How a violent conflict in the resource-rich Niger Delta has wrought ecological and economic devastation for a generation
JAMES BARNETT FROM NEWS LINE MAGAZINE
Since the 1990s, the Niger Delta has been embroiled in a violent conflict rooted in competing visions of who owns Nigeria’s oil — and what is owed to those who have suffered from the ecological and economic devastation wrought by decades of corrupt governance and poorly regulated oil extraction. The conflict has largely faded from view in recent years, as myriad insurgencies have sprung up in different parts of the country, but it has not receded so much as assumed a new form.
Today, among all the other challenges weighing down Africa’s most populous state, Nigeria must struggle to maintain a steady production of oil in a region where militants and ordinary citizens alike increasingly steal it straight from the pipeline. Oil bunkering, artisanal refining, coal fire — there are several names to describe the business of siphoning crude and distilling it at unofficial, jerry-built refineries into various gasoline products. While illegal, oil bunkering has developed into a sophisticated and far-reaching industry that thrives because of high-level collusion among many of those responsible for ensuring Nigeria’s oil production.
Oil bunkering poses an acute economic and national security crisis for Nigeria. Estimates of the oil that is lost to theft and pipeline vandalism vary from 200,000 to 700,000 barrels a day — essentially anywhere between 10% and one third of Nigeria’s total production, except no one seems to know how much oil the country actually produces anymore for this precise reason, so estimates are of limited use. Beyond the physical theft itself, the general environment of insecurity in the Niger Delta deters companies from investing in exploration and new licenses or even making basic repairs to existing facilities. Three of Nigeria’s largest terminals were shut down for several months (or more) in 2022, in a troubling sign of the state of the country’s oil industry. Traditionally, the country has been Africa’s largest oil exporter, but production appears to have nearly halved since the start of 2020, based on available data. “We will not allow a few criminals to have unfettered access to the nation’s crude oil supply,” declared the generally taciturn President Muhammadu Buhari in August 2022, in response to concerns over the security of the nation’s core commodity.
To many in the delta, however, oil bunkering is an act of protest and desperation, an alternative livelihood for unemployed university graduates, single mothers and savvy entrepreneurs who otherwise lack opportunities in a resource-rich yet underdeveloped region. “We call it drinking from your well,” one illegal refiner explains. “It’s not theft. It’s our resources.” Yet those who justify the trade will not deny that bunkering is also highly dangerous and a source of immense profit for some of Nigeria’s most notorious militant leaders.
This article explains how Nigeria’s bunkering enterprise has expanded and evolved in recent years, further battering the region’s delicate environment, exacerbating corruption and empowering militants. It is based primarily on interviews with several dozen individuals in the Niger Delta, ranging from local officials to environmental activists to the illicit refiners and militants themselves. Many of the sources requested anonymity or pseudonymity in order to candidly discuss their activities and perspectives. Most of those involved in bunkering are not only concerned about potentially being identified by the authorities but also by rival gangs or militant groups, which are increasingly fighting each other for dominance over the illegal oil trade. These individuals paint a picture of a complex, at points confounding, network of militant, private-sector and state actors dealing, double-dealing and backstabbing one another in pursuit of profit and power, with competition intensifying as Nigeria heads into elections in February 2023. The illicit oil economy in the delta is always in flux, explain two cultists in Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State and the delta’s primary economic hub. Bunkering pushes rivals into business while turning brothers against each other, the young men tell me.
Indeed, as they leave our meeting spot in the city one rainy afternoon, I notice that they depart in separate cars staggered some minutes apart. “Those two are old friends, but they joined rival cults. They cannot be seen together because, according to their oaths, they are supposed to kill each other,” explains my intermediary.
Nigeria would not be the state it is today — some argue there would be no state at all — without oil. It is a blessing and a curse that has shaped every stage of Nigeria’s history since independence, a commodity that has been responsible for marked economic growth as well as profligate corruption and bitter internal divisions.
In 1966, several youths from the Ijaw ethnic group, led by a young soldier named Isaac Boro, took up arms in protest of the exploitation of the delta’s oil by a distant federal government and international companies. Declaring a “Niger Delta Republic,” they fought with government forces for 12 days before being defeated, leaving a legacy of resistance and martyrdom that looms large in the delta to this day.
