ABUJA,
Nigeria—Alhaji Dokubo-Asari once stalked the mangrove-choked creeks of
the Niger Delta, a leaf stuck to his forehead for good luck, as a crew
that he ran bled oil from pipelines and sold it to smugglers. “Asari
fuel,” they called it.
The former Nigerian militant leader was restrained in 2006; the government later began paying him to guard the oil fields.
Last year, Nigeria’s state oil company began paying him $9 million a
year, by Mr. Dokubo-Asari’s account, to pay his 4,000 former foot
soldiers to protect the pipelines they once attacked.
He shrugs off the unusual turn of events. “I don’t see anything wrong
with it,” said the thickly built former gunman, lounging in a house
gown at his home here in Nigeria’s capital.
Nigeria is shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars a year to
maintain an uneasy calm in the oil-rich delta, where attacks ranging
from theft to bombings to kidnappings pummelled oil production three
years ago, to as low as 500,000 barrels on some days. Now production is
back up to 2.6 million barrels daily of low-sulfur crude of the sort
favoured by U.S. refineries, which get nearly 9 per cent of their
supply here.
The gilded pacification campaign is offered up by the government as a
success story. But others say the programme, including a 2009 amnesty,
has sent young men in Nigeria’s turbulent delta a different message:
that militancy promises more rewards than risks.
Violence in the Niger Delta
Militants in Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta began a campaign of
kidnappings and pipeline bombings in the early 2000s, upset over
pollution and the region’s endemic poverty. After a government-sponsored
amnesty programme in 2009, violence dropped and production went back
up. But oil theft, a lucrative criminal industry, has drawn many
militants new and old back into the delta’s winding creeks.
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While richly remunerated former kingpins profess to have left the
oil-theft business, many former militant foot soldiers who are paid less
or not at all by the amnesty, and have few job prospects, continue to
pursue prosperity by tapping pipelines.
Now, oil theft appears to be on the rise again. Royal Dutch Shell
RDSB.LN -0.02 per cent PLC’s Nigerian unit estimates that more than
150,000 barrels of oil are stolen from Nigerian pipelines daily. That is
one of the lower estimates. In May, theft from one pipeline got so bad
that Shell simply shut it down.
“Everybody seems to believe…that the Niger Delta problem is over,”
said a former government mediator, Dimieari Von Kemedi. “It’s just on
pause. The challenge is to move from pause to stop.”
Meanwhile, Nigeria is facing a separate militancy, in the form of the
radical Islamic group Boko Haram, whose guerrilla attacks on churches
and police stations in a different part of the country have left
hundreds dead. Some legislators have proposed extending amnesty to Boko
Haram, as well.
It is an expensive proposition. This year alone, Nigeria will spend
about $450 million on its amnesty programme, according to the
government’s 2012 budget, more than what it spends to deliver basic
education to children.
Under the arrangement, the government grants living allowances to
tens of thousands of former members of the bandit crews and sends them
to vocational classes, in sites ranging from Houston to London to Seoul.
These costs are on top of millions of dollars paid at the outset to the
crews’ leaders for handing in their weapons.
For a few, the programme has meant spectacular rewards. To improve
ties with former delta warlords, the government invited the top
“generals,” as they call themselves, for extended stays on the
uppermost, executive floors of Abuja’s Hilton hotel.
The Nigerian state oil company, according to one of its senior
officials, is giving $3.8 million a year apiece to two former rebel
leaders, Gen. Ebikabowei “Boyloaf” Victor Ben and Gen. Ateke Tom, to
have their men guard delta pipelines they used to attack. Another
general, Government “Tompolo” Ekpumopolo, maintains a $22.9
million-a-year contract to do the same, the official said.
A liaison to Mr. Tom declined to comment on the contracts. Mr.
Ekpumopolo didn’t return phone calls and messages. Mr. Ben, when reached
for comment, asked, “How much money is involved in this interview?” and
then hung up.
Later, he sent an enigmatic text: “Very wel dn im nt dispose bt
cnsider 100%al u wnt ,we need investors in niger delta absolute peace is
guarante.”
For President Goodluck Jonathan, a Niger Delta native, such lavish
expenditures have become a political liability. Despite a growing
economy, his country of 167 million struggles to finance even the
basics, starting with power plants, roads and sewers. A blossoming
middle class in Nigeria’s cities has put further strain on public
infrastructure.
Yet because four-fifths of government revenue flows from the oil
fields, aides to the president defend the high cost of peace by saying
the treasury would face an even worse drain if a full-blown militancy in
the delta flared up again. “If it’s too huge, what are the
alternatives?” said Oronto Douglas, a senior adviser to Mr. Jonathan.
“For you to address the whole issue of poverty and development, you
need some kind of peace,” added Mutiu Sunmonu, managing director for
Shell’s Nigerian unit. “That is what I think the amnesty programme has
offered.”
Enticed by the programme, the militants emerged a couple of years ago
from the oil-soaked swamps of the delta. Some of the leaders took up
residence in the executive floors of Abuja’s Hilton and through much of
2010 and early 2011 spent weeks or months enjoying the Executive
Lounge’s complimentary supply of Hennessey V.S.O.P. cognac, priced at
$51 a shot on the room-service menu. Over a buffet of fiery Nigerian
dishes—gumbos, Jollof rice pilafs, goat stews—they rubbed shoulders with
the country’s leading politicians and influence peddlers, who often
live in the floor’s $700-a-night art-deco rooms.
“These are young men who came out of the creeks and were given the
opportunity to hang out with the crème de la crème, wearing gold watches
and drinking from gold-rimmed teacups,” said Tony Uranta, a member of
the government’s Niger Delta Technical Committee advisory group and a
frequent Hilton executive-floor guest. “It’s a natural thing.”
