The gunfire exchange last Wednesday, between Nigeria’s state security forces and militants holding seven expatriate oil workers, marked a watershed in the militant-government confrontation in the marshes of the Niger Delta.
By the time the smoke cleared, four people lay dead; two of them part of the kidnappers group, one a Nigerian soldier and, the shame of it all, one Briton who was part of the very seven the operation was meant to save.
But the encounter was significant in the sense that it was the first time that the Nigerian government would attempt to re-capture hostages by force.
Until last Wednesday the pattern was familiar: Armed men attack a fixed oil installation, vessel or whatever. They capture workers, mostly without resistance. When there’s resistance, the Nigerian forces, usually surprised, get mowed. Then hostages are taken. And there begins a negotiation for their release. The story in peppersoup bars everywhere from Sapele to Eket is that millions of naira exchange hands.
So, even while the public crowed that the government- local, state or federal-wasn’t doing enough to develop the area, a whole lot of people had a moral dilemma as to whether the money from state coffers should be going to a growing cast of armed men who were singing less about resource control and environmental degradation and threatening more to kill white men they had captured if they didn’t get paid. Because, mark it, whatever was paid, either by oil company, or government, usually marked up the cost of Joint Venture operations.
And the more the money got paid, the more the incentive to attack and hold more people hostage.
It’s instructive that the only time the army attacked militants carrying hostages, the story was that the militants were returning the hostages. So it was shooting from the back, so to say. That campaign also led to the death of one oil worker.
So what happens after Wednesday?
The last kidnap group lost two of its men. Does it increase the stakes in kidnapping to such a height that kidnapping becomes a hard-to-go area?
Or will militants become more emboldened, acquire superior firepower and get ready?
Will oil companies prefer Nigerian government carrying out more raids like this whenever their workers are captured? Or would they put the pressure on government to settle things more peacefully?
Can the militants of the Niger Delta take on the might of the Nigerian army and wage a drawn out war in which no one really wins?
A lot depends on, (let’s borrow a phrase from Pat Utomi), elite consensus.
African governments, as a rule, don’t “settle” civil wars quickly. Check out Sierra Leone, DRC, Uganda (the Lord’s Resistance Army), Liberia and Angola. This is primarily because government troops are always as incompetent and as poorly equipped as the governments themselves. Plus, the generals as well as the rebel top rank, easily forget what the purpose of the war was in the first place. If the war opens the way to export illicit diamonds, the generals on both sides start to bomb villages that have those resources and capture them, not as new front to repel the enemy, but to just simply grow rich. Alternatively, you capture an easy town in order to make the point that you’re relevant. But in most cases, the wars come to an impasse because neither side could will it to end.
Nigeria was an exception, not because the federal army had superior military power (there is no lack of foreign interest willing to supply arms to any rebel army), but because there is always an elite consensus as to when some extreme ailment in the polity ought to stop. Some people would say that there is the matter of Nigerians being unlike other Africans; we don’t like being used by other people to die.
Is this what would likely play out here; that militants would start saying: Look: I don’t want to die?.
Anyone who has read Ahmed Yerima’s award winning play Hard Ground, (loosely based on stories related by people familiar with the situation), about a family discussion around the militancy in the creeks, would see that the militancy in the region has created tensions at the family level. That is: the homes where those youths come out of are not always united about the desirablity of their children going out to kidnap people.
The course of the situation in the Niger Delta would be determined, not by Government developing the place, but by a mix of elite consensus, the Nigerian propensity to want to get over any war quickly, which in itself is derived from our well documented zest for life.
Source: a reporter for Africa Oil+Gas Report