Soldiers in attack helicopters battled speedboats full of heavily armed fighters for control of key oil installations. Seven foreigners were snatched from within the barbed wire topped walls of a residential compound. Militants claimed dozens of soldiers were killed and a community razed.
Even by the standards of Nigeria’s volatile Delta region, it has been a bloody four days.
“There is no rule of law here. The AK47 rules,” says Anyakwee Nsirimovu, a human rights lawyer based in southern Rivers state, which has been worst hit by the violence.
Few believe that this week’s attacks, which come after a month of relative calm, are linked to a specific timetable or the work of a single group.
Instead, Nsirimovu says, they are the result of general lawlessness, bred by a government that buys off potential threats but has done almost nothing to develop a poverty-stricken region filled with simmering resentment.
“The government is doing nothing to develop the country, so the principle of self-help has set in. And people are helping themselves with guns,” said Nsirimovu.
No one group in charge of militants and gangs
The private security contractor to a major oil company, who was not authorized by his employers to speak to the media, said that the bewildering array of demands — for cash, development projects, the freedom of imprisoned leaders — left companies with a sense of chaos.
“The scary thing is, that there is no one person in charge of these (fighters). You have political guys, you have criminals, and every shade in between,” he said.
Not even the Delta’s most sophisticated and best armed group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, is in control.
MEND crippled the oil industry with a series of kidnappings and bombings earlier this year, cutting production in Africa’s largest oil exporter by around a quarter.
The group denied responsibility for what it calls “botched robberies” on several oil convoys this week, saying it would only send out fighters to protect civilians from military reprisals.
“We are being forced act ahead of our planned major strike on the Nigerian oil industry,” it said in an e-mail statement.
Maj. Sagir Musa, a spokesman for the Nigerian army, said the military did not know who was responsible for the attacks.
MEND says that government forces attacked a civilian settlement on Thursday. Government forces in the Niger Delta did not immediately comment.
Government crackdowns ineffective
Government forces have a history of reprisals against civilians, often sparking deadly revenge attacks.
The government has announced several crackdowns on the violence, and pledged to address the economic grievances believed to be fueling the violence. But the people of the delta have seen many promises of development go unfulfilled, and the military response does not appear to be working.
The number of active fighters is relatively small compared to Nigeria’s population of 130 million. But the militants have an easy target in the oil industry’s network of pipes spread out over a wetland the size of Connecticut.
The Nigerian military, lacking local knowledge and equipment, struggles to avoid ambushes in the mangrove swamps, where the populist rhetoric of the militants have won them sympathy.
Corruption reigns among contractors, activists and thugs
Most of the Delta’s people long for regular light and clean water. In the absence of government aid, they turn to oil companies as surrogate providers. But oil-company sponsored development projects often fail, due to corrupt contractors or broken promises, leaving communities bitter.
The gangs making passionate demands for social change don’t always follow through, either.
Antony Goldman, a London-based oil analyst, says the militants sometimes find themselves fighting for the very corrupt politicians they denounce. Many well-established militant leaders have received semiofficial posts in government or been rewarded with “security contracts” by major oil companies, says Nsirimovu.
Many of the current fighters say they were initially armed by politicians using them as hired thugs to intimidate opponents, a charge backed up by human rights groups but denied by the politicians.
Now that President Olusegun Obasanjo and the majority of his 36 governors have served the constitutional limit of two terms, the field is wide open for anyone who seeks to take control of oil revenues next year.
“A governor in the Delta is sitting on roughly $1.5 billion a year with precious little oversight,” Goldman said. It’s a lot of money in a country where the average wage is less than $2 (about euro1.50) a day. “Politics is so expensive in Nigeria and the stakes are so high, people will do anything to make themselves relevant to the process.”
If the polls go ahead, it will be the first time an elected civilian government will hand over power to another since the country became independent from Britain in 1960. But despite the President’s public promise to hold a peaceful election, after this week few in the Delta are holding their breath.
Politics just adds to a volatile mix.
“When you look at the pattern of violence over the last few months, it’s not simply a matter of government forces against militants. There is a gray area in between, of government, private security companies, politicians, criminals and militants. It’s a sliding scale. There’s a lot of flexibility in the Nigerian situation, groups that oppose each other one day may next day be on the same side,” Goldman said.