The hymn We are Fighting for Jesus rang out across the Niger Delta as a boatful of balaclava-clad militants brandishing machine guns and rocket launchers greeted the international press corps. In a bizarre masquerade, the latest militia group to lay claim to the oil fields on the Delta handed astonished journalists a 69-year-old American hostage.
”We are giving you Mr Hawkins as a goodwill ambassador. We are freedom fighters, not terrorists,” their commander shouted before firing an assault rifle in the air and driving off. Macon Hawkins, one of nine oil workers abducted nearly two weeks ago, said that, although his glasses were broken and his shirt was ripped during the initial abduction, he and the other captives had subsequently been treated well. He also said he bore no animosity towards the militants, who he described ”as poor as field mice”.
Five other hostages, from Egypt, the Philippines and Thailand, were released later the same day. The group has retained two other Americans and a Briton, owing to their countries’ links with oil exploration in Nigeria.
Security analysts say that the kidnappers, who call themselves the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend), is far better armed and disciplined than previous groups. Unlike the gin-swilling, flip-flop-wearing youths of previous movements, these men wear matching camouflage body armour, boots and masks. A boatful will instantly react to commands. Although their operations have so far been confined to the western area of the Delta, Mend has mounted a rapid succession of raids and kidnappings that have shut down 20% of the daily 2,5-million barrels of oil Nigeria produces.
But the recent show proved that the fight for international opinion is almost as important as the control of the black gold. When the state Governor James Ibori assured Nigerians that the situation was under control, the militants sent a flurry of e-mails saying he was not in contact with them. When the commander of the armed forces informed the public that barges involved in illegal bunkering had been bombed last month, Mend said the retaliatory bombing of civilians triggered the second wave of kidnappings after four hostages were released last month.
Some villages have certainly been hit by the military. In one small riverine community, fisherman John Bull Sunday displayed fragments of a shell that had blasted a crater close to the town hall. Eleven large-calibre bullets had ripped holes through the corrugated iron. ”When the helicopters came, people fled into the swamps,” he said through an interpreter. His four-year-old daughter is among the missing.
In other areas, it appeared Mend had coached sympathisers on what to say. ”You can see, here we were bombed,” gestured youth leader Raphael Danweei towards a field of slightly singed grass stalks without a single indentation. Around him, barefoot women picked their way to thatched huts through a sea of oily, stinking mud, but a private generator at Danweei’s house powered a television, DVD player and sound system.
Amid the poverty, violence and corruption in the Delta, both politicians and militants try to twist the truth. Just further down the creek in Okplema, Eohar Lorent sends her children to a school with no walls and drinks out of a foul smelling well covered in pond scum. Her youngest is sick; the skin is peeling from his legs but, although she can see Chevron’s enormous tank farm across the river, the nearest clinic is three hours away. ”We are suffering, the government must do something to help us,” she pleaded, echoing the refrain of the Delta’s abandoned villagers.
Leaders of the Ijaw, Nigeria’s fourth-largest ethnic group and the backbone of Mend, say the government’s failure to make good on development promises is weakening their influence over impatient youths. ”Why should they have confidence in us? We will not be able to control them. If we cannot support them, if we do not have the means to make them survive, go to school, get jobs, then what are we?” asked Chief Edwin Clark, the head of the hostage negotiating team.
Clark and many residents insist that only a president from the region will halt the Delta’s decline. Warri, the nearest city, is already plastered with posters proclaiming that next year’s election should see the election of a ”south-south” president. No one here wants a Muslim northerner like Vice-President Atiku Abubakr or another southern Christian like President Olusegun Obasanjo, who is rumoured to be trying to change the Constitution to run for a third term.
”The president should come from this place, then he will not neglect his people,” said 20-year-old Akpoviri Igbeh, working among piles of sawdust at a lumberyard in the city centre. His friend, Gift White, says he had been employed by politicians to tap pipelines of crude oil but stopped because the money is not worth the risk.
The last elections, he said, were terrible. The workshop where they saw timber was burned down; his boss came home to find his father and brother mutilated and murdered. As the tribal fault lines in politics increase and more arms are shipped to shadowy groups in the creeks, the men in the lumberyard and the women in the thatched cottages seem to think it will only take one spark for the whole thing to go up in flames.