Nigeria's Deadly Days

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The latest wave of attacks, though, is different. The government dismisses mend and similar groups as the same criminal gangs responsible for bunkering and past attacks — and there is undoubtedly some crossover of membership. The region is awash with unemployed men; weapons are easy to find, either left over from the 2003 election or smuggled in by boat from neighboring countries. But the latest attacks appear to have been driven more by frustration and an ideology of armed resistance than by thoughts of criminal gain. While it is "very difficult to draw a line between the criminals and the so-called liberators," according to Anyakwee Nsirimovu, a human-rights lawyer in Port Harcourt, "You do now have groups that articulate certain policies and ideas and principles." Those principles — the oil belongs to us; give us development and compensation or get out — have been cemented by the Nigerian government's handling of the crisis. Dokubo-Asari was little known when he began, say activists in Port Harcourt. But when he turned on the government he became a self-styled liberation leader. By jailing him, the government risks making him the martyr he says he is. mend has demanded his release.

A new ideological coloring to the attacks has been backed by increasingly sophisticated tactics. A car bomb just over two weeks ago, at an oil-truck stop in Warri, was activated by a cell phone and came just days after China's Hu met with Nigeria's leaders. The bomb was "the final warning" before fresh attacks on oil workers, storage facilities, bridges, offices and other "soft, oil-industry targets," a mend official wrote in an e-mail to news organizations. But it was also, the e-mail said, a message to "the Chinese government and its oil companies to steer well clear of the Niger Delta. The Chinese government by investing in stolen crude places its citizens in our line of fire."

Western companies have grown used to working with the threat of attack. But the dangers are increasing. U.S. oil executive Ricky Wiginton, 51, was shot dead in Port Harcourt by assailants riding a motorbike as he drove to work at drilling-equipment maker Baker Hughes last week, and a day later three oil workers with Italian oil contractor Saipem were kidnapped in the same city but later released. mend says it was not responsible for either act, but whoever is doing the killing has spooked the oil companies. Shell, which is by the far the largest operator in Nigeria, has been forced to evacuate staff and scale back operations in the past few months. Time asked representatives of a number of oil companies to comment for this story, but all declined interviews. In an e-mailed statement, a Chevron spokesman said, "We take the security of our people and facilities seriously, and for obvious reasons cannot discuss the measures we implement to mitigate these risks." A Shell spokeswoman pointed to the company's 2004 report entitled People and the Environment, which details the steps the company is taking to clean up environmental damage, train local employees in the Delta, build schools and health centers for local communities, and end the wasteful and destructive "flaring" of gas, as Nigeria's government requires it to do by 2008. But a letter in the report from Shell's local managing director Basil Omiyi conceded that the people of the Niger Delta "see few of the benefits" from oil.

Nigeria's federal government has been promising to help the Delta for decades. But government bodies have come and gone with little progress. The latest, the Niger Delta Development Commission (nddc), was set up in 2000 to coordinate development activities in the region. Funded by the oil companies, which are required to give 3% of their local budgets to the nddc, and by Nigeria's federal government, the Commission has about $235 million to spend every year. "That is peanuts compared to the problems of the area," says the nddc's head of corporate affairs, Anietie Usen. Projects are often delayed, he says, because the federal government is slow to cough up its share. Grandiose announcements, such as the unveiling by Obasanjo last month of plans to construct a $1.8 billion highway through the region and create 20,000 new jobs in the military, police and state oil companies, do little to appease feelings of neglect. "We have not received money from the federal government since last September. It makes things very difficult," Usen told Time last month. Many see the nddc as mere window dressing. In March, a bomb was thrown into the car park of its Port Harcourt office, and plastic explosives were later smuggled into the building in an apparent attempt to blow it up.