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Foreign firms back in Delta?
18/07/2003 10:07 - (SA)
Kokodiagbene - As the burnt-out village came into view off the bows of the motor yacht and its escort, a gunboat packed with heavily armed troops, the peace mission's optimism took a dent.
Four months after a bloody ethnic uprising forced international oil firms to evacuate their wells in the western Niger Delta, the local state governor was leading a confidence-building trip back into the swamp.
Earlier, as Governor James Ibori's flotilla nosed out of the mangrove forest to stop at the Anglo-Dutch giant Shell's James Creek flow station, all the signs had been positive for the firm's local manager Martin Winks.
"The washing machine's still there. The air conditioning units are usually the first things to go, and they're all there," he said, as Ibori's luxury yacht came upon a two-storey Shell houseboat.
Nearby lay the silent, but apparently undamaged, flow station itself, a jumble of pipes and tanks linking a network of 36 of the oil wells which dot the waterways of southern Nigeria.
Production could restart at James Creek within days if Shell agrees that security has returned. Elsewhere in the Niger Delta, it will take more work to repair the wells and rebuild political trust.
On March 14 militants from the Ijaw ethnic group lanched an armed rebellion in the swamps west of the oil city of Warri, attacking oil facilities and the villages of the neighbouring Itsekiri community.
At least five Nigerian oil workers were killed, along with a dozen military personnel guarding them and an unknown - but certainly higher - number of villagers. Thousands of refugees fled the region.
Shell, France's Total and US major ChevronTexaco airlifted out their staff and stopped up their wells. World prices shot up on the news. At one point more than 40% of Nigeria's production was halted.
Now, four months on, an uneasy calm has returned to the swamps, and Ibori has launched himself into an energetic campaign to resolve local differences and persuade the foreign firms to come back to work.
"I will go through, trying to make these communities understand that they don't need to take up arms. I will go, at the risk of exposing myself to danger, to speak to armed youths," he said.
This week the governor, Shell managers, a small group of journalists and a platoon of soldiers armed with belt-fed machineguns, assault rifles and rocket launchers set off on a tour of Ijaw fishing villages.
Near James Creek, in the fishing village of Kokodiagbene, Ibori and his friends were the honoured guests of the community, and given the traditional Ijaw welcome gifts of fish, gin and bundles of cash.
Warm words were also exchanged, and community leaders promised that Shell was welcome back into an area where, until recently, the firm had extracted 130 000 barrels of oil per day.
Further into the swamps, where the creeks turn brackish and tidal as they approach the Atlantic, the mission came upon a more depressing sight.
The first sign that something is amiss in Otumara is another Shell houseboat. This one, the Challenger, has indeed lost its air-conditioning, as Winks predicted, but looters have also stripped it of its roof.
A few hundred metres further on, Otumara village, once a dirt-poor but habitable huddle of shanties and fishing jetties and home to a few hundred Itsekiris, has been burned to the ground.
Otumara flowstation has also been damaged, its roofing torn off, its offices ransacked. Oil wells near the site appear to have been stripped of some of their equipment.
"The oil industry is seen as a manifestation of government," explained Winks. "And when people get into a state of hostile frenzy, anything in their path is attacked."
Ijaws are angry with government because they believe they have been excluded from the fruits of Nigeria's young democracy.
They say Itsekiri dominate local government, state and federal authorities have starved them of development and the oil giants pump crude from their land without giving much back in terms of jobs and investment.
As this year's April 19 elections approached with no sign that their grievances were to be addressed, the rage erupted. Gun battles broke out with the navy, and boatloads of militants assaulted Itsekiri settlements.
Shocked by the scale of the economic and human devastation, Ibori has now swung into action, shifting the seat of his government to Warri, and seeking dialogue in the swamps.
As his motorboat headed into the delta, he said that what was needed was a "political re-engineering" to involve the Ijaws in decision making, and more money for his administration from federal government.
"We need to allocate massive finance," he said.
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