During the country’s brutal civil war from 1967 to 1970, both the federal government and the breakaway Republic of Biafra sought to occupy the delta in the first months of hostilities, with the region’s inhabitants caught in between. The government captured the oil fields and subsequently won the war. Nigeria’s fortunes soared over the next decade, as a result of the Arab oil embargo and attendant hike in the price of Brent crude, sparking a boon in government spending and infrastructural development. The prosperity was neither widely shared nor sustained, however, as kleptocratic military regimes pilfered chunks of oil revenue or spent it on vanity projects that today lie in disrepair.
Most communities in the Niger Delta, for their part, saw no dividends over these years — only spillage. The international oil companies (IOCs) often failed to maintain their equipment, delta communities allege, which, after decades of use, began to corrode and leak crude oil into the waterways. Authority Benson, an environmental scientist at Niger Delta University, describes the cumulative effects of these spills as ecocide. “It’s killing everything. The water becomes dead water. The forest is dead. If it’s a river, it’s a dead river, because there are no nutrients cycling.”
Certain individuals in the delta managed to profit from the environmental destruction nonetheless, including a number of activists who were co-opted by the IOCs or military regimes, as well as some well-connected Deltans who discovered that, by secretly vandalizing pipelines, they could win lucrative contracts for the subsequent cleanup. “People were beginning to learn that everything is a business,” recalls “Peter,” a colleague of mine in Bayelsa, when speaking of that period. But it was a business in which only a few profited and most struggled to survive.
Environmental destruction in the Niger Delta gained global attention after the military regime of Gen. Sani Abacha executed nine environmental activists in 1995, leading to international sanctions and censure at the United Nations. The Nigerian government was unfazed. Oil revenue was more important than Nigeria’s standing in the international community and aggressive tactics were used to ensure a steady supply of petroleum. Even when Nigeria transitioned from military rule to democracy in 1999, newly elected President Olusegun Obasanjo listed the “crisis in the oil-producing areas” as the nation’s chief emergency in his inaugural address. He subsequently dispatched thousands of troops to the region to quash growing agitations.
Fyneface Dumnamene, an activist and NGO director in Port Harcourt, believes the troubles that erupted in the 1990s can be understood through what sociologists call reference group theory: The youths were exposed to wealth that was just out of reach, creating feelings of both resentment and ambition.
“They see how those who work for the IOCs are living large in gated compounds here in the city. They see how politicians take billions from the delta to live lavish lifestyles in Abuja and Lagos. They feel that they should be allowed to live like that. … They see this as their land and their resources,” Fyneface explains.
By 2003, organized street protests had morphed into full-fledged armed conflict, as youths mobilized against the government under loose coalitions such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force (NDPVF). Local cults — essentially university fraternities that evolved into highly sophisticated mafias — similarly expanded their reach from campus into the cities and then the hinterlands. With colorful names derived largely from Western culture — e.g., Greenlanders, Icelanders, Chelsea and KKK (that one is a bit perplexing) — many of the cults acquired military-grade weaponry and aligned themselves with various militants in an ostensible liberation struggle. The myriad groups purported to fight for the same demands, chief among them a federal restructuring to grant the oil-producing states a greater share of the oil wealth theretofore hoarded by the government in Abuja. To make their demands heard, they blew up pipelines and kidnapped expatriate oil workers with shocking regularity throughout the 2000s, sending Nigeria’s oil production tanking and sparking concerns about the future of the Nigerian state.
Although the militants spoke about the Niger Delta as a collective, they often mobilized around highly local concerns. Henry Eferegbo, a councilor representing Obelle town in the Emohua local government area of Rivers State, narrates how one oil spill in 1998 irrevocably pushed his community into violence.
That February, the casing on a Shell oil well in Obelle failed some 100 feet beneath the ground, causing gas to escape to the surface and subsequently catch fire. The inferno lasted more than two months, burning over 60 acres of land, including farms, forest and wildlife. Most residents left Obelle for fear the fires would spread into the town. “The whole community were smelling gas,” Henry recounts one evening in Port Harcourt.
