Pirates

by Ross Kemp

  The bunkering of oil, it was becoming clear to me, was an illegal act on the water – yet another form of piracy, and the sort of sums Mitee was talking about were staggering. The government’s own anti-corruption task force estimates that $400 billion has gone missing since oil was first discovered in the Delta. And as with so much of the corruption in Nigeria, it occurs at the highest level. You don’t get the oil out into the open market without the help of people in authority. That means the government. Once it enters the world’s fuel supply, there’s nothing anyone can do about it – chances are that you or I have filled up our cars on illegal bunkered oil without even knowing it. You can see the attraction, both for the corrupt politicians in Abuja and for the poor of Ogoniland – if you’ve got gold right on your front door, chances are you’re going to grab a handful.

  I’d been shocked by what I had seen in Ogoniland. But as we’d been driving around our guides had told us that there was a village called Bodo on the outskirts of the area that was even worse. So the next morning we decided to take a look. In order to get to this new oil spill we needed to head further up the river. The canoes we had been in the previous day would be no good to cover that kind of distance, and so we boarded a small fleet of lifeboats with outboard motors. I say we boarded – in fact we were piggybacked onto the boats by our guides, who insisted that we shouldn’t risk wading through that polluted river.

  We sped through the confusing network of waterways. The plan was to stop off to see the oil leak, then move on into the village of Bodo itself. So it was that we moored at the edge of the mangrove swamp, alighted from our boats and set off in search of oil.

  The spill that they took me to was on a much more massive scale than those I had seen the previous day. All around, the mangrove – which takes hundreds of years to grow – had been killed. The ground itself was a soggy, muddy, oily mess; you could touch it with your fingers and they would come up stained black. The closer we drew to the source of the leak, the blacker the earth became. I felt like I was sinking in a quicksand of black gold. The mud itself was hot because of the oil – so hot that it started to cook my feet. Eventually we just couldn’t walk any further.

  These pipes have been there for many years and they don’t have an indefinite lifespan. Sooner or later, they’re going to split. Bunkering is doubtless a big environmental problem in the Niger Delta, but it’s not the only one: the area suffers from an ageing oil infrastructure that hasn’t been maintained and is causing devastation such as that which I was looking at now. The underground pipe had obviously been leaking for a long time, and eventually the oil had spurted to the surface. It’s very difficult to find the source of such a leak and it takes a long time – time during which the environmental damage accumulates. This leak had been fixed a year ago, but it was clear that its impact would last for tens, maybe hundreds of years to come. It was hell on earth, and I was shocked to learn that oil spills such as this happen, on average, once a day in Nigeria.

  The boggy ground around the oil spill wasn’t the sort of place you wanted to stay for long, so we returned to our boats and headed up towards Bodo. There we disembarked again. As we entered the village we received the familiar hostile looks – the fact that we had white skin naturally made the locals think that we were oil workers. Not their favourite people. When it became clear who we were, however, they grew a little less antagonistic, even eager to talk to us and explain what was happening to their home.

  The villagers were angry with the oil companies and the effect their presence has had on their lives. A crowd of them gathered round me, and their spokesman spoke vehemently about the lack of compensation they had received. ‘We are fed up,’ he said. ‘This is our river. This is our only source of livelihood. Over 80 per cent of this community depends on this river. Look at all the people – you can see that they are all hungry. If this river was OK the way it was, all these boys would be on the river struggling for their daily bread.’

  I looked towards the river. The boys he was indicating weren’t working – they were larking about in the filthy, oily water.

  ‘But because they have nothing to do,’ the villager continued, ‘every day we fight with them that they should not commit stealing and all that.’

  The story I was hearing was similar to the one I had been told in Ajegunle: because of the pollution, people were turning to crime in order to put food in their bellies.

  The villager continued. ‘All this militancy is attributed to it. Their pipes should be removed from our land. Our source of livelihood is destroyed now. And one of these days they will hear from us, because the solution would be to blow up the manifold. And we will. We will. I am saying to you we will. We are going to blow down this manifold and let the government come and kill all of us. So let them kill us with their guns instead of we die of hunger.’

  Truly desperate words. It would have been easy to mistake them for mere rhetoric, but the crowd of villagers hanging round their spokesman showed no sign that they disagreed with him, and he spoke with a real passion. Part of our reason for travelling into the Delta was to try and make contact with MEND. We hadn’t done that, but we had certainly learned why they exist and why they have support among certain sectors of the community. The villagers in Bodo honestly believed that the pollution was killing them. It was causing crime and misery. Under circumstances like that, it’s perhaps understandable that people might want to take things into their own hands, and that their measures are likely to be extreme…

  Bodo was an edgy place. It smelled like a refinery, and we were covered in oil. The kids offered to clean our boots for a few dollars – cheap for the kind of work they had to put in, but I still have those boots and they still reek of oil.

  The day wasn’t over yet. As we sped back, I was in a boat with our journalist fixer and four or five of the locals who were showing us around. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, our boat peeled off down a tributary, away from where the others were heading.

  And in the Niger Delta, that’s not a good thing to happen.

