THE LINGERING CRISIS IN NIGERIA'S NIGER DELTA AND SUGGESTIONS FOR A PEACEFUL RESOLUTION
March 2000

Introduction

In November 1999, exactly four years after the Ogoni leader and environmental campaigner Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian military junta, the town of Odi in the Niger Delta was burnt down by soldiers on the orders of the country's newly elected President, Olusegun Obasanjo. Several hundred people, including women and children, were killed in the streets as they tried to escape from their burning houses. Restive youths, protesting the neglect of the community after four decades of oil exploitation in the area by western multinational oil companies in collaboration with the government, had murdered twelve policemen sent to restore order in the town the previous week. President Obasanjo, rather than send special forces to flush out the youths, despatched troops commanded by an army colonel, who with a full complement of artillery, bombarded Odi, murdered hundreds, and subsequently torched the town.
The destruction of Odi by Nigeria's democratic government, elected only in May 1999, is not only symptomatic of the crisis that has gripped the country's oil-rich Niger Delta since the late eighties, it is also a clear indication that the brutality and heavy-handedness with which previous regimes dealt with legitimate political dissent is still very much a feature of governance in this crisis-ridden nation. It also points to the continuing strategic importance of the Niger Delta in the economy and politics of Nigeria, which derives over 95 per cent of its external revenue from oil receipts. Indeed, the civil war that rocked the country from 1967-70 was a struggle between the breakaway Eastern Region and the Federal Government, an uneasy alliance between the Northern and Western regions of the country, for the control of the oil fields in the Delta.
Oil was first struck in Oloibiri, an Ijaw village in the Niger Delta, by Shell (then Shell-BP) in May 1956. Commercial exploitation began two years later. Half of the revenue was given to the Eastern Regional government of which the provinces and communities of the Niger Delta were part, and the rest was appropriated by the Federal Government under a fiscal arrangement based partly on the principle of derivation. It is of significance, however, that in 1957, a year before the production of oil in their area commenced, the communities of the Niger Delta and several other 'minority' ethnic groups in the country, had complained to the Willink Commission set up to enquire into their fears as negotiations began for a constitutional framework with which the country would be granted independence from Britain, that they were being neglected by the regional and central government in the allocation of social amenities and political appointments. The Willink Commission declined to create a separate state for the ethnic minority groups in the Eastern Region as their leaders demanded, but their protests were later to give birth to the Niger Delta Development Board (NNDB), a special agency established by the Federal Government to tackle the developmental needs of the area because of the peculiar harshness of the terrain they inhabited.
The military coups of 1966 and the civil war that followed in their wake put an end to whatever dreams and aspirations that the NNDB had to impact positively on the lives of these impoverished people, and ushered in a political and fiscal regime that not only transferred the bulk of the oil income to the victorious Federal Government, but also nationalised by decree, the land and mineral resources of the communities of the Niger Delta without consulting them. It is worthy of note that General Yakubu Gowon, the Head of State at the time, enacted the Petroleum Decree effecting this transfer in 1969 when his troops had taken control of the strategic oil terminal town of Bonny, and were pressing on their advantage to force an unconditional surrender on Biafra.
The civil war was fundamentally an oil war, and the victor was quick to take control of the booty. Scant regard was given to the people on whose land the oil was derived, and all through the oil boom years lasting to 1980, they were conspicuous in their absence when it came to allocating infrastructure and sundry social amenities. Indeed, one of General Gowon's key advisers in the Federal Civil Service, Mr Phillip Asiodu, made the cynical remark that the people of the Niger Delta could do nothing to change this state of affairs because they were numerically insignificant in the Nigerian scheme of things. Little wonder then that when the storm broke in 1990 with the advent of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), it took everybody, including Nigeria's military government, completely by surprise.
The Present Struggle for Social and Environmental Justice in the Niger Delta
When the then Nigerian Head of State, General Ibrahim Babangida established yet another development agency, OMPADEC, for the benefit of the Niger Delta in 1992, he was, in a manner of speaking, trying to nip the brewing storm in the bud. But OMPADEC is the classic case of locking the gate when the horse had already bolted. Umuechem, an oil-producing community in the Niger Delta had been flattened and several people killed by anti-riot police on Babangida's orders in October 1989. Youths in the town had petitioned Shell, which had been mining oil in the community for over twenty years, to assist them in providing social amenities for the people. They were also unhappy because the company had subjected the environment to devastation, spilling oil and burning production associated gas in its flow stations recklessly and without cease. The youths wanted to discuss these and other related issues with Shell officials. Shell ignored them, and instead wrote to the government requesting the assistance of anti-riot police to 'deal with hoodlums who are threatening our staff and hindering their work.'[i] The next morning two lorry-loads of armed police descended on the town, killing thirty people and burning several houses.
The Umuechem incident sent shock waves through the oil-producing communities, and forcefully brought home to them the fact that the civil war, in which the Eastern Region's seccession bid was crushed and the burgeoning oil receipts transferred to the central government, had not really stopped and they were now next in line for 'pacification.' It is therefore, not a coincidence that MOSOP, an umbrella organisation comprising several associations and self-help groups in Ogoni, a 500,000 strong community in the central part of the Delta, emerged one year after the sacking of Umuechem. MOSOP was unique in that it was a grassroots social movement, supported by virtually all Ogoni, with a clearly articulated goal contained in the Ogoni Bill of Rights (OBR).
OBR, the brain-child of the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni intellectuals, is an incisively-argued document, graphically presenting the economic, social and environmental travails of the Ogoni people since 1958 when Shell began to operate on their land, and calling for financial compensation from the oil company and the Nigerian government, which, according to MOSOP, had collaborated in appropriating the oil revenue taken from Ogoni without giving the owners of the land anything in return. The document also called for a restructuring of Nigeria based on equality of all its constituent nations and ethnic groups, and a revenue allocation formula based on the principle of derivation as provided in the 1963 Constitution when the country was still a proper federation comprising of four quasi-autonomous regions.[ii] The Ogoni Bill of Rights was presented to Shell, the Federal Military Government and the Nigerian people in a public ceremony presided over by Ogoni community leaders. When no response was forthcoming from the company and the government, MOSOP followed up by organising a peaceful demonstration in January 1993 in which 300,000 Ogoni men, women and children participated.
