Crude World

by Peter Maass

  “Can I buy it from you?” he asked.

  It would not be wise to refuse a warlord.

  “You can buy it on the Internet,” I suggested.

  “No. I need it now.”

  I said that I needed it to conduct my work in Nigeria. He understood. The interview began.

  Asari was an integral part of Nigeria’s ordered chaos. That is an odd phrase, “ordered chaos,” but it gives appropriate due to the connections among the men and women for whom the country is a giant stage where they fight and bargain for the treasure under their feet. In fetid swamps, crowded slums and corporate towers, there is a form of nonstop interaction between warlords, governors, tribal kings and oil executives, like actors and stagehands in the same production. The ones I met would move on sooner or later—to another position, another place of exile or a grave—but others would replace them, because this was not a theatrical production but a system of perpetual conflict that compromised everyone involved in it.

  Asari was one of six children in a middle-class family; his father was a judge, his mother a housewife. He attended a Baptist secondary school, became a Marxist in college, dropped out of law school twice and failed on two runs for elective office. He had converted to Islam before his electoral career, changing his name (good-bye Dokubo Melford Goodhead Jr.; hello Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo Asari), and became a Ramadan-observing militant. He professed admiration for Osama bin Laden as well as Nelson Mandela. Because personal as well as moral flexibility is required in tumultuous Nigeria, where life proceeds with the complexity of chess rather than the reliability of checkers, Asari was not accused of inconsistency.

  Nigeria’s population is the largest in Africa and is composed of several hundred ethnic groups divided into an even greater number of tribes and subtribes with their own dialects and disputes. Asari belonged to the delta’s largest tribe, the Ijaw, whose members are predominantly Christian. He was one of the tribe’s few Muslims, but in the rock-paper-scissors game of identity in Nigeria, tribe trumps religion; the Ijaw do not care if you worship Allah or Apollo—you are theirs. In the late 1990s Asari was involved in the creation of the Ijaw Youth Council, and became president of it in 2001. A slogan was adopted, “Resource control and self-determination by every means necessary,” and that meant war. Asari went into the creeks and formed his militia.

  It was a slow day at his hotel-turned-headquarters, so we conversed with few interruptions, though once, in response to an argument in a nearby room, Asari shouted something in Ijaw and the dispute quieted. Asari did not look like a warlord. He was of average height and chubby, with the eternally fatigued bearing of a man who must work several jobs to stay afloat. Yet he was the real thing. When I noticed a scar on an arm, he displayed others that were the result of combat, though he could not always recall the injury. “This one,” he said, touching a three-inch tear in the flesh of his leg and pausing over it, “I don’t remember how I got it.”

  Asari was fighting an alliance of the foreign companies that extracted the delta’s oil (Shell drilled the most) and the central government, which hired them and provided security for their operations. It was the same alliance that Saro-Wiwa and Isaac Boro had fought against. For them, the government and the companies were partners in a regionwide, decades-long crime. Of course, Asari’s fighters were also receiving money from the oil companies, in the form of ransoms paid for workers taken hostage or protection money to help defend oil installations from … their own attacks. It was a closed loop of recirculated violence.

  “The oil companies are working with an occupation government that does not have a legal right to the resources,” Asari said. “They should pack and go because they have contributed so much to the deprivation, oppression and suffering of our people. There is oil in Alaska, there is oil in Siberia. They can explore for oil there.”

  Asari liked to be known as a freedom fighter—that’s why he showed off his scars—and he offered a clear definition that explained his collision with the government in Abuja.

  “Freedom means the restoration of sovereignty to our people,” he said.

  Sovereign, as in apart from Nigeria?

  “Yes, as a separate nation. We are not going to be apologetic about it. We have the right to self-determination.”

  He responded without anger when it was suggested that he might fare no better than Saro-Wiwa, Boro or, for that matter, any rebel who wishes to separate his region from a government that is brutal, well armed and determined not to let go of a territory under which a treasure is buried.

  “Like the people of Ireland and the people of Chechnya and many other people, if it is not the wish of God that I should be the one who succeeds, a better person will take over,” he said.

  It was impossible to know whether Asari would reach the promised land that had eluded his predecessors, but one thing was sure: Nigeria was collapsing. Countries do not rot as fast as men or buildings, but rot they do. Laws devolve from tools of order into excuses for payoffs. You need a permit? Very good. How much will you pay? In parts of Nigeria, state control was an idea rather than fact. This is a hallmark of failed states: they fail to even exist. In the delta, there was no formal or informal demarcation between areas controlled by the government and those held by the rebels. Asari, at the time of my visit, was the delta’s alpha rebel, so I needed travel permission from him, not the police, the army or Shell.

  He assigned a young aide, whose nickname was Senator, to take me upriver. The next day, we traveled into the delta and wound up on a leaky canoe in a dying river with a tearful king.

