by Ross Kemp
We turned to our police guard and asked them if I could go down to the slum and film what was going on. Predictably enough, I suppose, they shook their heads. ‘No. You cannot go.’
I begged them. ‘We really need to —’
Nothing doing. ‘You cannot film this. You cannot go.’
I tried to talk them round. ‘This is the whole reason for us being here. If we can’t go and film this, what’s the point?’
One of the policemen frowned at me. ‘They have juju,’ he said.
In West Africa, juju is a form of witchcraft. But it’s not just something used to scare naughty children into good behaviour. Everyone believes in it. Everyone. The policemen told me that the pirates in the region had a special kind of juju that made bullets melt on contact with them. That was why they were so dangerous to approach.
I tried to keep my calm and turned to our fixer. He was a sophisticated man and I expected him to at least share my exasperation. But no. He was slowly nodding his head. ‘It’s true,’ he told me. ‘I have seen it. I have seen it with my own eyes.’
‘Don’t be silly, mate,’ I told him. ‘I’ve seen what a 7.62 round can do to someone and it doesn’t melt on flesh and bone.’
But he was adamant. ‘It does. I have seen it. And I will not go down there. You will not be able to shoot them and they will walk up to you and cut off your head with a machete.’
‘I don’t believe you. I want to go down there.’
‘I am not going down there. You are not going down there. And you are not allowed to film.’
Sometimes you have to accept that you’re flogging a dead horse, no matter how frustrating it might be. We weren’t going down into the slum; we weren’t going to get close to these gun-toting militants. And that was the end of that.
Our armed guards explained that the pirates achieved this magical effect by cutting their skin and putting some kind of leaf into their veins in order to make themselves like ghosts. And as we drove away from that shoot-out and a missed opportunity, I reflected that the fact that bullets patently did not melt on the skin of Nigerian pirates was actually immaterial. Our guards and our fixer believed it 100 per cent. They believed in juju in the same way a devout Christian believes in God. In a strange way that steadfast, unquestioning belief made it true in that the juju men reaped the benefit whether they were invulnerable to bullets or not. And it wasn’t lost on any of us that if even an armed police unit was too scared to approach a shoot-out, the militants involved pretty well had carte blanche to do as they pleased. I might not have believed in juju, but it made the prospect of meeting with the juju men nerve-racking, to say the least…
10. A Drop in the Ocean
Our time in Port Harcourt was a frustrating one. We kept receiving emails and mobile phone calls from MEND, but at the last minute these meetings would always fall through. What we didn’t know was that the militants were being heavily hit by the Joint Task Force at the time. They had other things on their minds than sitting in front of a camera for our benefit.
Constantly getting teed up and let down, though, had a bad effect on the camera crew and me. We know each other well, and we’ve been in dangerous places before – places where the bullets were flying – but nowhere compared to Port Harcourt for paranoia. If we were going to meet MEND, it would mean slipping out of our hotel room at night and trying to avoid our armed guards – an action that would probably get us arrested if we were caught. That in itself shrouded us in a sense of paranoid secrecy – the last thing any of us wanted to do was see the inside of one of the Nigerian jails, which by all accounts made Strangeways look like the Sheraton. But it was more than that. There aren’t many places in the world where you’re scared to leave your hotel compound, but Port Harcourt was one of them. Without wanting to sound in any way racist, in most places I’d travelled to I’d felt a vague sense of protection in being white. People might want to kill me, but the repercussions of them doing so would have been immense. You got the feeling that in Port Harcourt no one would give a shit.
Each night that we were on standby to sneak out and meet MEND, I would put calls through to two people in the UK, telling them that if I didn’t call them again by a certain time they were to contact the Foreign Office immediately because it would probably mean we’d been kidnapped. Belt and braces stuff, but necessary under the circumstances. Still, not good for your frame of mind. As a result of all these strains, tensions between the crew increased. We started getting snappy with each other. It wasn’t personal; it was simply something about that place.
We couldn’t just stay in our hotel for days on end, though. While we waited for our meet to go ahead, we made a journey – along with our security guards / armed chaperones, of course – deeper into the Niger Delta, half because we wanted to see it for ourselves, half because we knew that this was the territory in which MEND operated and we thought our chances of catching up with them would be greater if we put ourselves where they were known to be. Ogoniland is a few hours’ drive from Port Harcourt. Ken Saro-Wiwa’s heartland, this was the region where oil was first tapped in the Niger Delta, and also the first region to rise up against the effects the oil industry was having on the people, their livelihoods and their environment. I was keen to see what it was like, but I could never have imagined the devastation I was about to discover.
Oil is no longer tapped in Ogoniland. The non-violent resistance of Ken Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP had the desired effect, forcing the oil multinationals to stop drilling in that region. There are still pipelines, though, and the infrastructure that goes with them. These pipelines are a target for the militants: only the day before, one of them had been blown up. The oil companies might have withdrawn from Ogoniland, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still a dangerous place.
This is Africa as you’d imagine it. As our convoy drove along the mud tracks that led us deeper into Ogoniland, we passed thin men wearing ragged clothes, and nowhere did we see any signs of wealth. We stopped by a creek. There were fishing nets, wooden canoes and ramshackle huts. Progress had not come to Ogoniland, at least not to this part of it. You had the impression that the region looked much as it had done 100 years ago.
