Inside the militants colony

It was 4.38am in Egbema- Aghalabri in the Niger Delta creeks. Elsewhere in Nigerian villages, it was still dark with the first cockcrow heralding the dawn of a new day. But not here in this pristine community where gas flares made no difference between day and night.

Stucked with this artificial daylight, the crows of cocks now belonged to a distant past. Each time children were told that cocks used to make this clockwork noises in the mornings, they naturally believed their parents were treating them to another folktale.

Guided by a table clock, Yeebo Femene, about one hour later, knew when to open the coop and the front door of his thatch house to let the chickens out. Next, he rinsed his mouth with water, in the process mouthing some prayers. A few minutes later his wife and six children came out of their sleeping places. Yeebo began to say something. He was shouting. This wife gave responses to what he was saying. She too was also shouting. That was the only way they could hear each other.

With oil-pipelines criss-crossing everywhere and making so much noise, shouting was the only way for families to get along. Parents had to shout for their kids to hear their instructions. Even at the community�s primary school, teachers too had to shout all day for the pupils to make something out of lessons.

Wearing anxious faces, Yeeboh and his wife were discussing a different kind of noise. Last night, a military helicopter had whizzed past, several times across Egbema-Aghalabri and its environs. By the time morning came proper, most families were outside their homes, discussing the same matter.

Barely sixteen hours ago, the reporter had arrived the Egbema village in Ekeremor local government area of Bayelsa State. It had taken nine weeks for Yeeboh�s half-brother in Yenagoa to arrange the visit which main purpose was an undercover report of militant activities, military crackdown on villages and a spiral of violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta. With one hostage crisis after another, kidnapping had become a cottage industry forged by splinter armed groups, bomb explosion reprisal actions, crude oil piracy, arms trafficking and myriad illegal activities both in the complex creeks and the volatile waters of Gulf of Guinea.

Five days earlier, a militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) announced it intended to keep four foreign hostages snatched the previous week from an oil export terminal until after Christmas. The group had captured three Italians and a Lebanese during a raid at the terminal of the Nigerian Agip oil company at Twon-Brass, Bayelsa State. In one of their several kidnaps of foreign oil workers, the group had held two Americans and a Briton for five weeks.

With conflicting ideas over whereabouts of the kidnapped expatriates, experiences from the past supported conjecturers that even when kidnappings took place in Rivers State, the hostages could be moved outside the territory to Bayelsa or Delta state. Indeed, that theory was not lost on the anxious villagers as both men and women huddled together to debate the movement of the military helicopter which they suspected was on recognizance mission.

Saturday Sun gathered that whenever a militant group took hostages, the one place that quickly figured in the calculations of military and security chiefs was the Ekeremor region of Bayelsa State. Made up of nine of the most restive Ijaw clans, the Ekeremor Kingdom was not only considered the capital of militant activities, it was the seat of the legendary Egbesu shrine where all fighters must come to receive spiritual blessings and partake in magical baths believed to fortify them against bullets from government soldiers.

The Egbema-Aghalabri village, over which the military helicopter had flown last night, was just one of the over hundred communities in Ekeremor Kingdom. On the reporter�s journey to the place, it had been gathered that the Boloutoru river was the natural boundary between Bayelsa and Delta State. In places like Beautiful Gate in Torugbene, the river got so narrow that it was possible for someone in Bayelsa to wink at his neighbour in Delta State. Actually, the Ekeremor Kingdom stretched to Ekogbene in Burutu local government area of Delta State. All the nine Ekeremor clans had oil wells.

Leaning on the doorpost of his host�s homestead, the reporter watched from a respectful distance as the villages discussed the event of the night. They viewed the helicopter flight as a bad omen. Unlike the previous cases of kidnappings when hostages were left off after ransoms were believed to had been paid, the latest incident was different.

The hostage-takers had said it did not want money for the captives but would only release them if government met some of its demands. These were the release of the leader of Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPVF), Mujahid Dokunbo-Asari and former governor of Bayelsa State, Diepreye Alameyesiegha, compensation to villages for oil spills, transfer of control resources from the federal government to local communities and reparation for 50 years of �enslavement� by the oil industry.
With a remote chance of government yielding to the kidnappers� damand, the anxiety in the Ekeremor region could only be palpable. Two weeks earlier, a foreign hostage, David Hunt, had been killed during a bungled operation by the Nigerian Navy to free some captives. A soldiers was also killed in the operation killed in the operation.

