way to raise campaign funds. In March 2003, gangs attacked a series of production sites in the Delta. The oil companies evacuated their personnel, and more than a third of Nigeria’s production—over 800,000 barrels a day—was shut down.
After the 2003 elections, the militias, operating independently, began to acquire more weapons and build themselves into more formidable forces. They stole increasing amounts of oil—sometimes estimated at over 10 percent of Nigeria’s total production (which in 2010 would amount to over $5 billion stolen oil)—in collaboration with former oil workers, corrupt government officials, an international network of oil smugglers, and pirates operating widely in the Gulf of Guinea. Stealing and sabotage were largely responsible for the oil spills that despoiled the Delta. Violence was already so endemic and at such a level that by the end of 2003, an internal report for one of the major oil companies said that “a lucrative political economy of war in the region is worsening” and warned of “increasing criminalization of the Niger Delta conflict.”
The funds from the bunkering, in turn, enabled the militia leaders to further increase their arsenals and acquire much more lethal weapons and, in the words of one observer, “take militia activity to a new dimension of criminality.” As the head of one of the most notorious militias put it, “We are very close to the international waters and it’s very easy to get weapons.”
The wells and gathering systems are strung out through the swampland, mangrove forests, and shallow waters of the Delta, crisscrossed by creeks and streams—all of which provides for good cover and quick getaways on speedboats mounted with machine guns. The region is very densely populated, the birth rate is very high, and poverty is widespread. The inequities breed anger and resentment, on which the militias feed.
In September 2004 a leader of one of the gangs, a self-described admirer of Osama bin Laden and an advocate that the Ijaw ethnic group should secede and form its own country, threatened “all-out war” against the Nigerian state. That threat “pushed oil over $50 per barrel for the first time.”9
That was it for President Obasanjo. He summoned the leaders of two of the most violent groups to the federal capital of Abuja, where he met with them in the cabinet room and hammered out a peace accord. It lasted through part of 2005. But then the Delta began to descend back into violence and gang warfare.
“THE BOYS”
In January 2006, four foreign oil workers were kidnapped from a platform in the shallow waters of the Niger Delta, and then gunmen aboard speedboats attacked another oil facility in the Delta, killing 22 people, setting buildings afire, and severely damaging the equipment for managing the flow of oil.
A heretofore unknown group took credit—the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. MEND, as it became known, declared that it sought “control of resources to improve the lives of our people.” Claiming several thousand men under arms, MEND warned that it would unleash further attacks that would “set Nigeria back 15 years and cause incalculable losses,” and said it aimed “to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.” 10
A few days after the January 2006 attacks, in the snow-covered Swiss Alpine village of Davos, at the World Economic Forum, Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s president, was meeting in a seminar room to discuss his country’s economic prospects. Two of the participants, a venture capitalist from Silicon Valley and a world-famous entrepreneur from Britain, urged Obasanjo to get off oil and emulate Brazil and launch large-scale cultivation of sugarcane to make ethanol. A bemused Obasanjo, president of one of the world’s major oil producers, nodded with feigned enthusiasm and promised to give the idea serious consideration.
Toward the end of the meeting, as Obasanjo was about to leave, he was asked about the those recent attacks a few days earlier in Nigeria and whether they presaged a new wave of violence.
It was nothing to get too concerned about, he said with confidence. “The Boys,” as he called them, would be brought under control.
That was not an unreasonable expectation. After all, some of the militia and vigilante groups, including the Bakassi Boys, had been subdued over the previous few years. Moreover, it was difficult to distinguish among all those who attacked the oil industry infrastructure. They all operated with the same kind of tools—those fast speedboats, sometimes with machine guns mounted on them, AK-47s, and stolen dynamite. The picture was further complicated by the shadowy connections between