Nigeria's Deadly Days

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Corruption doesn't help. A Nigerian government audit of the oil industry last month showed discrepancies worth hundreds of millions of dollars between what oil companies say they paid the government and what authorities say they received. The federal government says it is tightening up its oversight. And there's the problem of what state governments do with the money they receive from Abuja. Thanks to high oil prices, Rivers, one of the biggest oil-producing states, has seen its revenues increase. But many schools still don't have furniture and roads are crumbling. Rivers' Information Commissioner Magnus Abe says that "there are lots of things we are doing" to develop the state. "Things are changing — whether rapidly depends on how you look at it." A copy of the 2006 state budget obtained by Time shows Government House overheads increasing from $38.6 million in 2005 to $81.1 million this year, while spending on salaries for state employees went up by less than the rate of inflation. Last year the state government bought two corporate jets (it says one of them is an air ambulance available for rent). Abe says that "it's not nice to suggest" Rivers may be spending too much in certain areas. "I don't think we can fight poverty by going back to live in caves," he says. "We need aircraft for a variety of reasons."

It would help matters if there was an effective opposition to enforce accountability. But in Rivers, Obasanjo's ruling People's Democratic Party fills every seat at both state and local level. Many frustrated citizens see next year's elections as a chance to get rid of the party. But the poll could prove bloody. Human-rights lawyer Nsirimovu says opposition groups have realized "that AK-47s are a necessary ingredient in elections in the Niger Delta," and will try to arm their own supporters in an attempt to counter ruling-party intimidation. "Then things will get really ugly."

mend, too, is looking toward the election. A militant from the group who spoke with Time on condition of anonymity said that it would fight efforts by supporters of Obasanjo to change the constitution to allow the President to run for a third term — moves that last week looked as if they may be blocked by Nigerian lawmakers. But even if the war that Dokubo-Asari and others have threatened never comes to pass, the violence could get bad enough to force oil companies to close down more of their land-based installations and concentrate production offshore.

The militants' campaign has widespread local support. One of the most popular new songs in the Delta describes a police raid on a house. A young man tells the police that he won't go with them to the station and warns: "If you fire [shoot at] me, I fire you." "There is overwhelming community sympathy for what they are doing," says Ledum Mitee, a human-rights campaigner in Port Harcourt, who describes the Delta's problems as "a crisis of frustration," which he hopes can be solved without violence. "[The militants] are seen as people who can stand up to the oppressors."

Mitee heads the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (mosop), the group founded by Saro-Wiwa. In January, he was asked to negotiate the release of the first hostages taken by mend. When Mitee arrived at the camp where the hostages were being held, he was shocked. "I consider myself a person who can speak on these issues — our problems and protests," he says. "But getting there and seeing 200 to 300 young men in uniforms, machines guns, rocket launchers and ammunition" — Mitee moves his hands through the air in front of him making the shape of a heaping mound of ordnance — "I said, 'God, so we have come to this.'"