Following this first attempt to adopt force to free hostage in the Niger Delta, the militants had responded not only with more abductions but added a rather alarming twist tot he crisis with two separate car bomb explosions rocking the facilities of two oil conglomerates, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) and Agip Oil Company. As Yeebo�s table clock ticked without being heard, the assembled villagers were not unmindful of reprisal actions for long hanging over their heads like the sword of Damascule. With embarrassing killings of soldiers and seizure of military gunbouts by militants, the Army had said it was restraining its troops in the Niger Delta. The villagers could never be in doubt what the government soldiers were capable of doing. The genocide in Odi, Odioma and Umuchem communities were still fresh in the minds.

Later in the morning, Yeebo and his wife came into the house of discuss breakfast, especially for the guest. With the droning pipelines, it was impossible to have private discussions without being heard by a visitor. However, that was the least of the problems of this household.
It was not until Mrs. Femene began to co-ordinate the activities of the day that the abject want and deprivations in the Niger Delta began to announce their presence, one after the other. The first was water, or the lack of it.

Playing the good hostess, Yeebo�s wife pointed out to the reporter where he could find some of the things he would need. The bathroom was the sprawling river than ran parallel to the village. There also was the toilet. She offered a chewing stick but the reporter had come with a toothbrush and toothpaste. Armed with these, and with a towel draped around his neck, the visitor marched off towards the river. In his wake came two of the Femene�s children, carrying dirty dishes and cooking pots.

For a first-time visitor, it was a bit difficult taking in all that were going on by the river, a little over 100 meters from the homestead. Standing bewildered by a wooden jetty, the reporter�s first preoccupation was maintaining his balance on the shaky platform as passengers awaiting boats to other communities jostled for space.

Having finally thought it wise to sit on the wet platform, the reporter�s senses were repulsed by the activities going on at the lowest rung of the jetty. Squatting over the water, in the full glare of everybody, were men, young and old, defecating into the river. There was no coverings to provide privacy and dignity, as civilization would demand for such human necessities.

However, in the circumstances of the fate which these villagers had to grapple with, dignity could not be the most overriding needs. A few inches away from the human waste, another group of men were having their morning bath. Still in the same water, a little to the right, another set of villages were filling their water pots and jerrycans.

If for a moment the reporter thought that what were going on in the water were aberrations, more and more people, including an elderly man with a transistor radio, turned up to take over spaces vacated by the first group. While some came solely to answer the call of nature or to wash their bodies or fetch drinking water, other did more than one thing before leaving the river. A little away from the men, the Femene kids were doing their morning chores, using the same water to wash the plates and pots. Beside them, some women were busy doing their laundry inside rickety canoes. When they were through, they had their bath toples, barely covering their loins with aging wrappers.

When the boat arrived the jetty, which was the equivalent of a bus stop, none of the passengers, from other villages already inside the boat, recoiled at the spectacle that welcome them. Obviously it was a way of life. Still squatting over the water, the elderly man with the transistor radio still found it convenient to wave at a passenger inside the boat while using the other hand to cup water and wash his buttocks.
Finally the jetty and the water and the canoes were all deserted.

The Femene kids had since returned home. Save for a little girl at play, using a basin to catch some tadpoles, the reporter was alone. The water before him was brown in colour and bore among other things, floating particles of household refuse which people had continually deposited into it. Just as coloured and polluted as Lagos flood water, the reporter could only stare at it. There was no way to begin a dialogue. It was unthinkable to put a leg in, to say nothing of dipping in the toothbrush. In defeat, the reporter retreated down the gang-plank and headed back to the homestead.

Back in the thatch house, Mrs. Femene was feeding her four-month-old baby with water brought back by her kids with the cooking pots. The baby was giggling. At the beginning of the journey, the reporter had only been told that �pure water� in the Niger Delta was expensive and cost as much as N10 or N15 a sachet as against N5 outside the oil-rich region. In this community, sachet water was a rare commodity.

Mrs. Femene was troubled by the visitor�s inability to take his bath. She said that whenever her family could afford it, she bought alum to discolour the water, which she then boiled and filtered with white cloth. She would love to give this �purified� water to her baby always but could not afford to do so sometimes.