Beyond 'Anarchy': Understanding the conflict in the Niger Delta
It could be argued that the January 1993 march, timed to coincide with the United Nations Day for Unrepresented Peoples, was the turning point in the struggle of the communities of the Niger Delta for self-determination and economic justice. One concrete achievement of the march was the expulsion of Shell workers, by non-violent means, from the Ogoni oil fields. Royal Dutch Shell is the second largest oil company in the world, and one of the most profitable. Its Nigeria concessions, of which the Ogoni oil fields is part, accounts for a significant percentage of the multinational's annual profits. Company officials therefore saw the emergence of MOSOP and the growing hostility of the people to Shell resulting in the shutting down of the Ogoni wells as a real threat to their profits, a malignant virus that had to be dealt quickly and decisively with if it was not to spread to other parts of the Delta.
On its part, the Nigerian military government was just as anxious to contain the Ogoni 'revolution.' Since the end of the civil war, the country had progressively become a 'rentier state,' involving itself in little productive work and relying on the oil revenue which the five western oil companies operating in the Delta, Shell, Elf, Mobil, Chevron and Agip generated. There was little or no integration between the oil sector and the rest of the economy, and successive attempts to restructure the economy and diversify it from its mono-product base yielded no tangible dividend. The Structural Adjustment Programme, embarked on by General Babangida in 1986 under pressure from the IMF, was ostensibly designed to breathe new life into the non-oil productive sector by devaluing the Naira, privatising government-owned ventures so they would become more efficient and competitive, deregulating the market for goods and services and reducing expenditure on social services which was seen as wasteful and a needless strain on limited resources.
But official corruption, shoddy policy articulation and sheer ineptitude all combined to render SAP into the ultimate economic nightmare. The standard of living of the average Nigerian plunged to an all-time low. Capacity utilisation of factories and sundry ventures fell drastically, throwing millions out of work. Such social services as health, education and water and power supply ground to a halt. There was a massive brain drain as doctors, university teachers and other skilled professionals began to migrate to Europe, the Persian Gulf, and the United States. With economic hardship came growing political unrest and calls for a Sovereign National Conference and an immediate return to democratic rule.
The military government and the political and economic elite with which it had collaborated to govern the country as a unitary state by decree for decades, found themselves in a desperate situation. They wanted to cling on to power and thus guarantee their continued access to the billions of dollars the oil wells of the Delta yielded to their private bank accounts annually. The Babangida government was, however, painfully aware that it had squandered the stock of goodwill with which it was greeted when it seized power in a military coup in August 1985, and that the spate of financial scandals to which the name of the Head of State had been linked coupled with his prevarication and somersaults on the issue of conducting credible elections and handing over to a civilian government, had turned the generality of the people firmly against continuing military rule in whatever guise.
It was a nervous junta that, faced with this cold reality, reluctantly called presidential elections for June 1993. In Ogoni however, events had taken a life of their own. Ken Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP had sufficiently mobilised the people to such a level that they overwhelmingly boycotted the elections, arguing that they had no part in fashioning the constitution on which basis the election was being conducted and that they would prefer a new political arrangement based on the demands contained in the Ogoni Bill of Rights. General Babangida's enactment of the Treason and Treasonable Offences Decree to deal with the MOSOP 'problem' and his subsequent annulment of the results of the June 12 1993 presidential election which the candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Chief Moshood Abiola won were all of a set, the visceral, knee-jerk reaction of an indolent power elite that had fed fat on the resources of the Niger Delta for so long that it could no longer conceive of economic and political life any way other than the status quo.
The storm of public outrage and protests that greeted the annulment and orchestrated by pro-democracy activists and journalists soon saw Babangida out of power, and quickly in his heels Chief Ernest Shonekan who succeeded him as head of the interim national government which the junta hastily put together before it quit the stage. It was left to General Sani Abacha, Babangida's former deputy and a key figure in Shonekan's ill-fated government, to ease out the latter in a palace coup, assume power as Head of State, and deal with the Ogoni problem.
A Marriage Made in Hell
Before he seized power in November 1993, Sani Abacha, an infantry general, had made a name for himself as a brutal and corrupt military officer. Rising rapidly through the ranks after he announced the coup that toppled the unlamented Second Republic in December 1983 and brought in General Muhammadu Buhari as Head of State, Abacha had by 1990 when he helped crush a military uprising aimed at removing General Babangida, Buhari's successor from office, become the second most powerful man in the country. As Chief of Army Staff under Babangida, he participated enthusiastically in the looting of the national treasury, diverting millions of dollars meant for the refurbishment of barracks and soldiers' welfare into his private accounts abroad. He was to show his thirst for blood and his contempt for the democratic aspirations of the people when he played a key role in the nullification of Chief Abiola's electoral victory in June 1993, and indeed personally commanded the troops who murdered hundreds of democracy activists when they poured out into the streets of Lagos to protest the junta's action. It was this man to whom Royal Dutch Shell, desperate to douse the inferno in the Niger Delta which MOSOP had triggered, turned for help.[iii]
Analysts and commentators on the present crisis in the Niger Delta tend to assume that the violent confrontation between the local communities, the oil companies and the government began only in the early nineties, and that before then the area was an oasis of peace and tranquillity, inhabited by a contented and law-abiding people. Nothing is farther from the truth. The Niger Delta has been ruled by violence since the mid nineteenth century when Britain and the other European powers, after plundering the coast and its hinterland of young Africans who they shipped out to the New World as slaves, switched to the so-called 'legitimate' trade in palm oil to power the Northern Hemisphere's industrial revolution. European traders were, from the onset, determined to control the trade in palm oil, produced by the local inhabitants, to their own advantage. They fixed the price they would buy the product (which in any case was exchanged for such worthless items as gin, coloured beads and mirrors), forbade enterprising locals from sending their oil direct to Europe for a better price, and indeed attacked towns and kingdoms that dared assert their right to free trade which the Europeans so enthusiastically espoused but only in the breach.
John Beecroft, Her Britannic Majesty's Consul in the Niger Delta, introduced the concept of 'gunboat diplomacy' in the area beginning in the 1850s, forcing dubious treaties upon local kings and princes and offering them 'protection' in return for allowing British traders to do as they pleased in their domains. Dissenting kings were either murdered and their towns razed to the ground, or they were dethroned and exiled and quislings put in their place. The harsh treatment meted out to William Dappa Pepple, King of the leading palm oil producing city-state of Bonny, Jaja, King of Opobo, Bonny's commercial rival, and Nana Olomu, merchant prince of the Itsekiri kingdom of Warri - all of whom where either dethroned or exiled in the mid-nineteeth century - was the beginning of an enterprise whose target was the expropriation of the economic resources of the local people and the institutionalisation of violence and coercion as instruments of political control.