  I felt my stomach turn to lead. Oh fuck, I thought to myself. This is it. We’re being taken.

  Nervous people on planes are known to look at the faces of the air stewardesses if they hit bad turbulence. If the cabin crew look nervous, they know they should panic. Similarly, I quickly glanced at our fixer, hoping to see a reassuring expression of calm. Not a bit of it. He looked as alarmed as I felt – with a sinking feeling of a lift you can’t get out of that is hurtling to the ground.

  ‘Where are you going?’ our fixer shouted. ‘WHERE ARE YOU GOING?’

  Our guides looked blandly at us. ‘Short cut,’ they said.

  ‘No,’ the fixer said. ‘No! No short cut.’

  By now the others were well out of sight. We were entirely under these people’s control: we couldn’t have escaped even if we’d tried. The only way out of that boat was into the water, and you’d have just drowned in the oil. I muttered nervously, doing my best to at least look calm. ‘Can we just turn round?’

  They looked at us like we were mad. Truth of the matter was that our boys were racing the others. But not in my head they weren’t. In my head we were about to spend a few months enjoying the hospitality of the Niger Delta pirates.

  There was a moment of stand-off. Our guides insisted that they wanted to take their short cut; I found myself nervously reflecting on an uncomfortable fact I had heard. Apparently, a substantial proportion of people, male and female, who are kidnapped in West Africa get raped. And – close your eyes now if you’re of a squeamish disposition – not always with a penis. Bits of wood, bits of metal… It’s a way of dominating someone. There was a good deal of buttock clenching going on. Not that that would have helped.

  Eventually, our guides relented. We turned back, caught up with the others and made it to shore safely, but we’d had a quick insight into how easy it would be to kidnap someone in that network of channels. I don’t think I fully relaxed until we were back in our a
rmed convoy heading out of Ogoniland and back to Port Harcourt.

  We were only in that part of the Delta for a short time, during which it was difficult to get a real handle on the ins and outs of the environmental damage that was being done there. The oil companies claim that the leakages are solely down to the mismanagement of the well heads by the many people illegally bunkering oil. It appeared to me that this was true in some places, but not everywhere, and you’d be hard pushed entirely to absolve the multinationals of blame. Whatever the truth, one thing was clear to me. The oil bunkerers were doing very nicely out of what was going on in Ogoniland; the oil companies weren’t doing too badly either. The losers were ordinary citizens and the environment. Having seen this at first hand, even if I didn’t agree with their methods, I could well understand why militant political groups like MEND existed.

  In June 2009, a few months after I left Nigeria, one of the multinational corporations, Shell, made a payout of $15.5 million to the families of the Ogoni Nine, including Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son, in settlement of a legal action in which it was accused of having collaborated in their execution. Shell did not concede or admit to any of the accusations, but by avoiding a lengthy court case they stopped the world at large becoming more aware of the environmental situation in the Niger Delta. A large proportion of that money will be used to pay the Ogoni Nine’s legal costs, but a sum of $5 million has been put aside to set up a trust for educational and community projects in the Niger Delta. The trust’s name is Kisi, which means ‘progress’. And maybe it is progress of a kind. I can’t help thinking, though, that in a country that produces $40 billion of black gold a year, $5 million is just a drop of oil in the ocean.

  11. Kidnap Alley

  Back in our Port Harcourt hotel, we returned to our prisoner-like existence. Subject to the whims of the MEND spokesmen, who would occasionally get in contact by phone and then let us down, we couldn’t go anywhere without our armed guards, who were there for our protection but also to make sure we didn’t go walkabout. We wanted to be low-profile, to melt into the background, but that was proving impossible. To make our predicament worse, we then received an official invitation to visit the governor of Rivers State early the next morning. We were bleary-eyed because we’d been up half the night waiting for phone calls from pirates. But we were also in Port Harcourt as the governor’s guests and couldn’t do anything without his permission. So in a way it wasn’t so much an invitation as a summons.

  Governor Amaechi – or to give him his full title, the Right Honourable Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, His Exellency the Executive Governor of Rivers State – is taking a hard line on piracy. He’s one of MEND’s biggest adversaries, and a bit of a maverick within the Nigerian political system. The government had recently passed a law giving all kidnappers an automatic life sentence, but Amaechi himself had supported increasing that to a death sentence. The word was that he had plans to turn Rivers State from the most volatile area in the Niger Delta into a thriving megacity, with skyscrapers and a monorail. If that was the case, he certainly had his work cut out. He had a hard act to follow too. One of his predecessors, Peter Odili, faced accusations over the theft and mismanagement of billions of dollars’ worth of oil revenue. However, he has since been granted immunity by a government anti-corruption investigation. I guess that’s just the way it works.

  Even if I resented being escorted to his offices with the kind of close protection I’d never previously had, part of me was curious to see what this optimistic hardliner was like. As we headed through Port Harcourt, we saw evidence of Amaechi cracking down on other illegal acts too. All too frequently we would pass houses – many newly built – with red marks on the door. These marks indicated that the houses had been built without planning permission, and the governor’s zero-tolerance administration had ordered that they were to be knocked down. So even before we arrived I had the impression that Amaechi meant what he said.

