Amnesty no cure for militant rage created by poverty

It is a little after dark in Port Harcourt and the electricity comes on long enough to illuminate a football match on the forecourt of a petrol station.

The young players have a line of parked cars waiting for a rumoured delivery of fuel the next morning.

The dim light shows the exhaust fumes of passing traffic and a game that's as enthusiastic as it is shortlived. After five minutes, the lights go out.

Within a 300km radius of the capital of Rivers State there is a larger reserve of sweet, easily refined crude oil than anywhere else in the world.

And yet the forecourt friendly gives a glimpse of much of what has gone wrong in the Niger Delta: a toxic cocktail of unemployment, fuel shortages, pollution, poverty and power cuts.

These are what people mean when they talk about the "underlying causes" of the armed uprising that halved production in Africa's oil giant and eventually prompted a much-vaunted and now failing amnesty.

According to its own statistics, the Nigerian Government has spent £37 billion ($80 billion) to disarm and rehabilitate Delta militants whose kidnappings, bombings and attacks on oil installations hobbled the energy sector and moved world oil markets. A series of recent attacks, culminating in a multiple car bombing at the site of peace talks in the Delta's Bayelsa State claimed by the powerful Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend), have left many here asking where the money went.

Part of the answer is supposed to lie about 45km outside Port Harcourt at Aluu, one of the half dozen amnesty camps where young fighters who emerged from the creeks to lay down their weapons are supposed to be starting their new lives.

A rundown series of outbuildings, Aluu is home to 300 surrendered militants. The camp's de facto leader is a tall, powerfully built man who calls himself Prince Wisdom.

Formerly second in command to Dokubo Asari, he was among the most senior militants to take part in the amnesty. And he's not happy with the results.

"Nothing is being done up to this day," he says, sitting in the back of a car parked at a safe distance from the camp. "The boys are not being rehabilitated. There is no water and no lights in the camp."

Before the 29-year-old became a prince, he was Jihad Amacribe - a junior officer in the army who deserted after the execution of Delta activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

The militants are not criminals as the Government calls them, he insists. They fought because of the "deprivation" and "because nothing is done for the Niger Delta", which produces more than 95 per cent of the country's export earnings.

Only 120 of his boys have remained at the camp. The others have drifted home or back to the creeks where many of their weapons were hidden, rather than handed in. "You can't take someone who was licking sugar and give him salt to lick and expect him to be happy," he warns.

While complaining of asthma and death threats from his erstwhile boss, Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, Prince Wisdom is running out of patience: "If they don't settle me I will use my last blood to fight them. I will destroy a lot of things."

Among the key architects of the amnesty was then-spokeswoman for Mend, Annkio Briggs.

Sitting in her house in the backstreets of Port Harcourt, she's unequivocal in saying the amnesty has failed: "The issue of the Delta and the financial crisis when oil production went under 1 million barrels a day made the Government offer the amnesty."

She says she believes the Government intended to use a rejection of the amnesty as a pretext to unleash the army and "declare war" on the people of the Niger Delta. The ceasefire has "called their bluff" and exposed false promises about infrastructure, jobs and training.

In her words, Africa's most populous nation is a place "where your vote can cost you your life": a place of epic corruption where "97 per cent of the wealth is taken by a handful of people"; where "police will kill you" for the equivalent of 50p.

"Violence is not the core of the issue, it's a symptom. It's the only way to get attention. We've warned the Government and the international community that this won't go away. The Niger Delta is a powder keg of nuclear proportions."

Across town in his crumbling office overlooking the rusted rolling stock of the defunct colonial railway, Ledum Mitee offers a living link with the peaceful protests of the past.

Ken Saro-Wiwa and the activists who were hung under the dictator General Sani Abacha in 1995 were friends of the veteran lawyer, who now heads the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (Mosop). The amnesty, he says, is just "patronage and corruption".

"'Just drop your guns and we'll give you some cash' can't be a substitute for a peace process," he says.

The oil companies claim there is now peace and cite increased oil production as evidence, he says. "They've just bought some time. People's lives have not improved and they are saying, 'We have dropped our guns and you are getting more revenue and we are getting more misery'."

Solutions are not necessarily as elusive as they seem, he argues. "There are simple things that you can do to tie production to community benefits." He reels off a list: use electricity at oil company flow stations to give power and pump water to local communities; put royalties per barrel into a community trust fund making people allies in production.

"Once the lives of these people improves even marginally they will not buy loyalty so easily. Remember you have to break the legs of the people to sell them crutches."

Hundreds of communities nestled among the rivers, creeks and swamps of the Delta have received a similarly bitter dividend from the oil wealth being pumped out.

In many senses, the exception lies further out in Ogoniland, one of the few communities to turn its back decisively on oil. The place called K-Dere offers a glimpse of a different region that has been lost in the past half century of drilling.

Behind his tin-roofed house, Amstel Gbarakpor starts unloading yams on the floor to illustrate the huge changes that have taken place in the once-polluted soil around the village, where the pumping stopped in 1993.

"Before we couldn't grow anything without large amounts of fertiliser. Now we need no fertiliser at all," he says. A community leader who grew up during the worst of the oil abuses and mass protests against Shell, he remembers the dark days surrounding Saro-Wiwa's execution.

"Because of Shell, we couldn't get crops like this," he says. "Shell was here from 1958 to 1993 and we got nothing. The only tarred road led to the oil wells."

Those wells are staying sealed for now but talks are under way to relaunch operations with another company as local feelings still run high at the mention of Shell.

Despite the fertile fields of Ogoniland, there is widespread support for another experiment with oil but on wholly different terms. "We know what happened before but the new leadership won't take the shit that we took," says the 48-year-old.

Back towards the main road, an ominous reminder of past atrocities rumbles in, in the form of a Shell convoy on its way to cap some of the rusting wells that are scattered through the fields of K-Dere.

The truck is escorted into this enemy territory by black jeeps known as "scorpions" from the Joint Task Force - the Nigerian security forces deployed as the oil industry's enforcers in the Delta.

For all the talk of peaceful partnerships for development, the lead scorpion carries a different message. Above the heads of the heavily armed soldiers, "Warlord" has been painted by hand in white letters.

- INDEPENDENT