Indeed, the crisis of political legitimacy in the Niger Delta presently has its roots in the actions of John Beecroft and his successors who destabilised age-old and properly-functioning political institutions in the area, replaced them with widely-hated warrant chiefs and 'native' authorities subject to imperial control, and removed from the ordinary people the power to check the excesses of their rulers and make them accountable as in the past. Goldie Taubman and his military assistant, Frederick Lugard, were to take this heady mix of political coercion and economic exploitation to its terrifying, bloody conclusion when he wielded the various competing European trading firms in the Delta into a formidable monopoly under his control, and then moved to bring the local people firmly into the orbit of his new economic empire as dependants by imposing illegal tariffs on their produce, and also forcing them to trade among themselves with his firm as sole middleman.
The ensuing economic hardship forced such kings as William Koko of the city-state of Nembe in the eastern Delta to resist this unfair arrangement. British warships were quickly despatched to deal with King Koko, and in 1895 the Nembe towns of Brass and Fishtown were burnt down, and over two thousand men, women and children killed. All local resistance crushed, Goldie's firm, later named Royal Niger Company, quickly expanded northwards following the River Niger to Idah and beyond, grew into an imperial government of sorts, and paved the way for the colonisation of the territory of what later came to be known as Nigeria.
Thus, Shell's decision to collaborate with General Abacha to 'pacify' the Ogoni in 1993 was merely a continuation of a firmly established tradition of suppressing the natives of the Delta with the maxim gun the easier to take away their economic resources unchallenged. The refusal of the British Colonial Government and the leaders of the three dominant political parties - the Northern Peoples Congress, the NCNC and the Action Group - to grant the people of the area some measure of political and economic autonomy in 1957, General Gowon's decree transferring the revenue from oil mined in their land to the Federal Government during the civil war in 1969, General Olusegun Obasanjo's Land Use Act in 1978 converting all land in the country, including oil minerals obtained from them to Federal Government property down to General Babangida's enactment of the Treason and Treasonable Offences decree of 1993 and its application on Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni eight in November 1995 were all of a piece - action aimed to deny the local people self-determination, and in so doing, prevent them from using their natural resources for their own betterment.
The present crisis in the Niger Delta can be better understood as a long-drawn out historical process, itself propelled and animated by complex international economic and political forces and which the local inhabitants have been trying to comprehend, resist or turn to their own advantage these past one hundred years with varying degrees of success and failure. In other words, it is a story of power and resistance to it; of alien and imposed authority and attempts to indigenise it and make it accountable to the people it purports to rule; an epic tale of ordinary men and women battling against vastly more superior forces threatening to take the bread from their mouth and destroy their way of life into the bargain. The American journalist, David Kaplan, published an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1994 in which he warned of 'the coming anarchy' West Africa, a situation of chaos and disorder where states would collapse and legitimate political authority would give way to bandits and tribal war lords ruling with the machete and the AK47.[iv] There is neither rhyme nor reason to Kaplan's 'Africa'; no economic or political or social forces propel the combatants. Plucked out of time and space and stripped of mental processes like the 'black shadows' in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Kaplan's warlords hack each other to death because...well, they are Africans.
It is this profoundly racist and spectacularly unscholarly 'analytical' model that western journalists, commentators and NGO officials have borrowed lavishly in their attempt to understand the crisis in the Niger Delta. The face-off between pockets of villagers of two different ethnic groups in the Delta over the very concrete political and economic issue of the location of a local government headquarters with all the social amenities that go with it is conveniently passed off as a 'mindless orgy of violence' between two tribes over nothing of importance; the squabble between two towns over land boundaries, itself triggered by the discovery of oil wells in the area by oil companies is interpreted to mean that 'these people do not have any sense of land tenure and property rights'; a fight for supremacy between local chiefs who have been compromised by the oil companies and youths angry that their future had been mortgaged by their elders is 'analysed' as a manifestation of primitive atavism, a clear indication that 'these people' are incapable of developing political institutions to administer their affairs efficiently without resorting to violence.
We have attempted in the foregoing to show that there is nothing analytical about this dominant analytical prism, that it is devoid of scholarly rigour and historical depth, and that it would be far more fruitful to proceed on the project of understanding the crisis in the Delta by restoring agency to the local people, locating them in the wider international arena of competing economic and political interests even as they ally with and contest with local patrons, and realising that today's victims of the globalisation juggernaut are no other than yesterday's victims of the Royal Niger Company's vicious economic war in the Niger Delta in the nineteenth century. It is the same bloody story, still playing itself out. The crisis will be better understood still by identifying the various actors in the conflict, and posing the simple question: What drives them?
The Actors
Nigerian government officials and the western oil companies have over the years assiduously constructed an image of the politics of the Niger Delta as 'very complex;' the raging conflict as 'very difficult to understand' and the dramatis personae as 'angry and illiterate mobs not amenable to reason.' But the facts on the ground tell a different story. These are ordinary people involved in the very ordinary process of using the social and economic resources at their disposal to reproduce themselves, and devising strategies of resistance when countervailing forces intrude to obstruct this process. Take MOSOP for example. The organisation emerged in Ogoniland in 1990 precisely to counter the action of the Nigerian military government and Royal Dutch Shell which since 1958, had been taking away the peoples oil and polluting the environment without giving them anything in return. General Sani Abacha set up the Rivers State Internal Security Task Force under the command of Colonel Paul Okuntimo in 1994 to suppress MOSOP, and there is evidence that Shell provided the soldiers with financial and logistical support[v], in spite of its repeated denial. By 1995 over two thousand Ogoni people, including the MOSOP leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa lay dead.
Following Nigeria's transition to civilian rule in May 1999, several MOSOP activists who had gone into exile during Abacha's reign of terror returned to the country and are now trying to rebuild the organisation. MOSOP has opened a new office in down-town Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, and its acting President, Mr Ledum Mittee (he took over after Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged) is in the process of repositioning MOSOP as a development agency, geared towards tackling the social and economic needs of the Ogoni people. MOSOP is a genuinely mass-based grassroots organisation, and still enjoys the support of the generality of people in all five Ogoni clans where it has modest offices and part-time volunteer workers despite the concerted efforts of the Nigerian junta and Shell officials to sow seeds of discord and splinter the movement in 1994.