  We arrived at the governor’s office, as requested, at 7.30 in the morning, ready for an 8.00 meeting, and were asked to go through the sort of security cordon you’d expect at any airport. But if Amaechi was keen to see us, as he claimed to be, he didn’t have a very good way of showing it. We were kept waiting in the lobby for two and a half hours before finally being ushered in to see the man himself. It was a bit like getting in to see the pope, what with all the goons and stooges and layers of security. Amaechi was obviously a popular man, but he was only the governor of one state of one region of Nigeria. It was immediately obvious, though, that maintaining his administration required a lot of money – you could tell that not only from the layers of bureaucracy and security that surrounded the man, but also from the relative affluence of the building. Amaechi looked younger than I expected – all the photos and paintings of him I’d seen around the place had been retouched to make him look older and more imposing.

  Amaechi wasn’t quite ready to talk to us, so he offered us breakfast while we were waiting. He led us into the breakfast room, an ornate space with a large table surrounded by gaudy but not inexpensive chairs. Breakfast consisted of typical Nigerian cuisine. I wasn’t a big fan of the chilli doughnut with blancmange filling; there was also goat stew filled with bones – as in many places I’ve been, the animal had clearly been carved with a hammer. I certainly wouldn’t want to slag off the way the Nigerians eat – it’s their cuisine, and they adore it. No doubt they find the idea of bacon and eggs a bit odd, but what was to their taste wasn’t hugely to mine, and I’d have done anything for a bowl of cornflakes.

  After hours of waiting, the moment finally arrived for us to have a bit of face time with the governor. He was a charming man, in his way. You could see how he might be a popular politician, and he smiled politely at me as I asked if I might talk to him about some of the issues he had inherited when he took over.

  I asked the governor what his take on MEND was. His face became a little less smiley. ‘I don’t think there is anything called MEND,’ he replied. ‘I have not seen one.’

  Really? So there was no Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta?

  ‘I’ve not seen one. Let one person come forward and negotiate with us. I’ve not seen one. I can’t say whether they exist, but I’ve never seen one person called MEND. So far the people I have been dealing with in the Rivers State have been criminals.’

  So was it the governor’s viewpoint that the people calling themselves MEND were using their organization as a political excuse for criminal actions?

  ‘Yes. Ninety-nine per cent of those involved in Rivers State are criminals. Simple.’

  I asked him about his support for the death penalty for acts of piracy and kidnapping. He explained to me that in Nigeria robbery attracts the death penalty. Kidnapping, from his point of view, was even worse – the robbery of a person. He believed that his calls for the death penalty were popular with the people. ‘You should go to the streets,’ he told me. ‘The people are tired of these criminals. So it’s quite popular. It may be unpopular with the NGOs, civil rights or human rights movements, but it’s popular with our population.’

  Amaechi had told me I should hit the streets of Port Harcourt. I wondered if he would accompany me. Ever-obliging, he agreed. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  The governor then took me on what was little more than a public relations tour of all the good works he had initiated in Port Harcourt. It was a curious excursion. He insisted on driving me himself, to show what a man of the people he was – it helped though that he had an armed convoy around him, with a Russian DshK heavy machine gun mounted on a pickup and 20 men with assault rifles clearing the path of traffic ahead of us. To give the guy his due, however, he didn’t appear to be afraid of getting his hands dirty. As we were travelling down the highway we saw a local trying to extort ‘taxes’ from another driver; the driver was refusing and the extortionist had attacked him. When Amaechi saw this, he ground to a halt, jumped out and ran across the highway. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded forcefully, be
fore turning to his guards. ‘Arrest that man!’ he instructed. A bit later on we were in one of Port Harcourt’s incessant traffic jams when we spotted a white army van going the wrong way up the road. Again, he stopped the car, jumped out and made the van turn around and travel the right way up the road, those inside apologizing to everyone as they passed.

  As we toured the town righting wrongs like some kind of West African Judge Dredd, I asked Amaechi about the piracy that blighted the region. What were the reasons for it, in his view, and what could be done to stem the problem? I was half-expecting more of the hard-line dogma, but in fact he showed himself to be sensitive to the causes of Nigerian piracy. ‘Poverty,’ he told me. ‘Most of those people who are involved in crime now used to go fishing. Now there is nowhere to fish. The military government that we had lacked the courage to enforce discipline and government control, which is what we are doing now.’ But the piracy was a direct result of poverty. After all, he said, ‘Who would want to carry guns and rob people at sea if they can feed themselves?’ You don’t take the kind of risk involved in committing acts of piracy, he maintained, unless you know you have a risk of dying of poverty.

  We were given a tour around a new hospital Amaechi was building, power plants, schools and other worthy projects. I couldn’t help noticing, though, that there were a lot of half-finished construction sites. When we stopped to look at one of these, Amaechi approached the Italian contractor, who happened to be on site. ‘Why is this not finished?’ he demanded. ‘What is wrong? Why is it not finished?’

  The contractor looked, I thought, a bit nervous. ‘Do you want the real answer?’ he asked. ‘On camera?’