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| A group of Niger Delta militants |
Former top Niger Delta militants have received about N6.32 billion to protect oil pipelines from attacks in the past year, a report by American newspaper Wall Street Journal said yesterday, quoting an unnamed official of the NNPC.
Tompolo, Dokubo-Asari, Boyloaf and Ateke Tom are being paid respectively N5.1 billion, N1.44 billion, N608 million and N608 million yearly by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to protect the pipelines from oil scooping, the Journal report said.
Alhaji Dokubo-Asari once stalked the creeks of the Niger Delta, a leaf stuck to his forehead for good luck, as a crew that he ran bled oil from pipelines and sold it to smugglers. "Asari fuel," they called it.
Last year, NNPC began paying him N1.44 billion a year, by Mr. Dokubo-Asari's account, to pay his 4,000 former foot soldiers to protect the pipelines they once attacked.
He shrugs off the unusual turn of events. "I don't see anything wrong with it," said the thickly built former gunman, lounging in a house gown at his home in Abuja.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a senior NNPC official said the corporation is giving about N608 million a year apiece to two former rebel leaders, Gen. Ebikabowei "Boyloaf" Victor Ben and Gen. Ateke Tom, to have their men guard delta pipelines they used to attack.
Another general, Government "Tompolo" Ekpumopolo, maintains a N5.1 billion-a-year contract to do the same, the official said.
A liaison to Mr. Tom declined to comment on the contracts. Mr. Ekpumopolo didn't return phone calls and messages. Mr. Ben, when reached for comment, asked, "How much money is involved in this interview?" and then hung up.
Later, he sent an enigmatic text to the Journal: "Very wel dn im nt dispose bt cnsider 100%al u wnt, we need investors in niger delta absolute peace is guarante."
When Daily Trust contacted the NNPC for comments yesterday, its spokesman Fidel Pepple said he was not aware of these payments.
"I don't have iota of idea regarding that kind of story. That is definitely not true. I will read the story in the journal and get back to you," he told our reporter. But he did not call back as promised.
For his part, spokesman for the Presidential Amnesty Office, Daniel Alabrah, said they were not involved in any such payments.
"The NNPC was alleged in the story to be paying the money, not Amnesty office, so find out from them. We don't make that kind of payments," he said.
Paying to protect oil production
Nigeria is shelling out billions of naira a year to maintain an uneasy calm in the oil-rich delta, where attacks ranging from theft to bombings to kidnappings pummeled oil production three years ago, to as low as 500,000 barrels on some days. Now production is back up to 2.6 million barrels daily of low-sulfur crude of the sort favored by U.S. refineries, which get nearly 9% of their supply here.
The gilded pacification campaign is offered up by the government as a success story. But others say the program, including a 2009 amnesty, has sent young men in the turbulent delta a different message: that militancy promises more rewards than risks.
While richly remunerated former kingpins profess to have left the oil-theft business, many former militant foot soldiers who are paid less or not at all by the amnesty, and have few job prospects, continue to pursue prosperity by tapping pipelines.
Now, oil theft appears to be on the rise again. Royal Dutch Shell Nigerian unit estimates that more than 150,000 barrels of oil are stolen from Nigerian pipelines daily. That is one of the lower estimates. In May, theft from one pipeline got so bad that Shell simply shut it down.
"Everybody seems to believe...that the Niger Delta problem is over," a former government mediator Dimieari Von Kemedi told the Wall Street Journal. "It's just on pause. The challenge is to move from pause to stop."
This year alone, Nigeria will spend about N72 billion on its amnesty program, according to the government's 2012 budget, more than what it spends to deliver basic education to children.
Under the arrangement, the government grants living allowances to tens of thousands of former members of the bandit crews and sends them to vocational classes, in sites ranging from Houston to London to Seoul. These costs are on top of millions of dollars paid at the outset to the crews' leaders for handing in their weapons.
For a few, the program has meant spectacular rewards. To improve ties with former delta warlords, the government invited the top "generals," as they call themselves, for extended stays on the uppermost, executive floors of Abuja's Transcorp Hilton hotel.
For President Goodluck Jonathan, a Niger Delta native, such lavish expenditures have become a political liability.
Yet because four-fifths of government revenue flows from the oil fields, aides to the president defend the high cost of peace by saying the treasury would face an even worse drain if a full-blown militancy in the delta flared up again. "If it's too huge, what are the alternatives?" Oronto Douglas, a senior adviser to Mr. Jonathan, told the Journal.