MOSOP however suffers the problem of inadequate financial resources to build up capacity in the area of personnel training, co-ordination of activities including project implementation, skills transfer in the rural areas and environmental monitoring and advocacy. There is also a growing fissure between MOSOP in Nigeria, led by Mr Mittee, and MOSOP Abroad, a coalition of MOSOP groups in Canada and the United States under the informal leadership of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa's junior brother, Dr Owens Wiwa. Underlying the misunderstanding between the two factions is the question of what appropriate strategy to adopt to move the organisation forward following the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa. The Mittee faction is perceived as moderate, choosing dialogue and reconciliation while the Owens group is seen as adopting the hard-line position that any dealings with the Nigerian government and Shell must proceed from an independent judicial investigation into the hanging of Ken and the other 2000 Ogoni dead and the application of proper sanctions on the culprits. It must however be noted that this division in MOSOP is to be expected as part of the teething problems of a political movement that is still in the process of picking itself up after passing through a period of crisis in which several of its tested cadres, including the upper echelons of the leadership, were eliminated. MOSOP watchers are optimistic that the movement will, with the help of people of good will, surmount this problem, unite the two factions, and rebuild itself into the formidable political machine it once was in the early nineties.
The Ijaw Youth Council (IYC), loosely associated with the Izon National Congress, the umbrella representative organisation of all 40 clans comprising the Ijaw nation in the Niger Delta, is seen today as taking over from where the old MOSOP left off before Saro-Wiwa was hanged in November 1995. The IYC was established in December 1998 following an all Ijaw Youth Conference in Kaiama town in the Niger Delta. The conference, coordinated by Oronto Douglas, an environmental human rights lawyer and leader of the pan-Niger Delta resistance organisation, Chikoko Movement, was attended by over 5000 Ijaw youths drawn from such already existing groups as the Movement for the Survival of Ijaw Ethnic Nationality in the Niger Delta (MOSIEND), The Movement for Reparations to Ogbia (MORETO), the Nembe 1895 Youth Movement, Okpolom Imo Engeni, Supreme Egbesu Assembly (SEA) among others. These groups agreed to come together under the umbrella of the Ijaw Youth Council with Mr Felix Tuodolo, a former staff of the NGO, Environmental Rights Action, as President.
In the now historic Kaiama Declaration, released to the local press and the international community on December 11 1998, the IYC declared, 'We cease to recognise all undemocratic decrees that rob our peoples /communities of the right to ownership and control of our lives and resources, which were enacted without our participation and consent. These include the Land Use Decree and the Petroleum Decree etc.' The Declaration also demanded that 'all oil companies stop exploration and exploitation activities in the Ijaw area,' pointing out that all the Ijaw people had gained from the presence of the oil companies in their midst were 'gas flaring, oil spillages, blow-outs and being labelled saboteurs and terrorists.'[vi] The IYC leadership announced its 'Operation Climate Change' programme, a series of activities beginning on January 1, 1999 and ending January 10 by which time all the oil companies were expected to have extinguished their gas flares and withdrawn from Ijawland.
The Ijaw are the fourth largest nation in Nigeria after the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo. They are spread through out the creeks and swamps of the Niger Delta and constitute a sizeable population of such states as Rivers, Delta, Edo, Ondo, Cross Rivers and the newly created Bayelsa. The bulk of the oil wells operated by the western oil companies are in Ijaw territory. Government and oil company officials alike were, therefore, understandably alarmed when the IYC issued its ultimatum in December 1998. General Abdulsalami Abubakar who had taken over after General Abacha died in mysterious circumstances in June 1998, immediately despatched several warships to the Delta. When Ijaw youths went out in the streets of Yenogoa, the Bayelsa state capital in peaceful protest about three hundred of them were shot down by soldiers in cold blood. The soldiers also invaded the town of Kaiama and murdered several people, including the son of the King of the town. Many women and under-age girls were also raped at gunpoint.
The IYC emerged from the Kaiama slaughter bloodied but resolved to go on campaigning for resource control and environmental justice for the Ijaw nation and the other ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta. The organisation has a collegiate leadership, drawn from the several zones into which it is divided, but day to day administration is in the hands of the President whose office is in downtown Port Harcourt. The different zones of the IYC hold regular 'mobile parliaments' in the clans, towns and villages of Ijawland in a rotating manner, in which zonal leaders educate the people- largely youths- on the social and economic problems of the Niger Delta, and what the IYC is doing to solve them. The IYC has, through its bold and unequivocal stance on the Niger Delta crisis, and its clear articulation of the way to resolve them, quietly emerged as the voice of the Ijaw nation, eclipsing the more moderate Izon National Congress whose membership is composed of leading Ijaw businessmen, politicians and leaders of thought. The interesting thing, though, is that relations between the two groups are cordial - indeed mutually reinforcing, as the leadership of the two work together and tend to adopt a common position on most issues. It is significant that when President Obasanjo toured the Niger Delta in May 1999, shortly after he took office, and asked the leaders of the Izon National Congress to come to Abuja to see him, they needed to consult with the IYC before accepting Obasanjo's invitation.
Unlike MOSOP which has not been able to work out a clear strategy for collaborating with other ethnic groups in the Niger Delta, IYC has been able to position itself as an articulator and energiser for other movements in the area, supporting the work of activists from the smaller ethnic groups and when need be, helping them financially. It must, however, be pointed out that IYC, also like MOSOP, is hampered by financial constraints and has not been able to fully consolidate some of its brilliantly conceived programmes like Political Outreach, designed to enlighten youths in the villages on political processes in the new democratic dispensation and how to access government and parliament to press their case in a non-violent manner. It remains, however, one of the best-organised mass-based ethnic nationality organisations with a clear political direction, in the Niger Delta.
The Chikoko Movement is the first movement to emerge in the Niger Delta with the clear purpose of uniting the various ethnic nationality and political and environmental groups into a formidable force working together to bring about a fundamental restructuring Nigeria. A pan-Niger Delta resistance organisation that takes its name from the Chikoko soil, its leadership is a council of eight drawn from the various movements in the ethnic groups in the region. The council of eight in turn appoints a Leader to oversee the affairs of the movement. Chikoko Movement is presently led by Oronto Douglas who is also the Deputy Director of the respected environmental NGO, Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth, Nigeria.
