Pirates
Page 12
The deal was done. Our hosts’ penchant for public speaking seemed suddenly to disappear. We took our leave, hit the streets and got the hell out of there. I’m no eco-warrior, but I’ve seen some dreadful things that man has done, and Ajegunle definitely makes the top ten.
9. The Juju Men
There are two kinds of piracy in Nigeria.
The first is purely criminal. It might be driven by the fact that the people are poor, but it is essentially armed robbery on water. The looting of boats in the quarantine zone of Lagos, the problems that prevented the fishermen of Ajegunle from casting their nets further afield: these were down to attacks from pirates who had a purely criminal motivation.
But there is another side to Nigerian piracy – a political side, carried out by insurgent groups in the Niger Delta. It is an irony that one of Nigeria’s biggest problems is a direct result of one of its greatest assets. Oil.
I’d seen for myself in Ajegunle that while Nigeria might be oil rich, its people are some of the poorest in the world. But that only tells half the story. Standard Bank – one of Africa’s largest financial institutions – estimates that over the past 37 years Nigeria has earned $1.19 trillion in oil revenue. That’s 1.9 million million bucks. Nigeria’s current yearly revenue from oil is around $40 billion. On the flip side of the coin, in the 30 years between 1970 and 2000 the number of Nigerians living on less than a dollar a day increased almost five-fold from 19 million to 90 million. The average income is less than that of Senegal, but Senegal doesn’t export oil – it exports fish and nuts.
Forty billion dollars a year revenue; 90 million people on less than a dollar a day. You don’t need a PhD in advanced mathematics to work out that something’s happening to the dosh.
Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. According to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission – Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency – around 70 per cent of all oil revenue is stolen or wasted. It is thought that 85 per cent of all the money made from Nigeria’s oil ends up in the pockets of 1 per cent of the population. Nigeria might be a place with huge natural resources, but it’s also a place where the divide between very rich and impossibly poor is massive. A study in 2003 determined the top five most corrupt public institutions in Nigeria. The list goes like this: the police, political parties, national and state assemblies, local/municipal government, federal/state executive councils. It’s a list that doesn’t really leave much hope for the ordinary man or woman in the street.
The Niger Delta is the main oil-producing region of Nigeria. In 2008 it produced, on average, $2.2 billion of oil every month. The federal government is officially supposed to distribute about half of the country’s oil wealth among the state governors, but because of the level of corruption, this money simply does not trickle down to the people. According to a report by Human Rights Watch in 2006, the government of Rivers State was awarded an annual budget of $1.3 billion. Out of this, the state apportioned: $65,000 a day for ‘transportation fees’ for the governor’s office, $10 million for catering, entertainment, gifts and souvenirs, and $38 million for two helicopters. Health services in the same period received just $22 million.
As a result, the Niger Delta suffers terrible poverty even by Nigerian standards. Less than a quarter of its inhabitants have access to clean water and very few villages have anything like what you and I would consider to be the most basic of amenities. The oil wealth that could have been spent on health and education for the millions of impoverished citizens of the Delta has been embezzled by the various layers of political corruption. Some of the money has even ended up in the UK. In 2007 a British court froze the assets of the former governor of Delta State, James Ibori. The frozen assets were said to amount to $35 million. While he was in office Ibori’s official salary was $25,000. So either he’d been saving up for 1,400 years or he had other interests.
Extreme poverty is not the only consequence of the oil industry in the Niger Delta. It has also led to a shocking level of environmental pollution. Each year about 300 individual oil spills are reported, but the World Bank estimates that the true number could be ten times that. In 2008 reported oil spills amounted to 10,000 barrels, but individual spills can be bigger even that that – in 1998 one leak released 800,000 barrels. The effect this has on the environment is devastating. People living among the oilfields are constantly breathing in methane gas; a minor leak can destroy a year’s worth of food for an entire community. Oil-infected waters have destroyed the fish population and have had a devastating effect on the mangrove forests of the Delta, with dreadful consequences for wildlife and humans alike.
The more I learned about the Niger Delta, the more I realized that while Nigeria’s natural resources were highly profitable for a privileged few, and of course constantly propped up by our own oil addiction, the consequences of the oil industry were very bad news for the ordinary people of Nigeria. It was in the late 1980s that the dissatisfaction with their lot felt by so many of them turned itself into a series of insurgent groups.
The first of these groups to receive widespread attention was the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). The Ogoni are a small indigenous group of around half a million, and their homeland – which they call Ogoniland – is located in the Niger Delta’s Rivers State east of the capital city of Port Harcourt. They suffered more than most when the oil workers moved into their land. In 1990 MOSOP, led by the Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, started a non-violent campaign against the government and the oil producers. MOSOP drew up an Ogoni Bill of Rights which demanded a fair share of oil revenues and a reversal of the environmental damage that had already been caused.
In 1993 MOSOP organized peaceful marches by almost half of the Ogoni population, designed to bring the situation to the attention of the international community. Soon afterwards the Nigerian government embarked upon a military occupation of the area. The following year Ken Saro-Wiwa was arrested on bogus charges. He and eight other members of MOSOP were tried in what was widely agreed to be a kangaroo court. They were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. On 10 November 1995 the non-violent campaigner and his eight colleagues were executed.
