of the first hostages taken by mend. When Mitee arrived at the camp where the hostages were being held, he was shocked. "I consider myself a person who can speak on these issues--our problems and protests," he says. "But getting there and seeing 200 to 300 young men in uniforms, machines guns, rocket launchers and ammunition"--Mitee moves his hands through the air in front of him making the shape of a heaping mound of ordnance--"I said, 'God, so we have come to this.'"
[PULLQUOTE]
"There used to be clashes and other problems, but in the past five or six months things have gotten much more serious." --MANOUCHEHR TAKIN, energy analyst
"The Delta's problem is a crisis of frustration. The militants are seen as people who can stand up to the oppressors." --LEDUM MITEE, human-rights activist
See also additional image(s) in Cover Description file and Table of Contents of same issue.
  
Copyright (c) Time inc.,2006. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be duplicated or redisseminated without permission. | Simon Robinson/Oporoza |   
[SUNDAY ALAMBA--AP]; LINE OF DEATH | Pipelines in Nigeria are often sabotaged. A blast outside Lagos last week, right, killed more than 150; PHOTO |    | [TIM A. HETHERINGTON--PANOS (2)]; ON THE ATTACK | Members of militant group MEND carry a white flag to signify war, not surrender, left. They say they want locals to profit from the oil, not just suffer its pollution, above; TWO PHOTOS |    | [TIM A. HETHERINGTON--PANOS]; MAKING A LIVING | A palm-nut farmer works close to an oil and gas terminal; locals say they rarely benefit from the wealth created by oil; PHOTO |    | [NIGERIA | Lagos | Port Harcourt | Abuja | Niger Delta | Warri | Oporoza | Gulf of Guinea]; MAP |   
Document TMAT000020060817e25m0002k

CHRONOLOGY-Chinese-African deals
485 words

22 May 2006

08:30 AM

Reuters News

LBA

English

(c) 2006 Reuters Limited
May 22 (Reuters) - China will give Nigeria a $1 billion loan to fix its dilapidated railways, Xinhua news agency said on Monday, in another sign of China's growing economic sway across Africa.
Trade links between fast-growing economic powerhouse China and Africa have taken a leap forward since 2004, when President Hu Jintao announced a new drive to strengthen relations with the energy and mineral-rich continent.
Here are some of the major deals of the last two years:
Jan/Feb 2004 - Total Gabon signs a contract with China's Sinopec under which Gabonese crude oil will be sold to China for the first time.
June 2004 - Chinese Vice-President Zeng Qinghong tours Tunisia, Togo, Benin and South Africa. Zeng's visit to South Africa was marked by agreements including a deal opening the way for the export of South African citrus to the Chinese market and letters of intent for two big trade and investment projects.
November 2004 - China's biggest telecoms equipment maker, Huawei Technologies, wins a series of contracts in Africa worth more than $400 million. Huawei says the contracts came from Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria.
January 2005 - Angola says it plans to use a $2 billion loan from China to repair its infrastructure.
July 2005 - China and Nigeria sign a $800 million crude oil sale deal between Petrochina International and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to supply 30,000 barrels of crude per day to China.
Jan 2006 - China's top offshore oil producer, CNOOC Ltd., agrees to pay $2.3 billion for a stake in a Nigerian oil and gas field, its largest ever overseas acquisition.
March 2006 - China agrees to add another $1 billion to its oil-backed loan to Angola.
April 2006 - Algeria awards contracts estimated at $7 billion to Japanese and Chinese consortiums to build parts of a 1,300 km (810 mile) highway running from Tunisia to Morocco.
April 2006 - Hu wraps up an Africa tour by concluding an offshore exploration deal with Kenya. The pact allows China's state-controlled CNOOC Ltd to explore in six blocks covering 115,343 sq km in the north and south of Kenya.
-- The China-Kenya deal came two days after Beijing struck a $4 billion deal for drilling licences in Nigeria, including grants for economic and technical cooperation, anti-malarial medicine and rice.
May 2006 - China's Export-Import Bank (Eximbank) announces it will invest $2.3 billion in the construction of a new Mepanda Nkua dam and hydroelectric plant, on the Zambezi river, in Mozambique.
May 2006 - China announces a deal which will give a concessional loan of $1 billion to Nigeria to repair it's dilapidated railways. Nigeria will come up with matching funds.
CHINA-AFRICA-TRADE (CHRONOLOGY)|LANGEN|ABX|AFA|CSA|LBY|RWSA|RWS|REULB|GNS|AFN|Z|ABN|E|RBN|D|RNP|DNP|PCO|SXNA
Document LBA0000020060522e25m0016n

How Oil Fuels Nigeria's Politics
7,038 words

18 May 2006

NPR: Talk of the Nation

TOTN

English

Copyright ©2004 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission. For further information, please contact NPR's Permissions Coordinator at [phone].
MICHEL MARTIN, host:
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Michel Martin in Washington. Neal Conan is on assignment.
It may have been a paragraph in your hometown newspaper, a couple of seconds on the news last week. A pipeline explosion near Lagos, Nigeria killed as many as 200 people, many of whom were siphoning gas from industrial pipelines into their own cans and bottles. Most of the people were so badly burned, authorities delivered them into a common grave. They said the families wouldn't be able to recognize them anyway.
It was a horrific incident, but it was by no means, the first. Over the last eight years, nearly 2,000 people have been killed in Nigeria, when the gas they were siphoning off industrial pipelines caught fire. The first question, of course, is why? Why would people in oil-rich countries risk so much for a few buckets of oil?
But the next question is for the rest of us. What does this have to do with the U.S.? Well, Nigeria is the fifth largest supplier of oil to the U.S., and some administration officials would like that relationship to grow, in order to lessen U.S. reliance on the Middle East. But what would that mean? Does more oil mean more U.S. involvement in insuring social justice and good government? Should it?
Today, we will take a close look at oil and politics in Nigeria. We will speak with Nigeria's Minister of