With one exception. A hundred years ago the area’s natural resources had yet to be discovered, or exploited.
Our plan was to travel by boat up the creek and, unusually, our guards refused to come any further. The kidnap threat here was particularly high and I suppose they didn’t want to risk it, their fully loaded AK-47s notwithstanding. Or maybe it was just because the boats all had holes in them and looked like they were about to sink. Up until now the presence of the guards had been a thorn in our side, but once we stepped into our wooden canoes and saw them and the shore ease away, we felt their absence keenly. We were about to enter the heart of the Niger Delta, and we knew that pirates, militants and kidnappers could be lying in wait around any corner, or hidden in the mangrove swamp. Not to put too fine a point on it, we were shitting ourselves.
Our guide as we slid through the water was a local man called Sonny. He sat in the back of my canoe, wearing a US Open baseball cap that looked decidedly out of place in this quiet, alien backwater. Sonny was taking us to see a damaged oil well head. It had leaked over a year ago and we were to witness the effect that leak had had.
It didn’t take long for us to see what all the fuss was about.
As we paddled, I noticed a rainbow film on the oars, like the colours you see when a child blows a soap-sud bubble. This wasn’t soap, however, and it wasn’t child’s play. Before long, you could see that the water was thick with globules of oil. You could smell it in the air too, the heavy, choking scent of crude. Here, miles from anywhere in the middle of the mangrove swamp, the air should have been clean and fresh, but instead it smelled like a petrol station. The further we went, the worse it got. If anyone had been so foolish as to light a match, God only knows what would have happened. We were warned not to use our mobile phones for fear that an electrical spark wo
uld ignite the fumes. About six months previously two guys had been killed in that way, and we were shown where the explosion had burned away a substantial part of the mangrove bushes. What a way to go. I was more than a bit worried about the wisdom of keeping the camera rolling because of the battery.
But roll we did, through the maze of dangerous swamps in the company of men we didn’t know. Sonny explained to us that fish, winkles and mangrove crabs are important to the Ogoni people. It seemed they still managed to catch a small quantity of fish in these distressed waters, though it was astonishing to me that anything managed to live there. You might as well try and live in a petrol tank, and I certainly didn’t see any sign of life as we continued our slow journey into the labyrinth. I didn’t hear any either. It was deathly silent all around.
Sonny was a quietly spoken man who seemed friendly enough; we all knew, though, how quickly things could change. I couldn’t suppress my nervousness as we continued to paddle through the polluted creek. It didn’t take long for us to arrive at the well head. By now the creek was more oil than water, and our boats approached with care. It looked like an appalling piece of modern sculpture, a confusion of pipes and plumbing, surrounded by some sort of scaffolding. There would once have been a platform on top of this so that the black gold could be tapped, barrelled, put onto barges and exported. But now that the oil companies had withdrawn from Ogoniland, this was all that was left.
We circled the well head. Around us, we could see the mangrove bushes stained with oil – these are tidal waters, so when the water swells and lowers, it leaves its polluted trace on the surrounding vegetation. The fumes were chokingly thick now – they were in our throats and in our eyes – and the air itself was hot. Sonny explained that deep in the earth huge oil reserves were bursting to gush out. The only thing that was stopping that from happening was the small piece of machinery in front of us.
At least, it was trying to stop it from happening. Sonny pointed out the clunky network of plumbing at the top of the head. ‘Can you see the oil coming up?’ he asked me. ‘If you look at that pipe up there, you can see something like smoke.’
I certainly could. A thick, cloudy vapour was hissing from the top of the well head – a bit like steam from a kettle, only this vapour was enormously explosive. There was also a constant, steady drip of viscous black liquid dropping into the water. The head might have been designed to keep the oil underground, but it clearly wasn’t doing its job very well.
There were two possible reasons for the well head not functioning properly. The first was neglect. The oil multinationals had left the area; there was no profit to be made in maintaining what they had left behind and so it had been allowed to fall into disrepair. Not, as far as I could tell, an entirely unlikely scenario. But there was another possibility too: this head could have been one hub of an illegal trade that exists all over the world but which is prevalent in Nigeria. That trade is oil bunkering.
Bunkering is a fancy word for theft. It’s big business in Nigeria – estimated to be worth $30 million a day. Looking at this leaking oil head, you could well understand why. It wouldn’t be too much of a chore to bring a barge up to an outlet like this, attach a pipe to the plumbing at the top and simply tap off as much as you could carry. It appears that this is being done by all manner of people. Impoverished Lagosians can pump a little fuel into jerrycans; corrupt politicians and officials have the means to bunker oil on a rather grander scale; militants across the Niger Delta exchange bunkered oil for weapons. The bunkered oil is taken to offshore loading stations and then sold on into the world market. The International Maritime Organization estimates that about 80,000 barrels of oil were bunkered every day in 2008. Crime breeds crime, and Dr Sofiri Peterside, director of the Centre for Advanced Social Sciences in Port Harcourt, estimates that during 2008 a thousand people died in turf wars directly related to bunkering.
