Oil Riches Bring Blood to Nigerian Villagers Fees Paid to State Never Reach Poor
By Lydia Polgreen
At first glance, it is hard to imagine anyone fighting over this place.
Approached by a creek, the only way to get here a day’s journey by dugout canoe from the nearest town it presents itself as a collection of battered shacks teetering on a steadily eroding beach.
On Sunday morning, the village children shimmy out of their best clothes after church and head to a muddy puddle to collect water.
Their mothers use the murky liquid to cook whatever soup they can muster from the meager catch of the day.
Yet for months a pitched battle has been fought between communities that claim authority over this village and the right to control what lies beneath its watery ground: a potentially vast field of crude oil that has caught the attention of a major energy company.
The conflict has left dozens dead and wounded, sent hundreds fleeing their homes and roiled this once-quiet part of the Niger Delta. It has also laid bare the desperate struggle of impoverished communities to reap crumbs from the lavish banquet the oil boom has laid in this oil-rich yet grindingly poor area.
“This region is synonymous with oil, but also with unbelievable poverty,” said Anyakwee Nsirimovu, executive director in the Niger Delta of the Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. “The world depends on their oil, but for the people of the Niger Delta oil is more of a curse than a blessing.”
Africa is in the midst of an oil boom, with companies and governments pouring $50 billion into projects that may double the continent’s oil output in the next decade.
In the world’s thirst for oil and the United States’ efforts to obtain it outside the troubled Middle East, African oil has become essential. Africa is expected to provide the United States with a quarter of its oil supply in the next decade, compared with about 15 percent now, and much of it will come from the Gulf of Guinea, where the Niger Delta sits.
But much of that oil will come from places like Obioku, and with it a tangled and often bloody web of conflict marked by poverty and a near abdication of responsibility by government.
Even though Nigeria elected a democratic government in 1999, which raised hopes for the long-suffering delta region, almost none of the enormous wealth the oil creates reaches places like this. The isolation of Obioku is total. With no fast boats available, the nearest health center or clinic is a day’s journey away. No telephone service exists here. Radio brings the only news of the world outside. Nothing hints that the people here live in a country enjoying the profits of record-high oil prices.
“It is like we don’t exist, as far as government is concerned,” said Worikuma Idaulambo, chairman of Obioku’s council of chiefs.
Nigeria, a longstanding member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, exported nearly $30 billion of oil in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The Nigerian government sends 13 percent of its revenue to the underdeveloped states where the oil is produced. Much of that is siphoned off by corrupt regional officials who often pocket the money or waste it on lavish projects that do little, if anything, for ordinary people.
A result has been a violent struggle over the jobs, schools and other aid that oil companies have offered to encourage local residents to cooperate.
Here in Obioku, as in many towns in the delta, an oil company, in this case a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell, has brought the only signs of modernity. In 1998, Shell bought the rights to drill for oil near a small fishing settlement at the edge of Obioku, no more than a handful of rough shelters of grass and wood.
Shell signed agreements with the chiefs of Obioku and with leaders in the nearest town, Nembe-Bassambiri, to help develop Obioku. In time, Shell built a water tower, gave the village a generator and built a primary school. In return, the village agreed to allow Shell and its contractors to work freely.
For years Shell did nothing with the field. Then, early in 2004, a Shell contractor arrived to begin work, and trouble started.
Officials in a nearby village, Odioma, laid claim to the land, and demanded that the oil company pay tribute if it wanted to drill.
“This is Odioma land,” said Daniel Orumiegha-Bari, a member of Odioma’s council of chiefs. “It belongs to us. Anyone claiming otherwise is an interloper wanting to revise hundreds of years of our history.”
Chiefs in Nembe-Bassambiri, who were receiving payments on the premise that the land was theirs, rejected Odioma’s claim.
In this labyrinth of rivers and creeks, where fishermen eke out a living casting homemade nets, who owned Obioku was academic to the chiefs of Odioma and Nembe-Bassambiri until Shell arrived. But with the sudden promise of payment, the dispute escalated, first in increasingly belligerent letters among the three communities.
In February, a boat filled with local government councilors on a mission to broker a deal among the feuding communities was attacked, and a dozen people were killed.
Officials in Nembe-Bassambiri blamed a militant youth group in Odioma for the slaughter. The group is believed to be involved in bunkering stealing oil by breaking into pipelines.
As is common here, members of the youth group had been hired by an oil company contractor to provide security on the waterways, chiefs in Odioma and other villages said. Such contracts are often a way to buy cooperation from youths who would otherwise attack oil installations and harass workers.
Contending that it sought to arrest the members of the youth group, a Nigerian military unit known as the Joint Task Force, charged with security in the Niger Delta, went to Odioma on Feb. 19.
Thinking that the task force was coming to help them, the chiefs of Odioma had gathered in the palace of the village king to receive it. But gunshots pierced the air, and the chiefs scattered.
“We thought they came in peace,” said Orumiegha-Bari, the Odioma chief. “But they destroyed our village.”
The army flattened Odioma, residents said, leaving behind a barren moonscape covered with a carpet of ash, broken glass and burned concrete. At least 17 people died in the raid, Orumiegha- Bari said.
Brigadier General Elias Zamani, commander of the Joint Task Force, said in an interview that his soldiers opened fire only after they had been fired upon.
“They were lying in wait for the arrival of our troops,” Zamani said of the youth group. He said some houses had been destroyed when stray bullets struck buildings where petroleum was stored.
The army disputes the death toll, saying army officials asked to see bodies and graves and could not find any. But a report on the attack by Amnesty International in November concluded that the destruction seemed to have had specific targets, destroying the houses of the village king and other officials.
It is hard to say who is to blame for the violence that has wracked this pocket of Nigeria. Some villagers and human rights groups blame the oil companies and their contractors, which pay for economic development and employ youths, creating an incentive for communal violence. Still others blame the national, state and local governments, which collect and distribute millions of dollars in the names of local residents yet never seem to produce much benefit.
“These conflicts are a direct result of the abandonment of these communities by their government,” said Nsirimovu, the human rights advocate. “If their government took care of them they wouldn’t be fighting over these little scraps and rewards from the oil companies.”
Nigeria’s federal officials point out that even if Nigeria is having an oil boom, it does not amount to great wealth per capita. In 2004, after costs were deducted, Nigeria’s oil revenue amounted to about 50 cents for each of the country’s 130 million people, they said.
Shell officials defended their role in the crisis, saying they withdrew from the area as soon as a conflict over ownership arose.
They said it was primarily the job of Nigeria’s elected officials to develop the country, but added that in addition to taxes and royalties, they contributed 3 percent of their annual operating budget to a fund to help develop the delta. In 2004, the company’s contribution to that fund was nearly $70 million
The communities fighting over the oil fields are in Bayelsa State, which produces a third of Nigeria’s oil and has an annual budget of more than $500 million to spend on its three million people. But most of it goes to white elephants like a new mansion for the governor and his deputy.
“This is what we eat,” said Paulgba Tekikuma, an Obioku resident, gesturing to a small bowl half-full of tiny fish and crustaceans she planned to mix with cassava. “The water, sometimes it get the babies sick when they drink. But we no get any other.”