Chronic gang warfare will return to Nigeria’s oil-producing south unless President Umaru Yar’Adua brings to justice local politicians who have fuelled the unrest, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Thursday.
Gangs behind kidnappings, oil theft and other violent crime in the Niger Delta were going unpunished partly because of their connections to local politicians who first hired them to intimidate opponents or rig elections, it said in a report.
”President Umaru Yar’Adua came into office in 2007 pledging to uphold the rule of law in Nigeria,” the report said.
”But that commitment rings hollow in the face of the impunity enjoyed by powerful Niger Delta politicians whose serious crimes lie at the root of the Niger Delta crisis.”
The wetlands region is home to the world’s eighth biggest oil industry, exporting about two million barrels per day. Most of its residents live in dire poverty, their villages polluted by frequent oil spills and the 24-hour burning of gas.
Rebels demanding greater local control over oil revenues launched a series of attacks in early 2006 that shut down a fifth of Nigerian oil output and pushed up world prices.
But the line between militancy and common banditry has become blurred and a lucrative trade in stolen crude has flooded the region with guns and crime has flourished.
Some of the bloodiest violence in July and August last year was essentially a turf war between rival gangs competing for access to government patronage in the wake of federal and state elections, HRW said.
It said dozens of people were killed and at least 150 shot and wounded between July 1 and August 12 on the streets of Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers state, as armed groups shot indiscriminately into crowds.
A government led by Yar’Adua and Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan, a native of the delta, took office last May promising to end the violence and provide economic opportunities for the jobless youths who make up the rank-and-file of the gangs.
Henry Okah, the suspected leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta which was behind a wave of oil industry attacks in 2006, was charged this month with treason after being arrested in September in Angola.
HRW said the authorities needed to bring other gang leaders and politicians to justice.
”This is not a meaningful gesture against impunity if the government’s political allies are not prosecuted for their role in perpetrating similar crimes,” it said of Okah’s case.
The rights group said prominent politicians in Rivers, including a former state governor, had paid and armed criminal gangs to rig elections in 2003 in favour of the ruling People’s Democratic Party and had since lost the ability to control them. – Reuters