"For you to address the whole issue of poverty and development, you need some kind of peace," added Mutiu Sunmonu, managing director for Shell's Nigerian unit. "That is what I think the amnesty program has offered."
Enticed by the program, the militants emerged a couple of years ago from the oil-soaked swamps of the delta. Some of the leaders took up residence in the executive floors of Abuja's Hilton and through much of 2010 and early 2011 spent weeks or months enjoying the Executive Lounge's complimentary supply of Hennessey V.S.O.P. cognac, priced at N8,000 a shot on the room-service menu. Over a buffet of fiery Nigerian dishes--gumbos, Jollof rice pilafs, goat stews--they rubbed shoulders with the country's leading politicians and influence peddlers, who often live in the floor's N100,000-a-night art-deco rooms.
"These are young men who came out of the creeks and were given the opportunity to hang out with the crème de la crème, wearing gold watches and drinking from gold-rimmed teacups," said Tony Uranta, a member of the government's Niger Delta Technical Committee advisory group and a frequent Hilton executive-floor guest. "It's a natural thing," he told Wall Street Journal.
Most have since moved out of the hotel. "It's too high-profile," said an aide to one ex-warlord, Mr. Tom.
The story of Dokubo-Asari
While not all of his account of life in the mangrove swamps could be verified, Dokubo-Asari, 48 years old, was one of Nigeria's best-known oil marauders.
About 25 years ago, Mr. Dokubo-Asari left overcrowded university classrooms, he says, to study guerrilla warfare in the Libya led by Col. Moammar Gadhafi. He says he was given $100,000 to stir up trouble back in Nigeria, an oil competitor to Libya.
Fomenting conflict proved easy in the restive Niger Delta he returned to in the early 1990s. From a local governor, Mr. Dokubo-Asari says, he procured weapons and money to build a militia that ultimately was several thousand strong. For years, as he tells it, they broke open pipelines, filling canisters with crude oil and refining some of it through timeworn techniques used by locals to boil palm-tree sap into wine.
The government struggled to lure him out of the mangroves. Mr. Dokubo-Asari responded to one amnesty offer that he considered meager by announcing a death threat against petroleum workers. Shell evacuated hundreds of expatriates and oil derricks briefly slowed to a stop. The next day, oil prices hit $50 a barrel for the first time.
Nigeria's government offered Mr. Dokubo-Asari a truce and $1,000 apiece, he says, for his AK-47 rifles, numbering 3,182. He says he took the deal and used the profits to purchase more weapons and return to the swamp.
There, he recounts he was finally arrested and coerced into another round of negotiations. Fearing assassination, he fled to Cotonou, Benin, where he says he founded a school for Niger Delta children. He showed a video of him teaching kids kung fu at the school.
New warlords quickly took Mr. Dokubo-Asari's place. Marauding under noms de guerre like Gen. Shoot-at-Sight, Gen. Africa and Gen. Young Shall Grow, they formed a loose confederation of gunmen calling itself the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND, and crippled enough oil infrastructure to bring Nigeria's production on some days to a near-halt.
That was when Nigeria announced the 2009 amnesty. In televised ceremonies, guerrillas dropped off rifles, machine guns, tear-gas canisters, dynamite bundles, rocket launchers, antiaircraft guns, gunboats and grenades to be sold to the government, which also offered the nonviolence training courses and nine-month vocational classes.
Theft fell sharply. Yet now, just as Nigeria's state oil company has begun institutionalizing pipeline-watch jobs for some ex-militants, theft has blossomed again. "It's quite an escalation. If nothing is done, it will continue to increase because more and more people will just come to feel that this is a gold field," said Shell's Mr. Sunmonu. "We're not going to give up on this and run away from it. We believe it can be stopped."
Maclean Imomotimi left an overpacked university four years ago, the muscular 30-year-old says, to rob barges in the Niger Delta swamps. Now, befitting his new career, he is known as Gen. Imomotimi.
He says he accepted the government's amnesty offer in 2011 on the expectation he would be feted, his hotel bills and bar tabs paid; instead, he was disappointed to receive a living allowance of just 65,000 naira a month.
So Gen. Imomotimi has returned to the waterways, this time, he says, not to rob barges but to steal oil.
"I take amnesty's money--what [little] they give me--I take it and I buy other guns," he says. "There's much, much more money in the creeks."
With Agency Report