Yeeboo summarized the water crisis in the Niger Delta thus: �We have water but we don�t have water.� He explained that because of oil contamination and what some people had blamed as the gas content of the soil and possibly shoddy jobs done by corrupt contractors, not one of the many boreholes so far sunk in the region was bringing out good water. Another option of harvesting rain water was said to had been routinely thwarted by gas flares which produced sulphuric acid mists, damaged plant and animals and turned rain water into acid rain.

The father of six revealed that some of the militant attacks in the Niger Delta were provoked by water problem. He fumed: �I can tell you that water is a big issue here. It is even better in this village. If you go to the salt water villages, water is costlier than kerosene. If you go to areas like Forcados, Ogulagha and Izefu, water is like gold and those who have it drink it little by little. To tell you what I mean, oil workers in our community get regular supply of fresh water in bottles. This is like cash around here and many oil workers have won the hearts of many of our young girls simply by giving them bottled water. Our daughters are enticed with bottled water. Soon, they get pregnant and we are nt happy about it.�

The attack over drinking water that Yeebo talked about occurred in October when anygry militants ambushed barges and boats carrying supplies of water, fuel and other materials to Shell facilities in the Cawthorne Creek Channel. When the militants, arrived in speed boats, they opened fire on the soldiers escorting the barges, sank the vessels and left off. Military authorities would admit that five soldiers were killed in the attack.

Unable to brush his teeth and still unable to swallow his sour saliva, the reporter devised an ingenious way of fighting mouth odour: he gargled with ogogoro, a local gin, which was not in short supply in the community. After a breakfast of Kpukpuru, processed tapioca, palmwine was the only reasonable alternative to water.

A little after midday, Saturday Sun took a walk around the community. Nearer the site of gas flaring, the heat was intense. Yeebo had said that the gas flame had never been shut off. When the reporter picked up the soil, it was sticky with oil. The air was dry and the atmosphere was suffocating. It took about an hour to realize it but when the visitor took a hard look at his sleeveless hands, he almost jumped: a good number of the hairs on his skin had cinged off. It was difficult to imagine but when the reporter dashed back to the hous, he made it a duty to watch Yeebo�s hands and legs closely. He had lost all the hairs on those part of his body.

There was no way of confirming another fears which was building in the visitor�s mind. Yesterday, when Yeebo welcomed his guest with an embrace, upon arrival at the jetty, the reporter had been stung with a whiff of smoked rabbit. Even now, it was difficult to say it everyone, including the visitor, smelt the same way.

As kids were wont, the Femene children flocked around the visitor. They had no clue to the environmental problems in their community. They appeared only troubled by the fact that they had never seen a television set in their life. Neither a motor car. Biaebi, the oldest, was fourteen years old and still in primary school. Her mother griped that learning had been irregular. Unable to cope with the harsh conditions of the creek, not a few teachers posted to the community had gone AWOL, never to return after their first salaries. Those sticking it out, including the headmasters, merely put up appearances, some as little as ten days in a month. Mrs. Femene lamented that the community could not even protest the teachers� conducts, lest should they all walk away.

The negotiator
After a dinner of starch and banga soup, Yeebo took Saturday Sun to the home of a man called Ebikayeibo (other names withheld), whom his half-brother in Yenagoa had suggested the reporter spoke to. A retired customs officer who left service in 1988, the obviously influential man was said to had successfully mediated hostage negotiations. He refused to confirm it.

Telling the visitor why the crisis in the creeks may never end, Ebikayeibo who originally was from a village called Agalaoweigbene pointed out that before oil was discovered by Royal Dutch Shell near the village of Oloibiri in 1956, the Niger Delta region had the most extensive lowland tropical and fresh water forests, acquatic ecosystems and biodiversity in West Africa.

The people, he said, cultivated rice, sugarcane, yams, plantain, cassava, oil palm and timber. �All these are gone because of pollution. In fact, the US Department of Energy estimates that since 1960, over 4,000 oil spills discharging more than two million barrels of crude have occurred in the Niger Delta. Pollution has affected our creeks and streams, poisoned our water supply and sources of livelihood. There are no more catches in the nets of our fishermen. Old mothers plough but get no harvest from destroyed farmlands. Our daughters are infected with HIV by oil workers. So for the affected people, all these are declarations of war.�

