The Niger Delta crisis and Yar’adua’s ‘magic wands’

By Francis Ogwo

The 10th annual memorial of the untimely death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua who died on 10th May, 2010, brings to mind, the pivotal decisions and policies of his presidency. One knotty issue of our national existence is that the late President played a significant role in restoring the peace that eluded the Niger Delta region of Nigeria with its high wave of militancy and violence.

Many had lost hope of peace and tranquility in the region. The news headlines like the COVID-19 dominating editorials, was filled with militancy and restiveness. Palpable fear trailed journeys across the region as many escaped death in whiskers. Multinationals had ‘closed shop’ and left to their respective countries for fear of abduction and kidnap until Yar’adua took a decision that changed the story for good and turned erstwhile guntrotting and bomb carrying militants into professionals and legitimate business owners through the infamous amnesty.

A look at the man Yar’adua x-rayed a young governor of Katsina State who had emerged as an underdog from a political powerplay that saw a transfer of power from an old warhorse in the person of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo to a relatively unknown Umaru who was adjudged one of the youngest governors in 2007.

Born on 16th August, 1951, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was governor of Katsina State in North Western Nigeria, from 29th May 1999 to 28th May 2007, and was declared the winner of Nigeria’s presidential election held on 21st April 2007, and sworn in on 29th May 2007.

Many had no premonition of his emergence but with a clean slate of developmental slides as then Governor of Katsina State, many doubting Thomases believed it was time to have a feel of the progress in Katsina on the macro platform called Nigeria.

Though shortlived due to untimely death from sickness, one significant role that would remain relevant in the annals of Nigeria’s history was the role he played in the amnesty declaration in the oil rich Niger Delta.

It would be recalled that insecurity had plagued Niger Delta for a long time dating back to the post colonial era as the cry for equality pitched tribes and regions against one another.

Let’s recall that, in the Niger Delta, violence had become a regular occurrence spanning for over forty years with a resounding cry for resource control following. This unending crisis led to perpetual destruction of projects sited by expatriates and other nationals in Nigeria who felt the region was robbed of her fortunes to enrich the North.

The Niger Delta region of Nigeria, located in the south-south zone of the country is the cashcow of Nigeria’s oil and the bane of Nigeria’s wealth since it was discovered in Oloibiri in 1956 in present day Bayelsa State and substituted agriculture as mainstay.

According to reports, the region with its oil provided 95% of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings and 80% of the government’s budgetary revenues.

The Nigeria National Petroleum Company also noted that Nigeria’s oil production was responsible for 8% of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Corporation (OPEC) which had total daily production and 3% of the world’s volume.

However, this natural endowment became a source of controversy as exploration activities caused the region huge hazards such as water and air pollution, leading to widespread rebellion and calls for compensation and equal control of the oil wealth.

This led to clashes between activists and multinational companies in the region with the Federal Government caught in the crossfire.

The practise of disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes is not new in war torn countries but the challenge is usually reintegration of former combatants into civilian life.

This was the case as the country was faced with an uphill task of calming the nerves of groups such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force, and Niger Delta Vigilante.

These militant groups emerged around 2006 and were popular for their violent attacks on the region’s oil infrastructure and kidnapping oil companies’ employees for ransom. Due to these violence and instability, the production and export of oil from the Niger Delta region dropped after 2006.

The amnesty programme was designed to put an end to this. Its main aim was to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate armed militants back into communities.

The terms of the amnesty program stipulate that militants who voluntarily hand over their weapons won’t be prosecuted and would get those benefits. These benefits included; a formal education in Nigeria or abroad, small loans to start businesses as well as a monthly allowance of about US$400. The allowance was higher than Nigeria’s minimum wage of about US$60 per month.

The leaders of militant groups were also offered mouth watering contracts in the oil industry and other sectors of the economy. The amnesty programme also made ex-militant leaders wield political power and influence in the cities to which they returned.

The programme led to a sharp reduction of violent attacks against the oil industry, leading to an increase in production. But cracks in the deal started to emerge.

Owing to a drastic fall in oil prices, the programme became very difficult for the Nigerian government to fund. For example, in May 2015, the allowance being paid to enrolled ex-militants had to be stopped. This worsened the situation as many of the disarmed fighters threatened to go back to the creeks. A large number of ex-militants are not employed and rely on monthly allowances.

The failures began to emerge as the Nigerian government failed to tackle long term socio-economic outrages and protests. The issues of social development in local oil communities, environmental pollution and the widespread allegation of exclusion of local communities from the governance of oil production in the Niger Delta region.

This led to a fresh emergence of new militant groups claiming to represent the grievances and views of local oil communities. These new militant groups included the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), Red Scorpions and the Niger Delta Greenland Justice Movement (NDGJM). They began to attack the region’s oil infrastructure, resulting in a reduction of Nigeria’s oil production from 2.2 million to about 1.1 million barrels per day in 2016.

So many drama started to play out. Firstly, ex-militants refused to go back to low-income jobs in their localities but preferred to remain enrolled in the amnesty programme. There was a new wave of recruitment of youths into militancy.

The amnesty programme was initially designed for youths who were active members of armed militant groups.

Because of the benefits attached to the amnesty, youths who weren’t part of any armed militant group began to form new groups or align with existing ones in order to benefit from the amnesty programme. In some cases, they quickly purchased weapons from the black market to enable them to participate in the programme.

When this became very obvious, the Nigerian government in September 2011, banned the inclusion of new militant groups into the amnesty programme.