Shell eventually put out the fires by pumping chemicals into the ground, but residents claim that this, in turn, poisoned the community’s aquifers for years to come. Henry learned that Shell eventually published two reports after the Obelle spill, one on the equipment malfunction and the other on the environmental impact of the chemical response. Yet, despite multiple petitions from Henry and his community, the company never shared the reports.
“I saw later that Shell claimed that it did a newer report on environmental issues in the area with community consultation. … But they never came to our community. They’ve never even showed photos that they held community dialogues or such things.”
Around the mid-2000s, some local youths formed a small gang called “New Wave,” with the ostensible purpose of forcing Shell to pay compensation for the 1998 spill. After some agitation, the youths eventually met in person with Shell representatives in Port Harcourt in 2008, according to Henry. It is unclear what was discussed at the meeting (Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary did not respond to questions about its engagement with New Wave or other aspects of its relations with members of the Obelle community) but the young men returned to Obelle and shortly thereafter killed 12 people, including the traditional chief of the community and the head of the local vigilante outfit.
“The boys claimed that Shell had told them that they [Shell] had been paying those community leaders to avoid paying a larger compensation to the community,” says Henry during our interview one night in Port Harcourt. “So, it was a revenge on those who had taken bribes.”
Whether those claims are to be believed, the result was that the upstart cult gained a stranglehold over the community and began clashing with rival gangs in Emohua.
“Till [this] date, my community has no peace,” Henry laments, flipping through his phone to show photos of the informal camps for internally displaced people that have popped up around Obelle as residents desert the town. “The funny thing is that the same people who said they are fighting Shell no longer talk about Shell. They are killing Indigenes.”
Henry could just as easily be speaking about the conflict in the Niger Delta as a whole, which began as a broad-based insurgency in opposition to exploitation and impunity but almost immediately devolved into a fractured melange of rival warlords. Veterans of the creeks will rattle off the noms de guerre of the various “generals” (as militants refer to their commanders) and their ever-shifting allegiances as if recounting the mid-season trades of sports teams. (“Asari turned on Boyloaf in 2007” — “No, no, it was Asari who was betrayed, and it was 2009,” and so on.)
The militants were never fully unified but, as their divisions grew, their activities came to resemble a hybrid of criminal violence and insurgency. Expatriate oil workers may have originally been kidnapped to send a political message but it was hard to ignore the fact that those with Western passports would fetch a hefty ransom. As expatriates relocated, kidnappings of Nigerians spiked for reasons that seemed to have little to do with oil or related grievances. By the late 2000s, high-seas piracy in the Gulf of Guinea had become a global concern, as militants began attacking commercial shipping and offshore oil installations. The “generals” always purported to carry on the mantle of the liberation struggle, but it seemed that they pursued increasingly parochial interests.
Faced with an intractable conflict that it could not win after more than a decade of military efforts, the Nigerian government opted to make peace with the militants in 2009. Under the presidency of Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, perhaps the only northern Muslim who is revered in the delta to this day, Nigeria initiated the Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP), promising the militants not only a legal amnesty for their actions but also temporary stipends, professional skills training and a host of other development programs.
The PAP was, in many ways, a success when one considers how dire the situation seemed throughout the 2000s. It helped quell the worst of the violence and attendant oil loss, giving Nigeria a degree of stability just before it began to face an even bloodier insurgency in the north with the Boko Haram Islamist militant group. But the amnesty was never the gold standard of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (“DDR”) that Nigerian officials have sometimes claimed. In fact, the amnesty itself may have been less significant in stabilizing the delta than the attendant “surveillance contracts” that the government quietly offered several militant groups — that is, payouts to hastily formed private security companies run by the militants in return for safeguarding the pipelines. In other words, the federal government sought to buy off its erstwhile adversaries.
