FOR the first time since the escalation of hostilities in the Niger Delta, the military Joint Task Force in the region has thrown its doors open for newsmen to visit some battle grounds in the area.
A report in the September 23, 2008 edition of the Financial Times of London, stated that its team was led on a guided tour of some of the places.
The brigadier-general in command in Rivers State, Sarkin-Yaki Bello, said he had studied river campaigns from the 19th-century Seminole wars fought by the US army against native Americans in Florida to the cocaine-fuelled insurgency in Colombia, but he would need to employ some imaginative officers to match Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta’s purple prose.
One of the facilitators said to be a paratroop Captain, Uche Nnabuihe, was described as a soldier who had seen bad and expected worse.
He was stationed in a remote creek in the region, guarding an oil-rig belonging to the US energy giant, Chevron.
He reportedly ordered his platoon to fill sandbags to reinforce the two-storey houseboat the company provide.
He recounted gleefully how his outpost fought off an attack a few nights before by suspected militants, who “roared out of the darkness in seven speedboats to strafe their position with gunfire and rockets.
“We are good to go. My boys are rugged,” he told the Financial Times, as the sun began to set over the wall of jungle across the water.
Then he shouted, “All the way airborne!” And they yelled a war cry of: “Ahua! Ahua! Ahua!”
A lieutenant in charge of the defences, Suraj Lawal, is dismissive of his foes.
”Let everybody just relax their mind. It‘s just their propaganda, they exaggerate everything,” he said. ”With the way we hit them I believe they will rethink and lay down their arms.”
The FT report observed that Nigeria‘s army rarely opened its positions to newsmen, but that officers were so frustrated with the Internet publicity campaign waged by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.
Therefore, the JTF decided to invite the FT to inspect the forces defending Nigeria‘s oil production.
According to the report, the trip revealed less about the truth of conflicting claims on casualties than it did about the scale of the task the military faces in hunting down the 2,000-3,000 gunmen it believed were active in Rivers State alone.
It noted that viewed from a helicopter, the terrain looked like the ideal place to film a Hollywood re-make of the Vietnam war: swamps dotted with the spidery root systems of half-submerged mangroves.
“As the helicopter comes into land at the first stop-off – a facility run by Royal Dutch Shell – the virtually deserted complex feels distinctly eerie.
“All non-essential staff have been evacuated and only a few workers in orange boiler suits had remained since an attack a few days earlier,” it noted.
However, the report said it was difficult to verify independently anything the Nigerian army said in the Niger Delta – where security forces had detained a number of foreign journalists who had attempted to visit the creeks this year.
The military‘s sudden willingness to allow soldiers to act as spokesmen is in some respects a testament to the success of the propaganda war waged by its opponents.
MEND had driven the news agenda by using a free Yahoo e-mail account to post claims of attacks shortly after they are carried out.
Even threats to attack have routinely pushed up oil prices.
“We are like mosquitoes, and come out only at night to suck the blood from the oil majors,” Mend said in a recent e-mail to the FT.
MEND often peppers its statements with calls for a fairer share of Nigeria‘s oil wealth for the Niger Delta.
But Gen. Bello said such claims masked the group‘s true nature as what he described as a criminal racket based on the industrial-scale stealing of crude.
Staring at the oil-rig rearing out of the channel, Captain Nnabuihe said he had asked Chevron to donate spotlights so that his men could see where to shoot.
“They keep promising,” he said. “But we‘ve not seen the promise.”