Speaking on casualties suffered by government soldiers in the creek, the retired customs officer said that the creeks would always know its owners. �If you understand the creek, it can take you from here to Cameroun or Benin Republic or Ghana or Gabon. You don�t have the waterways clearly defined on our maps because they have not been navigated. But the natives know the creeks like the back of their hands, so it is difficult to beat someone in his own game. The creeks have their own natural security arrangements and obstacles and you can run into a dangerous groove. It would be difficult for even the best trained amphibious fighter to beat these boys to their game. It is like what happened to the Americans in Vietnam. With all the sophisticated weapons they had, they didn�t understand the terrain as did the Vietnamese so the peasants made the superpower looked stupid. I ask you, how many gunboats have our boys seized. They Army won�t admit casualty figures.�

Women Freedom fighters
Early the following morning the reporter was at the jetty, exploring ways of traveling to a colony called Akran-Koko in Delta State where a new warlord called Governor Ogbongbolo had emerged in the salt water mangrove area.

Early this year, militants in the Niger Delta formed what they called the Joint Revolutionary Council (JRC), comprising groups like MEND, NDPVF and The Martyrs Brigade. While the leadership of these groups are all self-styled revolutionaries, Governor Ogbongbolo is clearly setting himself apart with his style of recruiting women as freedom fighters. His group in early December prevented the resumption of gas supply by the Nigerian Gas Company (NGC) the nation�s electricity company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

The militants prevented the NGC from assessing and effecting repairs on its pipeline vandalized in Okerenkoko in Delta State. Also trapped by the action of Ogbongbolo�s men were 500,000 barrels of crude oil production shut in as a result of hostile action. The gas shut had also led to drop in electricity supply from over 3,200 megawatts to less than 2,000 MW.

As Saturday Sun discovered, traveling in Niger Delta depended largely on when the boat arrived. In some communities it was once a day; in some others too it was every four market days. This meant that the reporter followed the boat to a place called Agoro.

Yeebo had tutored that �if you don�t time the movement of the boats you would be stranded with all the money in the world.� As it turned out there was only one boat to Agoro, ran by a perpetually tipsy operator who delighted in switching the engine off and watching with folded arms as the waves tossed the boat about.

Among all the communities in Niger Delta, Agoro strod out for two things. It was the only place where the natives still practice trade by barter. Another was that nobody in the entire community could afford to wear white. The water was so polluted that it could only make a dirty white cloth dirtier.
The Bolou-tori river leading to Agoro was not that turbulent but after Agoro, at a place called Ageh, it began to empty its water into the Atlantic.

A special arrangment had to be made for the reporter to get passage to Ogbongbolo�s colony. The journey could only be facilitated by �licenced� fishermen who were the only people permitted to come close. Paying an exhorbitant fee was not so much a deferent as the giant mosquitoes and sandflies swarming the creek. A curious remedy was offered. In the house of the fisherman who went by the name, �Donation�, a jar was brought out. It was crude oil. The reporter was told that was the only repellant for vicious insects of the creeks. Following their examples, the reporter applied the dark viscous liquid on his arms, legs, shoulders and face. At a point, doubt began to set in if these men were actually fishermen. They were.

The boat traveled almost all night. Donation who also was a hunter, explained that because of pollution from oil activities, there were no green trees anymore and that has pushed most animals and birds to migrate to cameroun.

For the same reasons, he said that the only place to get fist was towards the Atlantic and only Ogbongbolo could okay passage to fishermen. Sailing without lights, the fishermen still found their ways. At a place, they pointed out where the Nigerian Navy had lost four boats to the militant group. Other significant points were pointed which the reporter could hardly capture in the night. There was fears of running into a military patrol boat, but no incidence was recorded till the wee hours of the next day.

The Egbesu shrine
The last spot visited by Saturday Sun in the Niger Delta was Ekeremor town, the spiritual headquarters of the Egbesu shrine. At the palace of the paramount ruler, Amananao-Wei of Ekeremor XVIII, Ogurubebekenekene-Kuro-Agbe, the reporter was told that the people did not support hostage-taking.
The Royal father said: �Some of the boys doing these things are not from Ekeremor Kingdom. They are only giving us a bad name. The boys that destroyed the Benesiede flowstations came from Delta State. They even burnt donw our markets. But our hands are tied because government has never respected any agreement reached with our people.

The Egbesu shrine was pointed out to the reporter who was told that no stranger was allowed in. Unknown to the reporter, he had been placed on technical detention. Suspicious of his mission, the villagers said there was no boat to the leave the community. Boats were passing and going but nobody flagged them down. The only way out was to swim. Unknown to him, the delay tactics was employed while an emissary was sent to another village to check out his story.