This co-optation was a top-down affair that left a wide gap between the militant leaders and the rank and file. The “post-conflict” trajectories of several of the various warlords point to an emerging class of conflict entrepreneurs who parlayed their reputations for fighting prowess into positions of official or semiofficial authority. The MEND commander Farah Dagogo entered politics, heading to Abuja as a member of the national House of Representatives (ironically, the man who avoided capture as a militant landed a stint in jail in 2022 on seemingly politicized charges). The governor of Rivers made the notorious cultist Ateke Tom a ceremonial chief in the same communities of Okrika he had once terrorized. The NDPVF founder Asari Dokubo, a convert to Islam and self-styled mujahid, became an internet personality known for parading his fighters around Port Harcourt and loudly selling his endorsement during elections. The unofficial leader of MEND, Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, eschewed the limelight adored by many of his peers, opting instead to quietly amass a fortune through surveillance contracts. With his political and business savvy, he is, one often hears, the “shadow government” of his native Delta state.
The average fighter who entered the amnesty has far less to show for it. Some ex-militants claim they never see their monthly stipends, at least not in full: Abuja pays the commanders who, in turn, are supposed to distribute the stipends to their “boys,” but, of course, this leaves ample room for siphoning funds. The amnesty has also been plagued by allegations that contracts for the job-training programs were awarded to politically connected individuals rather than organizations with the requisite qualifications to steer thousands of ex-militants back into society. To make matters worse, there was no meaningful effort to provide psychosocial support to the former militants, explains one community organizer who conducted an external review of the program.
“Most of those boys had so many psychological issues,” says Emem Okon, director of the Kebetkache Women Development & Resource Centre in Port Harcourt. “I remember a boy in one of the camps who ran up to me and shouted, ‘Put your hand on my head! Put your hand on my head to see if it will stop the dreams!’” Seated beside her co-workers in her crowded office, she lets out a sigh.
“There was another boy who said he kept hearing the screams of the girl he had killed,” Okon recalls. “You cannot simply return these people to their communities and call it peace.” If the Nigerian government failed to prepare those who accepted the amnesty for a transition to civilian life, the bigger failure is seen in all those fighters who never laid down arms in the first place.
“Antonio” is one of those fighters. The intermediary who arranges for us to meet at a secluded bar in Port Harcourt warns me that he is “a very deadly man,” a veteran militant who now oversees some oil-bunkering operations and rarely enters town. For his own part, Antonio describes himself as an active member of MEND, one of “Tompolo’s most loyal,” who has stayed in the creeks for years.
It shows. Antonio has the face of a young man and the hands of an 80-year-old. Bony, cracked, covered in blotches, Antonio’s long fingers awkwardly grip a bottle of Budweiser as he describes the hardships of militancy. “Malaria don kill us,” he remarks in pidgin English of life in the creeks, with all the bitterness of someone who has come close to death more than once. At one point, he begins to unbutton his shirt to show me the bug bites that cover his body before I hastily advise him against creating a scene.
Antonio naturally blames the government for the delta’s woes and complains that Abuja has not been sincere in its pledges to spur development. But he is also inadvertently candid about the role that he and his fellow militants play in perpetuating the violence. Those militant kingpins who accepted the amnesty, multiple sources such as Antonio attest, never intended to commit to more than a partial demobilization. They enrolled some of their boys in the amnesty but also kept some of their best fighters in the creeks, calculating that, to exercise influence in the delta in the 21st century, you have to maintain a credible threat of force.
“Formerly, we were not carrying guns,” Antonio says of the youths who would go on to form MEND. “But we got to understand that the only language government understand is violence.”
He takes a sip of beer, then adds with a smile, “If you don’t shoot gun, they don’t hear you.”
Oil theft has been a central feature of the Niger Delta conflict for many years. The militants realized early on that they could finance their operations by siphoning crude from pipelines and selling it on the regional black market. Antonio claims that MEND has historically acquired some of its arsenal through a crude-for-weapons trade involving international arms dealers. “I have seen whole lot of them,” he says, pointing to my white skin. “They will sell us guns for oil. … We do [it] with barges at night,” he elaborates.
The sale of unrefined crude onto the global market remains a mainstay of militant activity, but it has also been matched, if not surpassed, by a rise in oil theft for purposes of local, illegal refining. The barrier to entry is low and the returns on investment are high, making it a veritable cottage industry. As one young refiner says, “It is a family business now. Men, women, children … Everyone gets involved.”