MOSOP continued despite their leader’s death, but the Niger Delta problem gave rise to several other groups, more militant than Ken Saro-Wiwa’s organization. These included the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force, led by Alhaji Dokubo-Asari. The NDPVF threatened ‘all-out war’ against the government. President Obasanjo offered Asari amnesty and money in return for the NDPVF’s weapons, but soon reneged on the deal. Asari was arrested and remains in prison.
The latest, and largest, of these groups is MEND – the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. They first came to widespread public attention in January 2006 when they kidnapped four foreign oil workers. Since then they have mounted sustained attacks on oil pipelines in the Delta, their stated aim being to reduce the country’s oil production to the barest minimum. They have also continued their policy of pirating foreign ships and kidnapping foreign oil workers – ‘white gold’ as they’re referred to in the Delta. In 2006 they kidnapped 80 foreigners. Between January and July 2007 they took more than 150. In 2007 the kidnap and ransom response company ASI Global rated Nigeria as being second only to Iraq in terms of kidnap threat; in the same year, foreign oil companies removed all non-essential personnel from the region.
MEND’s job is made a good deal easier by the geography of the Delta – the network of mangrove swamps, creeks and channels that make it such a good place to hide. If you have a boat, you can move around the Delta virtually unseen; and of course you can take your hostages with you. It’s pirate heaven. Or hell, depending on your point of view.
MEND’s attacks on oil installations and their kidnapping campaign have had a direct result on the Niger Delta’s oil output, reducing it by about a third. The organization has three main demands: the release of Alhaji Dokubo-Asari from prison, the receipt of 50 per cent of the
oil revenue of the Niger Delta and the withdrawal of government troops from the region. Unlike Ken Saro-Wiwa’s MOSOP, MEND positions itself decidedly at the violent end of the scale, warning the oil industry of its intentions in the following terms: ‘It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can, or die in it… Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.’
And they mean it. Their attacks have become increasingly bold. I was told by one trawler owner I met in Nigeria, who wanted to remain anonymous, that some vessels in the Bight of Benin fly special flags to indicate that they have paid MEND off in order to reduce their chance of being pirated. But the militant pirates don’t only attack boats. In June 2008 MEND attack vessels hit the Bonga oil platform. This platform can extract up to 200,000 barrels of oil per day, but because it lies 75 miles from the coast it was generally believed to be out of the militants’ range. That one attack shut down 10 per cent of Nigeria’s oil production. The Nigerian government has attempted to downplay the organization’s significance since MEND first appeared by saying that it’s just a criminal gang and has tried to quash it by military force. To this end, they have established the Joint Task Force – a combined force taken from the navy, the army and the police – specifically to combat crime, militancy and piracy in the Niger Delta. The JTF was dispatched to the Delta under the moniker Operation Restore Hope – ironically the same phrase the United Nations used for their activities in Somalia that ended in the disastrous Battle of Mogadishu. But if restoring hope truly is the aim of the JTF, it has quite a job on its hands: MEND know the area around the Delta much better than the government forces; they are better equipped and very well armed. (We heard rumours of a ship run by an enterprising arms dealer that sailed in and out of the region, a kind of floating gun supermarket. Whether this was true or not, I don’t know, but there’s certainly no shortage of weapons in that part of Africa.) And in any case, Nigeria being Nigeria, it is said that the JTF troops are far from squeaky clean. They have faced numerous allegations over the murder and rape of hundreds of civilians in areas thought to be militant strongholds – not exactly the best way of endearing yourself to the local population. The JTF is also unpopular in certain circles because in its struggle against MEND it is seen as protecting the interests of the oil multinationals and not the Nigerian people.
Conversely, the insurgents have the support of a large proportion of the public. Their aims are the aims of the common people: an end to poverty and government corruption. It is possible to buy on the beaches of the Niger Delta wooden models, about a foot long, depicting a boat with a couple of MEND militants – identifiable by a flash of red on their balaclavas – with two blindfolded oyibos in the back who have oil-company logos carved on their clothes. And people only sell these kidnapping mementos because there’s a market for them among the locals. The Niger Delta, after all, is hardly a tourist hot spot.
It is of course the case, as happens with any such militant organization, that criminal gangs – in Nigeria they call them cults – have tried to get into the act, pirating and kidnapping for financial gain rather than political ends. MEND are savvy enough to distance themselves from such cults. In July 2007 they secured the release of a three-year-old British girl who was being held for ransom in Rivers State; in October 2008 they freed 18 oil workers who had been kidnapped for non-political reasons by people they referred to as ‘sea pirates’.