The movement rarely mounts political and environmental campaigns on its own but rather helps its member groups to strategise, pull resources and work together to achieve common goals. The Chikoko Movement acts as a catalyst and bridge-builder and has worked with such groups as the Oron-based Oron National Forum to produce the Bill of Rights of the Oron People (June 1999). It also works closely with such groups as Egi Peoples Coalition, Southern Minorities Movement, and the Ikwerre Youths Convention among others. Working with these groups, the Chikoko Movement organised a highly successful rally in Port Harcourt on 18 June 1999 to mark the International Day of Action Against Corporate Rule and Imperialism and also to welcome Dr Owens Wiwa back to the Niger Delta after four years in exile.
The Chikoko Movement is not a formal organisation in the ordinary sense of the word in that it does not have offices anywhere in the Niger Delta, nor does the public know the names of the council of eight (except the leader). But it is a highly effective organisation, well respected, and is influential across the various communities and ethnic groups in the Delta.
There are also several other ethnic nationality and community based groups active in the Niger Delta. The prominent ones include Niger Delta Women for Justice (based in Port Harcourt and Yenogoa), Ikwerre Youths Convention (representing the interests of the Ikwerre people in Port Harcourt and environs), Society for Growth and Awareness in Etche (representing the Etche nationality movement), Egi Peoples Coalition (Egi nationality platform, pressing the case of the Ogba, Egbema and Ndoni people of Rivers State), Supreme Egbesu Assembly (a politico-religious organisation pressing for Ijaw self-determination), Movement for the Survival of Ijaw Ethnic Nationality (MOSIEND), Urhobo Economic Foundation (based in Warri and Lagos), Movement for the Survival of Itsekiri Nationality (MOSIEN, based in Warri) and Isoko Front (based in Oleh, Delta State).
Unlike the Chikoko Movement and the IYC, these groups and movements tend to be small, and restrict their activities to their individual communities. There are, however, instances when they collaborate with bigger and more established groups to carry out joint campaigns. Most of the movements do not have offices from which they operate; they do not have full-time employees nor do they have sufficient capacity to carry out advertised projects. What they have in abundance, though, is determination and commitment to the cause of returning the Delta to environmental health, and restructuring the Nigerian State into a proper federation where their interests would be better represented.
Reaping the whirlwind
It is significant that the majority of these movements emerged in the Niger Delta following the advent of MOSOP and the adversities of its leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Indeed, the hanging of Saro-Wiwa in November 1995 could be said to be the turning point in the politics of the Niger Delta in that for the first time since Major Adaka Boro and his band overran a few oil platforms and declared the ill-fated Niger Delta Republic in 1966, the various nations and ethnic groups found a common and unifying factor in the travails of the Ogoni who they realised were being persecuted because they were demanding a fair share of the oil proceeds from their land. The Niger Delta Congress, a political party established by Chief Dappa Biriye, a Bonny prince in the late fifties to represent the interests of the Ijaw and the other ethnic nationalities of the Niger Delta as Nigeria prepared for independence could not develop into a potent and credible platform before the civil war swept it and the other bigger parties away. There followed an extended period of military rule in which all dissent was suppressed. Saro-Wiwa and the events of 1995 was therefore, in a sense, the catalyst that swept away the dead weight of praetorian governance and the return of politics, properly so called, in the Niger Delta.
Of even greater significance is the often overlooked fact that the leaders of these movements are young people - under thirty-five years, and mostly single. The new politics in the Niger Delta is a struggle for 'generational' supremacy as much is it is a struggle for responsible and accountable government in the Delta communities. NYCOP, the youth affiliate of MOSOP, quickly emerged the decisive arm of the organisation at a time it was faced with grave crisis in 1993 and 1994. Similarly, IYC has become the de facto representative, and voice of the Ijaw nation as it faces mounting repression from the government and the oil companies. In certain villages and towns in the Itsekiri, Isoko and Egi areas the youths have sacked the chiefs and elders and replaced the formal traditional structures of government with ad hoc popular assemblies. For years the youths had complained that the community chiefs were collaborating with the oil companies and the government, taking contracts from them and getting wealthy at the expense of the welfare of the community. They could not migrate to the cities where there were no jobs to be had- jobs which even if they existed they were in any case not qualified for as they had little or no formal education. Meanwhile four decades of oil spillage had laid waste to the farmlands and fishing creeks, destroying the traditional occupations which their fathers and grandfathers before them had relied on to eke out a living. Faced with this impossible situation, they rose against the 'eating' chiefs, and then against the oil companies and the government.
Kidnappers or Freedom fighters?
It is in this social and economic context that the spate of kidnappings of oil workers in the Delta by 'restive' youths should be viewed. It is instructive that since the kidnappings began in 1995, not a single oil worker has been killed or harmed. They are promptly released safe and sound as soon as the ransom (usually a thousand dollars) is paid. The motive here is pecuniary; these are hungry and unemployed youths who, having been denied an opportunity to earn an honest living by a formal economy that takes from their land and leaves only devastation in its wake, are now operating in the 'informal economy' of hostage-taking to make ends meet. There is no doubt that some of the youth-kidnappers are feckless types who squander the money as soon as it comes their way; yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the phenomenon of hostage-taking as yet another example of the 'atavistic' tendencies inherent in 'these people.'
Underlying the development is a concrete economic crisis, in reaction to which the youths are resorting to this rather extreme and unfortunate measure. It must, however, be pointed out that the wall between economic crisis and political agitation is a very thin one, and there are now indications that some 'economic' hostage-takers of yesterday have evolved into political activists in their own right, seeing the kidnapping of oil workers as not only a legitimate form of political protest but also a practical means of raising funds to finance their struggle for self-determination. The Odi incident provides the best illustration of this new development. The youths at the centre of the fracas resulting in the death of the policemen had gained prominence during the governorship and presidential elections in Bayelsa State in 1999. Some of them were recruited by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) politicians to intimidate their opponents in the other parties and ensure their victory. Indeed, Elisabeth Blunt, the respected BBC journalist who covered the presidential elections in the Niger Delta reported that the February 1999 presidential election was heavily rigged by PDP elements in the area on behalf of Olusegun Obasanjo who later emerged President. The youths, largely unemployed and thus susceptible to financial inducement, were the shock troops that facilitated this 'victory.'