The growth of illegal refining is not simply a question of abundant supply but also unmet local demand. While Nigeria produces crude oil in abundance, the country does not have a single functioning state-owned refinery (a private refinery established by the billionaire Aliko Dangote is set to come online in the first quarter of 2023, after many delays). Similarly, despite government subsidies, the cost of imported diesel is high and the government hardly imports any kerosene. Yet both of these are household essentials in a country with one of the most notoriously inconsistent power grids on the planet.
Local refiners therefore focus on producing those three products: gasoline, diesel and kerosene. While gasoline is the most profitable, it is also the most difficult to produce and is therefore primarily the domain of the larger bunkering sites managed by the militants who have the requisite connections to sell it onto regional and international markets. Those with smaller operations tend to specialize in diesel and kerosene, as there is high demand within the delta for these products and so the logistical costs are lower than with gasoline.
Those involved in bunkering prefer the term “artisanal refining” because they feel — and not without reason — that their work is a craft. The techniques are similar to what Deltans have employed for generations to make “kai-kai,” a pungent moonshine derived from palm wine that, for the uninitiated, can make the right side of the face grow numb and twitch (or so my experience suggests). These distillation techniques were first put toward refining oil during the civil war, when Biafran secessionists sought to exploit the delta’s oil without the benefit of formal refineries. The techniques have grown more sophisticated since, especially in the past few years as the business has expanded.
As refiners explain it, their sites have massive steel “pots” several yards long in which crude oil, having been delivered either by boat or makeshift pipeline to the site, is “cooked” with fire. The vapors are passed via pipes into a separate tank where they cool and condense into various fuels (gasoline, kerosene, diesel) depending on how long they are left in the tank. Increasingly, the refiners use large conical “condensers” to catch more evaporation in the cooling process and thereby maximize how much refined product they can distill from the crude. Depending on the quantity and type of refined product produced, it can be loaded into anything ranging from jerrycans and small fuel drums to massive 12,000-gallon fuel trucks for transport and sale.
“We have more experience, and more [university] graduates into it,” explains “Francis,” an artisanal refiner in Port Harcourt. Francis turned to bunkering after he failed to secure a steady job with his engineering degree. Using his old campus connections, he got a job building “pots” for the cultists and eventually made enough money to set up his own operation.
Showing me pictures of the equipment on his phone, he smiles: “Refining is getting more sophisticated. We’re less careless than we used to be. Mistakes and risks are fewer.”
“Mary” is somewhat less sanguine in discussing the risks associated with the trade. A single mother in Bayelsa with more limited education, she says she turned to artisanal refining after her previous business venture failed and a neighbor introduced her to the trade.
“Me, I really want job. If I have a good job, I will stop,” she says when we meet outside Yenagoa, expressing a degree of embarrassment in describing her trade. “But the sweetness of the business will not let me go out.” Starting with a limited investment to purchase a 7-gallon drum, she moved her way up to a 70-gallon operation and now runs a medium-sized site that employs more than a dozen workers, a site manager and a secretary. Her output is still well below that of some of the militants, whose operations can produce five 12,000-gallon tankers of gasoline a month. (“They have the money, they have the power,” she says.) But she does far better than in any other job she has ever held, earning up to $2,000 a night in revenue, of which she may take home roughly a third in profit after paying her workers, security, shipping expenses and related costs.
At a time when the Nigerian public faces record-high inflation and frequent fuel shortages, many ask, if only rhetorically, what the hell is happening to all of the oil the country supposedly has. To answer that a sizable chunk of it (a tenth? a quarter? a third?) is being stolen straight from the pipeline by unemployed university graduates and single mothers would seem implausible. And it would indeed only tell part of the story. An enterprise as complex and far-reaching as this could not function without significant collusion from both government and private-sector actors.
