BREAKING NEWS, Oil & Gas
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Nigeria’s turbulent oilfields cannot be pacified by bribing rebels
A THOUSAND years ago an English king called Aethelred (“the Unready”) used to pay marauding Vikings sacks full of precious coins not to attack his kingdom. The trouble was, the Vikings got a taste for Danegeld, as it was later known, and kept coming back for more. King Aethelred learned a harsh lesson: when you reward bad behaviour, you get more of it.
Nigeria’s rulers have yet to learn from history. In recent weeks a group of heavily armed and masked men calling themselves the Niger Delta Avengers has caused havoc in the region where Nigeria’s oil is pumped. With speedboats and submachine guns rather than longboats and battle-axes, they are every bit as fearsome as the Danes of old, and nearly as disruptive. They claim to fight for justice (and a bigger share of oil revenues) for the people of the Niger Delta. By blowing up pipelines they have helped crash oil production from 2.2m barrels per day to 1.5m. This has hobbled the Nigerian economy and gutted the budget—petrodollars account for nearly all of the country’s exports and the vast bulk of government revenues. It has also set off global ripples. The squeeze on Nigerian oil output is one reason why the price of crude has rallied in recent weeks.
Intriguingly, for such an influential group, no one knows who the Niger Delta Avengers are or where they got their seed money. There is less mystery about why they are holding the state to ransom: because it has worked in the past.
The Nigerian army never defeated the previous group that mounted a serious insurgency in the Delta, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. Instead, in 2009, the government negotiated an amnesty with the rebels, who laid down their weapons in return for a monthly stipend of several hundred dollars each—in a region where most people make less than a dollar a day. This is far more than the UN offers other African rebels to disarm. And Nigeria’s plan to provide job training for ex-rebels, which has succeeded in other countries, was a shambles. The deal gave the region’s many jobless young men an incentive to take up arms, in the hope of being paid to lay them down again.
These Avengers are not superheroes
It is unclear how Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, will tackle the Avengers, or even whether the government is talking to them. However he proceeds, Mr Buhari should not try to buy them off. Rather, he should arrest those who have committed acts of violence or extortion. And he should work to improve the appalling governance in the Delta region, so that locals have less cause to hate the government.
Alas, the Nigerian security services are not good at hunting down rebels. As a recent study by the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, points out, the army is overstretched, has a woeful human-rights record and is hollowed out by corruption. Officers sometimes even sell their own side’s weapons to insurgents. Urgent reforms are needed to military recruitment, training and procurement.
The people of the Niger Delta have genuine grievances. In theory the region gets a generous share of the nation’s oil revenues. In practice much of the money is stolen, by federal or local bigwigs, before it reaches schools or clinics. The national budget crisis has made matters worse as many local officials have not been paid for months. Cleaning up this mess will be staggeringly hard, not least because Mr Buhari, a northern Muslim who replaced a president from the Delta, is not popular there. The task will be close to impossible unless it is part of a nationwide push to fight graft. Mr Buhari’s anti-corruption zeal seems genuine and he has shown he can make tough decisions. This week, for example, he allowed the Nigerian currency to float. He should be resolute in the Delta, too. – The Economist
— Jun 23, 2016 @ 17:45 GMT
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