Having played a key role in getting the PDP Governor, Chief Alayemeisigha into Government House in Yenogoa, Bayelsa State - they then began to see themselves as power brokers in the new regime. It has been reported, although CDD has not been able to confirm this, that the Bayelsa State government regularly paid the youths who had now constituted themselves into a vigilante of sorts, until there was a parting of ways in June 1999. At this point, the youths had graduated from kidnapping oil workers and running errands for local politicos to a loosely-structured political group, critical of the Obasanjo government for not moving quickly enough to right the injustices in the Niger Delta, and berating the oil companies for devastating their fishing streams and farmlands. The group that gathered in Odi in early November 1999 was an odd assortment of political jobbers, former kidnappers-now turned political agitators, and ethnic nationalists enraged that the Federal Government was not doing enough to stop the bloody feud between the Ijaw and the Ilaje-Yoruba which had devastated the slum quarter of Ajegunle in central Lagos and left scores dead the previous week. A considerable number of the dead were Odi-Ijaw, and the youths were mobilising men and materials to travel to Lagos to intervene in the crisis when the police came.
One thing that has continually puzzled Niger Delta watchers and analysts is why the youths, who for years had kidnapped oil workers and set them free unharmed, would suddenly metamorphose into a murderous mob, hacking law enforcement officers sent to the town to restore order to death. However, a careful analysis of the events leading to the Odi massacre appears to reveal an orchestrated drama, scripted in such a way as to ensure the bloody denouement that was the flattening of Odi. The oil companies had been on 'red alert' following the Kaiama Declaration in December 1998, a document they read as a formal declaration of war on them by Ijaw youths. They were further alarmed when the Izon National Congress, the umbrella body of prominent Ijaw chiefs and elders, came out in open support of the Declaration following the unprecedented slaughter of youths in Yenogoa, Oloibiri and Kaiama a few weeks later. Obasanjo's tour of the Delta a few months later in which youth groups made it clear that to him that they were no longer interested in palliatives but a fundamental restructuring of the Nigerian state along lines of equity (resource control) and equal representation did not help matters. Shell and the other oil companies had worked closely with the Abacha junta, and its successor, General Abubakar to 'pacify' the restive youths. Indeed, Mr Emeka Achebe, a senior official of Shell UK had declared to Irish journalists in 1996 that his company preferred working with military dictators as they tended to guarantee the political stability which multinational corporations like Shell needed to operate profitably in developing countries. It was therefore understandable that Shell and the other four western oil multinationals operating in the Delta would seek assurances from the new civilian government that it would not be 'soft' on 'the hoodlums' making their work difficult in the Delta. At a meeting between government and oil company officials in October 1999, General Yakubu Theophilus Danjuma, Obasanjo's defence minister, assured Shell and the other companies that he would give 'security' in the Niger Delta the highest priority. After this meeting, there followed a series of threats and warnings from government officials, describing environmental and minority rights activists in the Niger Delta as 'hoodlums and miscreants.' There followed a massive build-up of troops in the area, indicating that a major military operation was in the offing.
For the youths, this was the final straw. The bulk of them had come of 'political' age following the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in November 1995. Since then, they had observed as successive governments made the usual obligatory noises about doing 'something' for the people of the Niger Delta and then quitting office with billions of dollars of the area's oil receipts in their pockets. Some had pinned their hope on the return of 'democracy' but even this quickly evaporated when President Obasanjo told their representatives during a heated meeting in Port Harcourt in June 1999 that they should just shut up, that he alone knew what the problems of the Niger Delta where, and he alone knew how to go about solving them. What they badly needed were jobs, education, an end to ecological warfare, soothing words to the effect that all these would be provided. What they wanted to see was a clearly thought out policy framework, worked out by the new government with their participation, that would begin to tackle these age-hold problems head-on. When Obasanjo failed to deliver, they retreated into a laager of justified outrage. The new government became the enemy; the anti-riot police and soldiers and navy personnel patrolling the creeks of the Delta an army of occupation. When the youths killed the eight policemen in Odi, they saw them as prisoners of war. When the government ordered that the town be razed to the ground, it saw the expedition, code-named Hakuri, as a military exercise to safeguard the oil platforms and installations of the western multinationals. The one was fighting to wrest back control of his resources; the other to keep it. The result was hundreds of hapless Odi women and children dead, and possibly hundreds more banished into the surrounding forests. Odi was the Rubicon in the renewed struggle for the control of the glittering oil prize. The new government and Delta youths alike have crossed it.
The End of Politics?
Some have seen in the renewed violence in the Delta the foreclosing of the political option to resolve the crisis. But as we have argued previously, the face-off between the youths and the elders, the resurgent inter-ethnic hostilities, and the running battle between the youths and the government and their oil company allies is the resumption of the struggle of the ordinary people to have a say in the way they are governed, and also in the way which the wealth they help generate is allocated. At the core of the crisis in the Niger Delta is the failure of politics to allocate authority, legitimise it, and use it to achieve the social and economic ends that conduce to communal wellbeing. In order words, it is not the end of, but the return of politics. A century and half of brutal economic imperialism, colonial rule, and plain ineptitude and corruption on the part of successive post-independence governments have combined to erode the legitimacy of formal political authority in the Niger Delta. The ordinary people, expelled to the margins of politics and economics for so long, and suddenly realising that the emperor is naked, are now knocking insistently on the gate, demanding to be let in. The youths are their torchbearers.
There are, however, certain interest groups that over the years have offered the outside world an interpretation of the conflict in the Niger Delta in line with their agenda of maintaining a permanent police state in the area. First are the western oil companies. Their standard line is that there is need for them and the government to work closely to maintain security in the Delta or oil production would cease altogether. They contend that the incidences of oil spillage that occur daily in the area is the handiwork of criminal youths who sabotage oil installations in order to claim compensation from them. They also dismiss the view that some of the youth leaders are environmental and human rights activists fighting non-violently to bring about a new and equitable social and economic regime in the Niger Delta. They use such incidents as hostage-taking and the inter-ethnic conflicts in the area - in Ilaje, Itsekiri and Ijaw - to back up their claim that the Delta is in a state of mindless chaos and needs the presence of security officers to provide a peaceful environment for oil workers to operate.