In Lagos the pirates were purely criminal. From our point of view, this meant they had no reason to want to talk to us, no agenda that they wanted to promote. MEND, we thought, would be different. They had a drum to bang. They wanted their cause to gain attention. If we wanted to meet Nigerian pirates, they were our best bet; and if we wanted to contact MEND, we’d have to leave Lagos and travel south into the Delta. It wasn’t a journey to be undertaken lightly, and the Nigerian authorities warned us against it. A delicate ceasefire between government forces and MEND had just collapsed, and the insurgents’ policy of taking Europeans hostage meant that we would be very much in the firing line. Moreover, none of us had forgotten about Matthew Maguire and Robin Barry Hughes. They had been kidnapped by pirates five months previously and it was MEND who had claimed responsibility. The rumour was that they had specifically targeted British hostages because of a statement Gordon Brown had made in which he indicated his willingness to aid the Nigerian government should their ability to produce oil come under threat. All this meant that our plan to contact the MEND pirates was even more dangerous. But we knew that if we wanted fully to understand piracy in Nigeria, we needed to hear what MEND had to say. We needed to meet them.
So it was that we prepared to make the journey from Lagos to Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, one of the nine states that make up the Niger Delta. We knew that MEND had Matthew Maguire and Robin Barry Hughes; we knew there was a possibility that they would see us as more desirable hostages. It wasn’t too fanciful to believe that they would be willing to release Maguire for one of us. So it was that we forced ourselves to decide who, if push came to shove, should be the one to offer themselves up in that extreme scenario. In reality, the decision was already made for us. Everyone else in the crew had children. Everyone except the presenter. In retrospect it was a bit of a romantic notion, but I couldn’t say I relished the idea of an enforced stay at the pleasure of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. Still, as we flew to the region that was their centre of operations, I couldn’t shake the thought that it was a distinct possibility…
For the purposes of our investigations, we like to travel under the radar. Attract too much attention and people get nervous. Camera shy. They certainly start looking at you in a different way if they see you have security. I suppose that goes with the territory of searching out people who don’t always want to be found. As we emerged from Port Harcourt International Airport, though, it was immediately clear that keeping a low profile was going to be a bit of an issue.
A team of armed police – uniformed and plain clothes, about 15 in all – was waiting for us; we were driven to our hotel by a police officer and our vehicle was flanked by police vans with wailing sirens. We cut through the thick, noisy, dirty traffic – people just got out of the way, and I would have done too – but it felt as if every man, woman and child knew we had arrived, and they stared at us as we passed through the busy streets. We couldn’t have been more obvious if we’d tried. The security had been laid on at the insistence of the Port Harcourt authorities. From a safety point of view it made sense, I guess – every person with white skin in Port Harcourt is assumed to be an oil worker and is therefore a potential kidnapping victim. There are many such kidnappings a year from Port Harcourt and for us to be swiped would have been a high-profile calamity for the Nigerian authorities.
From an investigative point of view, however, it was a disaster. We were told that we couldn’t go anywhere or film anything without our security team. They didn’t leave us even when we arrived at our hotel. The lobby was crowded. We were later told that it was full of plain-clothes police, undercover government officials and MEND spies. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but I will say this: there were a lot of people hanging around in that lobby reading newspapers and doing not much else, and they didn’t look to me like residents. I felt like I was living in a John le Carré novel. Before long, a creeping sense of paranoia started to ooze over us – a paranoia that would be with us for the rest of our stay in the Delta. I’ve been to some paranoid countries in my travels, places that make you feel uncomfortable for reasons you can’t quite articulate. But the Niger Delta takes the cake.
MEND is a shadowy organization. Little is known about its power structure, and if its members want to hide they can easily do so in the Delta. We’d had an indication from people claiming to represent the movement before we arrived in Port Harcourt that they would be willing to meet us. But such people are by their very nature elusive.
You don’t just walk up to their doorstep and demand an interview. You don’t summon them; they summon you. We knew we could be in for a long wait before that happened, so in the meantime we took to the street. I wanted to see the places these Nigerian pirates were known to frequent, and witness for myself some of the problems I had heard so much about.
Port Harcourt was different from Lagos. You feel even less safe walking round the town. The locals were noticeably more hostile towards white faces – you could see it in their aggressive stares. Our police escort didn’t help matters because they were obviously even less trusted than the oyibos. This was hardly surprising: during my time in that town I saw members of the police force hitting people in the street for no apparent reason; I saw them bashing cars with their AKs. It wasn’t exactly Heartbeat, and I have to say that when the coppers were out of sight (which didn’t happen very often) I felt very, very white and very, very vulnerable. Never more so than when we were on the quayside. Bonny Island, the main terminal for all the crude oil extracted in the region, was just 40 minutes away up the creek. The waterways were filled with small elderly motorboats that ferried the locals up to Bonny Island and to the nearby villages. I didn’t fancy taking my chances in one of those, not least because it was on this stretch of water that Matthew Maguire and Robin Barry Hughes had been pirated. I wondered how near or far away from us they were at that very moment, but in the Niger Delta it was impossible to know. Their location would only be known when – and if – MEND wanted it to be known.
Our fixer in Port Harcourt was a local independent journalist, a respected and intelligent man. He accompanied us everywhere and gave us the benefit of his knowledge. It was while I was talking to him, however, that I got one of my starkest ever insights into the difference between African culture and our own. We had driven, together with our always-present police escort, along a road that looked down into a nearby slum. This, our fixer told us, was where pirates and militants were known to live. From our vantage point on the high ground we could see that there was a shoot-out happening down below.