Most have since moved out of the hotel. “It’s too high-profile,” said an aide to one ex-warlord, Mr. Tom.
Meanwhile, thousands of former militant foot soldiers have been given
job training, a feature of the programme that officials call its most
indisputable success. The question is how many will be able to make use
of this training. In Nigeria, the government estimates, there are 67
million other people waiting to be employed.
Kempare Ebipade says he spent six years guarding creek-side armouries
as an oil militant, in the course of which he took two bullets to the
thigh. In 2009 he accepted amnesty and was sent to the U.S. for two
weeks at the Martin Luther King Jr. Centre for Nonviolent Social Change
in Atlanta. He displayed a booklet of Dr. King’s speeches from which he
said he sometimes reads to villagers.
Mr. Ebipade is a skilled welder now, trained in the craft by the
amnesty programme. But the father of four struggles to imagine how he
will find clients for a welding workshop he has set up, or how he will
continue to afford his apartment’s rent of $1,100 a year.
The government has vigorously pushed oil companies to hire locals.
Mr. Ebipade says that out of the former militant army of 10,000 he
belonged to, he has heard of only five that landed jobs with oil
companies.
Shell’s Mr. Sunmonu warned against the idea “that every trained
ex-militant is going to get a paid employment, because if you just look
at the number, it’s probably huge. So we therefore must broaden our
solutions to focus more on self-employment: small enterprises, medium
enterprises.”
The Niger Delta has seen promising economic progress. Construction on a regional highway is under way.
Nigeria’s overall economy is projected to grow at a brisk 7.1 per
cent this year. But much of the growth is in cities far from the delta,
and a population boom reduces the degree to which the growth helps with
the unemployment problem.
In the delta, years-old electric towers punctuate village skylines,
but many don’t carry electricity, having never been connected to the
overtaxed power grid. Children travel to scattered schools aboard
canoes, navigating creeks coated by the rainbow stains of oil slicks. A
United Nations office has estimated it would take 30 years to clean the
waters, which once sustained fisheries.
Amid this landscape, oil-related crime lures locals like Atu
Thompson, father of 18 and self-described oil thief, who says he and
others see few other ways to provide. “You can take me to amnesty, give
me a good contract—but others are still there,” Mr. Thompson says.
Mr. Dokubo-Asari, 48 years old, used to be prominent among them.
While not all of his account of life in the mangrove swamps could be
verified, he long was one of Nigeria’s best-known oil marauders.
About 25 years ago, Mr. Dokubo-Asari left overcrowded university
classrooms, he says, to study guerrilla warfare in the Libya led by Col.
Moammar Gadhafi. He says he was given $100,000 to stir up trouble back
in Nigeria, an oil competitor to Libya.
Fomenting conflict proved easy in the restive Niger Delta he returned
to in the early 1990s. From a local governor, Mr. Dokubo-Asari says, he
procured weapons and money to build a militia that ultimately was
several thousand strong. For years, as he tells it, they broke open
pipelines, filling canisters with crude oil and refining some of it
through timeworn techniques used by locals to boil palm-tree sap into
wine.
The government struggled to lure him out of the mangroves. Mr.
Dokubo-Asari responded to one amnesty offer that he considered meagre by
announcing a death threat against petroleum workers. Shell evacuated
hundreds of expatriates and oil derricks briefly slowed to a stop. The
next day, oil prices hit $50 a barrel for the first time.
Nigeria’s government offered Mr. Dokubo-Asari a truce and $1,000
apiece, he says, for his AK-47 rifles, numbering 3,182. He says he took
the deal and used the profits to purchase more weapons and return to the
swamp.
There, he recounts he was finally arrested and coerced into another
round of negotiations. Fearing assassination, he fled to Cotonou, Benin,
where he says he founded a school for Niger Delta children. He showed a
video of him teaching kids kung fu at the school.
New warlords quickly took Mr. Dokubo-Asari’s place. Marauding under
noms de guerre like Gen. Shoot-at-Sight, Gen. Africa and Gen. Young
Shall Grow, they formed a loose confederation of gunmen calling itself
the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND, and
crippled enough oil infrastructure to bring Nigeria’s production on some
days to a near-halt.
Makeshift refineries run by oil bandits, such as this one near Port Harcourt, worsen the Niger Delta’s pollution.
That was when Nigeria announced the 2009 amnesty. In televised
ceremonies, guerrillas dropped off rifles, machine guns, tear-gas
canisters, dynamite bundles, rocket launchers, antiaircraft guns,
gunboats and grenades to be sold to the government, which also offered
the nonviolence training courses and nine-month vocational classes.
Theft fell sharply. Yet now, just as Nigeria’s state oil company has
begun institutionalising pipeline-watch jobs for some ex-militants,
theft has blossomed again. “It’s quite an escalation. If nothing is
done, it will continue to increase because more and more people will
just come to feel that this is a gold field,” said Shell’s Mr. Sunmonu.
“We’re not going to give up on this and run away from it. We believe it
can be stopped.”
Maclean Imomotimi left an overpacked university four years ago, the
muscular 30-year-old says, to rob barges in the Niger Delta swamps. Now,
befitting his new career, he is known as Gen. Imomotimi.
He says he accepted the government’s amnesty offer in 2011 on the
expectation he would be feted, his hotel bills and bar tabs paid;
instead, he was disappointed to receive a living allowance of just
65,000 naira ($413) a month.
So Gen. Imomotimi has returned to the waterways, this time, he says, not to rob barges but to steal oil.
“I take amnesty’s money—what [little] they give me—I take it and I
buy other guns,” he says. “There’s much, much more money in the creeks.”