The Nigerian government, from Babangida's regime onwards, has also followed tack. They see the crisis in the Delta as purely a security matter, insisting that the country is dependent on the oil wells to power its economy, and that any action designed to endanger this ought to be treated as treason or economic sabotage. It was this reasoning that informed General Babangida's enactment of the Treason and Treasonable Offences Decree in June 1993 to contain MOSOP. Certain western journalists and NGOs have also swallowed the oil companies /government line uncritically and regularly portray the Delta as ridden with violence, with youths locked in a bloody contest with the government and the oil companies and calling for 'conflict resolution and peace-building' programmes to return the region to normalcy.
But what is often ignored is the fact that there are clear beneficiaries of the present state of violence and anarchy in the Delta, and that these beneficiaries have absolutely no incentive to work with others on a programme that would return sustainable peace in the region. The alternative to massive security presence in the Delta is a new political and economic framework, guaranteed by a new federal constitution, that would transfer power, and with it the control of economic resources, to local people in the Delta. This would entail the democratisation of politics in such a way that the ordinary people would become the object and subject of development, and thus would development be democratised.
But this would be at a great cost to both the oil companies and the central government. A politically empowered local people would be in a position to demand that the oil companies adopt sound environmental practice in oil exploration and production activities. They would demand to see environmental impact assessments as stipulated by national and international law - which all the oil companies in the Delta obey only in the breach because they don't want to pay the extra costs. They would demand, as the IYC did in December 1998, that the companies stop flaring production-associated gas immediately, and the latter would not be able to get out of this by arm-twisting the central government - which is what they did in 1985. They would demand that the oil companies invest a fair portion of their profit in the local economy, as is the practice elsewhere in the rest of the world, in Europe and the Americas especially, rather than take the profit and run. In short, they would be in a position to tame the oil multinationals because the alternative would be mass impoverishment and ecological suicide. This, inevitably, would cut a large swathe into the oil companies profit margins, and this they don't want to contemplate, less concede. They have done good business with an indolent and corrupt central government for the past four decades, and they are determined to maintain the arrangement, even through violence if it comes to that.
That is precisely why companies like Shell continue to maintain their own private security outfit (Shell Police) even in the face of international outcry, provide materials and logistics to government troops deployed to the Delta, and now are recruiting local vigilantes in such towns as Nembe to 'protect' the oil installations. The more the number of armed vigilantes running amok in the Delta, the more the need for 'security.' The more the inter-ethnic clashes, sometimes triggered by the divide and rule policies of the oil companies themselves, the more the 'need' to call on the government to deploy troops to 'arrest the situation.' And the government's interest is in turn served because senior officials in Abuja and their partners in the business community have, since Gowon's 1969 decree, come to see the Delta as a dependable cash cow that should be milked without let or hindrance. If violence is what it would take to keep the local people down, then violence it would be. All talk of a Sovereign National Conference and a new political framework to allow self-determination and a measure of resource control to the people of the Delta is viewed with profound suspicion and, sometimes, outright hostility. The violence in the Niger Delta is manufactured, and its purveyors - the government and the oil companies - are the beneficiaries. The victims are, of course, the local people.
Are There Possible Agents of Peace?
It is true that there is chaos, violence and the collapse of formal political authority in the Niger Delta. But it is also true that there exists a pool of people of goodwill in the region, who, given moral encouragement and practical support, could emerge as the core of a new social and political movement that will return the Niger Delta to the path of sustainable peace. Here must be counted community leaders who over the years have distinguished themselves in honest and selfless service to the local people, in helping them to solve their social and economic problems, in criticising the policies of the government and the oil companies, and also calming the youths when, visited with yet another act of violence by the government, they go on war-path. These leaders are to be found in the various ethnic and self-improvement unions and the various church denominations in the region. Another group is the youth leaders of the various ethnic nationality movements who have quietly emerged as the vocal representatives of their groups. This is a well-educated, politically-astute, and inspirational group, some of whom have assumed legendary status in their communities with considerable following.
There are also the heads of various local and international NGOs working in the Niger Delta, some of whom, over the years, have acquired unrivalled knowledge of the area, interacted closely with the local people, and are now seen as defenders of their cause. Specific mention must be made of Environmental Rights Action/ Friends of the Earth Nigeria - with offices in Benin City, Port Harcourt and Yenogoa, the Niger Delta Wetlands Centre - whose field quarters and resource centre in Odi have since been burnt down, and Pro-Natura International - with offices in Akassa in central Delta. These NGOs are well resourced, well managed and well staffed. They have, over the years, played a key role in attracting the attention of the local and international community to the activities of the oil companies and the Federal Government in the Niger Delta, articulating clearly what the problems are and how they can be resolved. Any programme designed to restore peace in the area must take these NGOs on board if it is to make any headway, and even more importantly win the trust and support of the host communities who have come to see these groups as part and parcel of them.
There are several other smaller NGOs working in the areas of environmental and human rights and advocacy in the Delta, but they are still at the stage of building up capacity and articulating what their area of specialisation would be. One notable exception is Medicin Sans Frontiers, the Paris-based health charity which has recently opened offices in Yenogoa. It is, however, not yet clear what their purpose in the Niger Delta is, as they seem to be concentrating on peace building rather than their traditional area of medical relief. Whether they have properly studied the social, economic and political factors that led to the breakdown of peace in the Delta, in the first place, before designing an intervention package remains to be seen.
All in all, there are credible agents of peace in the Niger Delta, rooted organically in the social fabric of the people. The challenge is to work out a strategy, along with these agents and the representatives of the local people themselves, to begin the work of teasing out what the conditions and ingredients for peace are, and working with the various interest groups in thrashing out a deal that would be acceptable to all, most importantly the local people themselves who ultimately, are the guarantors of whatever agreements would be arrived at.
Position of CDD
Following from the above, we believe that the key issues in the Niger Delta are political self-determination and resource control, the denial of which has triggered the present crisis in the region. Viewed historically, the crisis is the culmination of over a hundred years of violent political repression by more powerful outsiders to facilitate the expropriation of the resources of the local people, the consequence of which has been wide-spread poverty, the erosion of legitimate political authority and unprecedented ecological catastrophe. The resort to violence and kidnappings by youths in certain parts of the Niger Delta is a response to this violent appropriation of their political and economic space; a clear demand that the status quo be dismantled to give way to a fairer and more equitable system where local people would have a say in their own governance and, thus, in a position to participate in the creation and enjoyment of wealth derived from their land in an environmentally-friendly and sustainable manner.