Sonny explained that bunkering could be done not only from a well head like this, but also from any one of the pipes that pump fuel across the region up towards Bonny Island. All anyone needed to do was find a valve, open it and help themselves. Here on the water it was clearly more than possible that the oil dripping from this head was a result of illegal bunkering – someone had attached a pipe, taken what they wanted and failed to close up the plumbing properly.
It wasn’t the sort of place you could stay for long. My eyes and throat were stinging from the fumes. The sky above was thundery and threatening. It looked like the heavens were about to open and I remember thinking that might not be a bad thing. Perhaps it would relieve us of the symptoms the oil vapour was causing.
We headed back down the creek and returned to the bank. By now any doubts we’d had about our escorts had dissipated a bit, but we were deeply shocked by what we had just seen. We loaded ourselves back into the car. Our tour of Ogoniland was not over yet – Sonny still had a few sights to show us. Although production had stopped here, there remained a huge network of pipes taking oil through Ogoniland to the terminals on the coast. Our convoy took us to the site of an old flow station and a new one. These places pump the oil offshore. We couldn’t stay there long – this was an extremely dangerous place. The oil companies employ locals to protect the flow stations against oil bunkerers and militants. Ostensibly these people are employed to protect the community, but inevitably they divide it by overstepping the mark. It was just after we arrived when we received word that these locals already knew we were there and were on their way. Furthermore, they were armed. We knew that it was a very sensitive area to film, and that it was impossible to judge how our presence would be interpreted. Frankly, we didn’t really feel like sticking around to find out. Time for a sharp exit, and on to our final destination for the day: another deserted well head, this time one which the oil companies claim to have cleaned up.
This head was on land but it looked very similar to the one we had visited in the creek. It too had oil fumes steaming, dragon-like, from its plumbing. The surrounding ground was one huge puddle of oil. ‘So, as you see,’ Sonny told us as we padded towards the well head, ‘they have cleaned the spill. What they call “clean-up” has been done.’
It didn’t look very clean to me. Oil was still leaking from the head and the surrounding space was dead and barren. Had it ever been cleaned up? Or had someone recently come along, bunkered oil and failed to seal the oil head properly? It was impossible to tell, but one thing was sure.
This place wasn’t clean, and it wasn’t healthy.
It was devastated.
Ledum Mitee is a lawyer and human rights campaigner in the Niger Delta, a friendly and intelligent man who received me in the yard of his Ogoniland compound. Following the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Mitee is the president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. He had agreed to explain to me in more detail what it was that the inhabitants of the Niger Delta had to put up with. I asked him exactly what was threatening the survival of the Ogoni people.
‘Oil was being exploited in front of people’s houses,’ he told me. ‘In your backyard or anywhere. I grew up in a house that is about 200 metres from the nearest oil well. They spill occasionally. The only source of water that people have is stream water, and these rivers are themselves polluted. With gas flares 24 hours a day it makes it difficult for the crops to pollinate.’
The water they drank, the fish they fished for, the crops they grew – all these were being damaged by the oil industry. And I, as our fixer might have said, had seen it with my own eyes. But it wasn’t just that. Ledum explained to me that the land was important to the Ogoni people not only because of what it could produce, but because of its spiritual connotations. ‘It’s where our ancestors live. You have the right to protect them, and if you don’t, if the land is being desecrated, that portends some calamity to the community. Some forests that are sacred to the people are being felled for oil wells. We are not supposed to do that to them. The deities are annoyed.’
As Ledum spoke, I was reminded of the c
ultural differences that exist between the multinational oil corporations and the people whose land they are exploiting: the inhabitants of the Niger Delta were not only suffering environmentally and physically, they were suffering spiritually too.
MOSOP is a peaceful organization; Ledum Mitee is a peaceful man. I wondered what his thoughts were about MEND’s less than peaceful modus operandi. He spoke frankly. ‘The execution of Ken and the rest of my colleagues,’ he told me, ‘was intended to intimidate the rest. But it produced the opposite effect because most of those who have taken to militancy in other parts of the Delta cite our case as an example. They say, you were killed. I will not wait to be killed before we start killing.’
I asked him if he saw a direct connection between the piracy in the region, the militancy, the criminality and the pressure exerted by the JTF, the oil companies and the government. Ledum Mitee had no doubt. ‘All these things are one single process. One reinforces the other.’ The situation in the Niger Delta, then, was a vicious circle, and it sounded to me like it could only get worse.
I put it to Mitee that the environmental situation in Ogoniland was not just the fault of the oil companies – it was also down to the practice of oil bunkering. He agreed, and he enlightened me further on the gravity of the problem. ‘There are three stages we found of bunkering. The first stage is those who cut the pipes and put it in jerrycans. Boys who are cutting the pipes in some areas and selling to the middlemen – those who have barges. And before you can be someone at that second stage, you must have a lot of connection and leverage, with armed, military people. Then you have those guys who will take it to the high seas where you have the big tankers. That is controlled by very, very important people who call the shots from Abuja. Last year, through bunkering, we lost almost $15 billion of oil.’