The onslaught and violent attacks in the region led to a serious reduction of the country’s oil production. This worsened the Nigerian government’s already formidable financial and economic concerns and challenges.

But the government must be dialogue based in dealing with the issue as usage of force had proved unsuccessful with the groups avoiding dialogue with government.

Despite all its failures, the only short-term option to get the county’s oil production and exports back on track quickly is the continuation and possible expansion of the current amnesty programme to address the new groups that have emerged.

This would help increase oil exports and revenues and buy the government time to develop more effective reintegration strategies. However, any new amnesty strategy will need to de-emphasise financial payments to ex-militants for it to succeed. Instead, it will need to focus on underlying issues such as the development deficits and environmental pollution affecting communities. In the long term, the government should design transparent mechanisms which include local communities in the governance of oil production. This will reduce the tensions that provide justification for militancy in the region

Forward to 10 years after the death of former President Umaru Musa Yar’adua, it’s evidenced that the amnesty hasn’t worked as planned. The negotiated amnesty and resulting fragile peace are primed for collapse, with criminality and oil theft continuing unabated.

Under the agreement, former militants were promised monthly allowances and job training. But the payment system is marred with challenges. The extended duration of the payments was almost 10 years and the methods by which they were distributed reinforce militant rank and file rather than weakening them and helping to reintegrate the former militants into the society.

At the outset, the federal government of Nigeria reportedly made lump sum payments to ex-commanders, who were charged with distributing the cash to their ex-combatants. This system was challenged in 2015 by mid-level commanders claiming corruption in the payment system and in the granting of large pipeline security contracts to top commanders, with little trickle-down effect.

A new system was formulated to make payments directly to the former combatants’ bank accounts. But this was also challenged by the ex-militants, who alleged that commanders and banks were shortchanging payments. The lump sum cash payment system was started in 2017.

This was problematic on several levels. First, paying ex-commanders directly maintains fighting organizations and power structures. The continued amnesty payments reinforced patronage networks. They also created vehicles for political power and political violence for the 2019 presidential elections.

Finally, the allowances have morphed into a cash-for-peace system that was not sustainable, turning violence into a commodity.

The top-down cash distribution creates and re-creates potential rivalries through discretionary and often opaque cash disbursements. By bolstering ex-commanders’ control, the former fighting organizations were re-created and able to leverage their power over the government.

There was a resultant fresh threats and eventual attacks on the military, oil installations and hostage taking, with direct consequences on oil production at a time when lower oil prices had already affected Nigerian coffers.

Furthermore, because of the relatively significant amount of monthly individual allowances, ex-combatants were discouraged from getting jobs, which even for professionals, generally pays less than the amnesty stipend of N65,000 per month, equivalent to about U.S. $180. An average school teacher in Nigeria, earned N18,000 or about $50.

The sizeable allowances, coupled with limited access to and availability of skills training under the amnesty agreement, the lack of fundamental improvements in regional socioeconomic development and increasing small arms circulation, only served to sustain the fighting frameworks and capabilities to strike. Consequently, concepts of the marginalized warrior identity, fundamental to the protracted violence, were also sustained.

Because there hadn’t been sufficient sustained reintegration efforts in the way of training and job creation, there was an increasing perception of criminality in the Niger Delta, and particularly in the oil capital, Port Harcourt. Reports of the kidnapping of prominent locals and their family members abound, as well as reports of increased armed robbery. Additionally, former combatants continue to turn to gang (known as cults or campus cult organizations) membership, creating altered if not, new layers of communal rivalries as these gangs battled for turf.

Further, the amnesty program’s lack of full participation from some commanders and their militants, along with the limited surrendering of weapons, generated additional communal rivalries and violent clashes, both between and within militant and gang hierarchies.

Finally, illegal oil lifting (known as bunkering) had been increasingly professionalized and militarized: there were organized underground labor unions for both crude and refined products; there are well-defined levels of investment for buy-in for the lifting and marine transport activities from the pipeline tappers, pumpers and speedboat drivers to offshore tankers, captains and document forgers; there were set payoff calculations for the players including the Nigerian military’s joint task force; and security details for each phase of the operation.

Current bunkering estimates ranged from 10% to 15%, or a minimum of 200,000 barrels per day (roughly the total production of Trinidad) out of the official production rate of just over 2 million barrels per day in early 2018.

Despite the decreased hostilities ushered in by the amnesty, Niger Deltans report that since the inception of the amnesty, the federal government’s military presence has broadened rather than diminished. They blame the military and the politicians that control it for the majority of the bunkering activities and for generating the conditions for the current reciprocal racketeering.

The outcome of the military presence, the ongoing militant hierarchies and poverty serve to maintain a social disorder and a security economy-potent ingredients for petrol violence anew.

It’s 10 years after the death of President Yar’adua and the objectives of the amnesty deal is far from achieved. It’s still business as usual. The tension in the oil rich region has heightened with selfish politicians milking the region dry, Many believe that if Yar’adua were to be alive today, there probably would have been a modification of the master plan of the amnesty deal to have a long term outlook.

The Niger Delta region of Nigeria comprises the nine states Abia, Akwa-Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Edo, Imo, Ondo and Rivers. About 31 million people live in the region which is renowned as one of the World’s ten most important wetland and coastal marine ecosystems.

The decision made by late President Yar’adua, however, on the troubled Niger Delta despite its current limitations will be remembered in years to come .