CDD is opposed to violence no matter the legitimacy and justness of the case involved. We thus condemn unequivocally and unreservedly, the relentless chain of executions, rape, wholesale sacking of villages, kidnappings and the reckless use of violent language on the part of the oil companies, the government, and the youths in the Niger Delta. We have always argued that violence is a deadly virus that spawns new pockets of violence in a vicious and unremitting cycle, spreading through the entire body politic and ravaging it beyond repair. There is no credible alternative to dialogue and the peace-table. The AK-47 may secure some gain in the short-term, but as South Africa, and most recently Northern Ireland, has shown, political gains secured with the Armalite are sooner than latter frittered away, and the ballot box has to be brought in to secure long-term peace. The Niger Delta can be no different.
In the short term, we call for an immediate cease-fire in the Niger Delta. We use the term 'cease-fire' because war, albeit of the low-intensity variety, has already broken out in the region. The Niger Delta is highly militarised. Youths are routinely shot by armed soldiers that have taken over the area. The new civilian administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo, instead of moving to restore the confidence of the local people in his government by removing the troops, has, instead, reached an agreement with the United States government to supply fast attack boats and sophisticated weaponry, ostensibly to patrol the Niger Delta and check the incidence of oil smuggling. But such groups as the IYC and MOSOP have correctly interpreted the fresh deployment of men and weaponry as a continuation of the strong-arm tactics of the Abacha regime, designed to intimidate local communities struggling peacefully for social and ecological justice. And when they refuse to back down, to use the same awesome and superior firepower to pummel them into submission.
If the bloody but heroic resistance of Ogoni and Ijaw youths to the combined forces of the government and the oil companies has anything to recommend to policy makers, it is that more soldiers and sophisticated weaponry is not the road to peace in the Niger Delta. Vietnam clearly demonstrated that a people, convinced that they are in the right and that they are fighting a war of survival, will be able to face the biggest of armies and acquit themselves creditably. President Obasanjo and his advisers must demonstrate courage and discard the old nostrum, a carry-over from Biafra, which argues that the only way to continue to keep the oil fields of the Niger Delta under the control of the Federal Government is though the deployment of the instruments of violence. What is sorely needed, and urgently, is new thinking, in short, a shift in paradigm. The new argument must be that the best way to guarantee the continued participation of the inhabitants of the Niger Delta in the Nigeria project will be through dialogue, informed by the acknowledgement that they are equal partners in this project. And dialogue can only be initiated when the aggressor - in this case the Nigerian government and oil company officials - demonstrate good faith by ordering the soldiers still rampaging in the area back to the barracks. The local communities would then be bound, faced with this gesture, to tone down their language of anger and meet the government at the negotiation table.
Long-term Prospects for Peace and Sustainable Development in the Niger Delta
The popular refrain in the Niger Delta presently is 'resource control, true federalism, and sustainable development.' There is a sense in which it can be said that all three are inter-linked, that indeed none can be achieved without the others, and that actualising these demands as the local communities in the Niger Delta have set out to do would require nothing less than a fundamental political restructuring of the Nigerian state. The question then is: Is such a restructuring necessary and desirable? The answer must be a clear and unequivocal YES. Claude Ake, Julius Ihonvbere and several other development scholars have advanced a compelling argument for devolution of power and democratisation of the process of development in post-colonial African states like Nigeria, where centrifugal forces, propelled by the competing demands of the elite of the various ethnic groups, have made the task of nation-building very difficult.[vii]
It has also been shown that Nigeria made more social and economic development between the period 1960-1966 when it functioned as a true federal state with residual powers in the four regions, than after the civil war in 1970 when the military government imposed a unitary state on the country, stifling local initiative and converting Nigerian into a 'rentier' state solely dependent on oil receipts. In the particular case of the Niger Delta with its peculiar and difficult geographical terrain, it makes sense that local people, who understand the area and its delicate ecosystem, be given a degree of autonomy, fashioned out and guaranteed by a new constitutional compact, that would enable them to deploy their natural genius to reproduce themselves with the resources at their disposal.
Studies have shown that local people are best placed to manage their environment and its resources in a sustainable way.[viii] Thus, a new constitutional arrangement restoring agency and autonomy to local actors would be killing three birds with one stone. Nigeria would have taken a firm and concrete step toward returning the ecologically threatened Niger Delta to the path of environmental health; the local people, enjoying the freedom to utilise their skills in the development process, would join eagerly with compatriots in other parts of the country in creating more wealth; and Nigeria, with a fair amount of power devolved from the central government, would become more stable and united politically as key economic and political actors turn their attention to their various regions where the real action is.
A strategy for long-term peace and people-driven development in the Niger Delta must, therefore, be informed by the foregoing principle of self-determination if it is to have any chance of meaningfully impacting on the local communities. The provisions in the 1999 constitution that allocate 13 per cent of total oil revenue to the oil producing states of the country and also establish a Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), a Federal Government agency whose remit is to accelerate economic development and provide social infrastructure in the area, are commendable steps. It must, however, be stressed that these are conciliatory stop-gap measures that address the symptoms of the malady, and do not begin to tackle the fundamental demands of resource control and political autonomy for all geo-political units in the country, the prerequisite for a stable and prosperous Nigeria.
Similarly, the programmes of such international bodies as the European Union, which is about to embark on a small credit scheme for the local communities, and the American government's Organisation for Transition Initiatives which focus on peace building and conflict resolution, are, as presently conceived, philosophical cousins of the Nigerian government's NDDC.
They may be well intentioned. But their - some say, deliberate - refusal to see the wider picture, to see the deep-rooted historical and political currents that drive the present crisis in the Niger Delta, preferring to reduce the problem to a simple 'Father Christmas' case of distributing the artefacts of development to the local people (bore holes, milling machines and a few Naira notes) instead of working with local people to put in place a new constitutional compact that will transform them - the local people - into agents of development able to provide these needs themselves as they clearly desire, could further muddy the water, and in the final reckoning, turn into an obstructing cog inviting forcible removal.
Besides, it would be very difficult to convince the leaders of these communities that the same American government that is working with the Nigerian government to further militarise the Niger Delta by sending military sea craft to the region should be taken seriously when it hands out a few dollars to local NGOs to convene 'peace-building' meetings.
The local people of the Niger Delta are best placed to deliver and guarantee peace in this troubled region. The way to begin the journey to peace should be by asking the seemingly simple but all-important question: Why are these people angry? What will it take to resolve their grievances? All else is self-serving politics in the service of rapine economics.