Bunkerers need to know when oil is flowing through a given pipeline in order to properly tap the line and divert the flow. They often get this information from sources “upstream,” they say, meaning either employees of the oil companies or the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). In order to sell illegally acquired crude or refined products on anything other than the local black market, the bunkerers need certificates and permits from any number of government agencies, particularly if the oil is to be exported internationally. The documents are easy to acquire from corrupt officials, says one Port Harcourt businessman involved in various aspects of the illegal oil trade. “NNPC is neck-deep in it; the security is neck-deep in it; immigration is neck-deep in it; customs …”
In a recent TV interview, the Nigerian navy’s top official hinted at such high-level collusion, describing a trend in which naval forces will seize tankers on the ocean that lack necessary permits, only for a government official to hastily update its manifest of approved vessels to include the impounded tanker, forcing the navy to release it. The Port Harcourt business owner similarly suggests that much of the paperwork that bunkerers acquire is actually ad hoc and sloppy. After all, once the bunkerers (or whomever they sell their product to) leave Nigerian waters, any official they encounter is unlikely to be able to know the particulars of the Nigerian oil exportation bureaucracy. Simply having some papers with the right letterhead can therefore make a product seem aboveboard.
The collusion is not limited to mid-level bureaucrats. “Politicians, they are behind us,” says one bunkerer in Port Harcourt, who claims to have done “cooking” on behalf of several elected officials. Essentially everyone I interview in the delta agrees that politicians are some of the biggest investors in bunkering, and the militant or cult affiliations of different chairpersons, senators and governors are discussed as an open secret. It is not hard to see why politics and business go hand in hand. Political campaigns in Nigeria are expensive and cutthroat. Bunkering, in all its forms, generates a tremendous amount of revenue (presumably in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year, if not higher). Politicians therefore rely on proceeds from bunkering to fund their campaigns during election season, which is one reason they only ever selectively attempt to curb bunkering activities while in office, explains Fyneface, the activist and researcher in Port Harcourt.
Bunkering also persists because of corruption within the security sector. Military, police and paramilitary forces are deployed in heavy numbers across the delta to protect critical oil infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, a number of them are in on the cut.
Two senior government officials in the delta say that the multi-agency security force tasked with countering bunkering, known as the Joint Task Force (JTF), has been undermined by corruption. “We cannot rule out that the JTF has been compromised,” one says, while the other is blunter: “We’ve seen a lot of compromise.”
“There are some coordinates [of bunkering sites] we give. They don’t touch those coordinates,” says the first official. “Sometimes the soldiers will tell us not to set fire to a certain camp,” he continues, suggesting that this is because such sites are linked to local military commanders who have invested in bunkering themselves.
Every artisanal refiner I interview says that they bribe security forces. “Government pay some policemen 65,000 naira [about $100] a month,” claims Francis. “You come to our camp, we will pay you and your boys 500,000 naira [$800]. You are paid for months,” he says with a satisfied smile.
When I ask Mary, one of the bunkerers in Bayelsa, if she pays bribes, she laughs.
“Of course! We Nigeria; we are corrupt!” When caught, Mary will beg for a grace period to gradually wind down operations in order to make a limited return on her investment, though implicit in what she describes is a quid pro quo of some sort. “They will give us little time. … They will say, ‘You people have spent money to set up pot.’ They understand. So, they will give us two weeks.” She leans back and opens her arms as if to preemptively deflect judgment. “They are human now. They will pity you.”
Still, the military has made a number of high-profile raids on bunkering sites and seized several massive tankers carrying illegal crude since the summer of 2022. After seeing news of one such seizure in September, I sent a message to a contact close to the bunkerers in Bayelsa to get their sense of whether this marked a shift in approach. “Historically, government will make a show to crack down on bunkering ahead of elections,” my contact replied. “The refiners are hoping this will reduce after February.”
Between the overcast weather and the muted colors of a polluted landscape, the highway linking Port Harcourt to Yenagoa makes for a bleak drive on the days my colleague and I traverse it. The slow traffic caused by heavy seasonal rains washing over poorly tarmacked road is compounded at several points by obstructions: tanker trucks that have either been impounded or, in one particularly disquieting instance, charred in a fireball caused by leaking contraband.
The palm trees and mangroves that flank us are stained black for a yard or so upward from the roots. “When it floods, if there has been spill, the water is black…
