Petro-Insurgency or Criminal Syndicate? Conflict & Violence in the Niger Delta

The volatility of world oil markets, and the grumbling of American consumers over rising gas and heating oil prices over the last year, has highlighted a number of key trends in world oil markets: the rapidly growing demand for oil by China and India, the questionable status of some of the mega-oilfields in the Gulf, the aggressive nationalism of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and President Ahmadinejad in Iran, and not least the spill-over effects of the Iraqi insurgency across the Gulf. But there has been another presence contributing to this volatility, namely the deepening conflicts across, indeed the increasing ungovernability of the oil fields of the Niger Delta in Nigeria. A spectacular escalation in violent attacks on oil installations and abduction of oil workers beginning in December 2005 and January-February 2006 by a shadowy and largely unknown militant group MEND (the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta), have thrown into dramatic relief the enormous fragility of the Nigeria's oil economy. Among MEND's demands were the release of two key Ijaw leaders but as their operations became more brazen and daring so did their political demands. MEND claimed a goal of cutting Nigerian output by 30 per cent. Within the first three months of 2006, $1 billion in oil revenues had been lost and over 29 Nigerian military had been killed in the uprising. By early July 2007, 700,000 barrels per day were shut (deferred) by growing political instability and insurgent attacks. The situation across the oilfields is now as fraught as at any time since the onset of civil war in 1967. How did this instability and political order arise and does it reflect, as some have suggested, an oil insurgency draped in the garb of organised crime?