  The global distribution of oil is wildly irregular. Lots in Russia, not nearly as much in China. Vast reserves in Venezuela, none in Guyana. Large amounts in Libya, minor quantities in Egypt. The unevenness applies within countries, too. America’s remaining fields are in a handful of states, yet even in those, there are geographic gaps. The oil of Texas is lopsidedly concentrated in the west and east of the state. Though we think of Saudi Arabia as swimming in oil, in fact, most of the country has little; its reserves are concentrated in Ghawar, the 174-mile-long field discussed in chapter one. The same for Iraq—it has two giant concentrations of oil, one near Kirkuk, the other near Basra. Elsewhere in the country, relatively little. Geology is not destiny—Texans are not at one another’s throats—but the uneven distribution of oil can exacerbate regional tensions. The Shiites concentrated in Saudi Arabia’s eastern oil region would prefer autonomy, if not independence, but the Sunni royal family has used its security forces to prevent those sentiments from going anywhere; also, the region where oil was found has been repopulated with Sunnis. In Iraq the huge oil reserves located around Kirkuk could be the setting for a war between Kurds and Arabs, both of whom claim ownership rights over the area and its oil.

  Today, you needn’t be a Marxist to be interested in the role of natural resources in political conflicts. One of the most prominent experts in this hybrid field is Paul Collier, an economist formerly at the World Bank who coauthored a study of 160 countries and 73 civil wars since 1960. The report was titled “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” and this is how Collier described its findings: “Dependence on primary commodities substantially increases the risk of conflict, unless the primary commodity is extremely plentiful, such as in the case of oil in Saudi Arabia. In a country with no primary commodity exports at all, the risk is about one percent in a five-year period. In a country with high dependence on primary commodities, which means about 30 percent of its national income comes from primary commodities, the risk is around 23 percent.” A key problem is political maturity. If a country has a stable and open government and a sense of national identity, like Norway, it has a high probability of resolving the disagreements over who owns the oil and how revenues should be distributed. But Nigeria, like most countries, lacked those attributes.

  The Niger Delta was a territory of 100 percent risk. With Senator guiding the way out of Port Harcourt, we drove for nearly two hours to Abonnema, where the road
ended, and got into a canoe with an outboard engine that conked out several times as we made our way deeper into the delta. The delta is one of the world’s largest wetlands, its ecosystem once nourishing almost any living thing that might have walked, flown, swum or wiggled onto Noah’s Ark. If the delta had been blessed with no oil, it might now be a wildlife sanctuary in which Western tourists would pay hundreds of dollars a night to fall asleep in ecolodges listening to the sounds of herons in the trees and manatees in the creeks. Fate has not been so kind. Our first stop, after forty-five minutes of navigating a sweltering maze of muddy, mangrove-lined creeks, was Tombia, a town attacked on multiple occasions and by multiple forces, in 2004.

  Tombia was a shambles, half its homes burned or bombed beyond repair. As the canoe glided onto the riverbank, a dozen survivors came out, and their manner was not warm. They were young men, fighters, some with soiled bandages. Fingers and hands were missing; limbs were swathed in gauze that was caked in pus. I stayed by the canoe as they argued with Senator. After a few minutes, Senator came to my side and whispered, “We’ll probably have to go.”

  The puzzle was not hard to piece together, because I had heard of Tombia’s sufferings. In the delta war, the town had sided with Asari, who sheltered there from time to time. A rival militia led by a warlord named Ateke Tom had attacked and seized Tombia. Ateke Tom had taken a shortcut to the position of rebel leader: much of his funding and weaponry allegedly came from the local governor. This is often the way things go in collapsing states. To undermine a semipopular rebel like Asari, a government, realizing that its own forces are inept or too unpopular to win a hearts-and-minds struggle, funds a new rebel force that it quietly controls. If the new one becomes too popular and uncontrollable, yet another one is created to take on the last. Antigovernment agitation becomes a perpetually splitting atom.

  After retreating from Tombia, Asari’s fighters regrouped and reconquered it. The government then stepped in. Army forces attacked in the brutal way they usually do, with helicopter gunships strafing anything that moved, while speedboats landed soldiers, who shot and looted their way through town. A dozen people were reported killed, and the town’s population was too frightened to return—but in any event, there was not much to return to.

  The young men who’d argued with Senator were upset that Asari had failed to compensate Tombia for its misery; the boss was living well in the city while his followers were perishing in the delta from their suppurating wounds. Senator—who, fortunately, had the charm of a senator—eventually soothed these survivors, and they provided a tour of the remains of their town, which had had a population of several thousand before the attack. The youths’ leader, whose nickname was Prince, led the way, pointing out the destruction with the stump of what used to be his right hand. Even the Lutheran cathedral, St. Stephen’s, had been destroyed, a fire consuming its walls and roof. Its timid pastor, living in a shack and shivering from malaria or fear of the bitter youths who ruled this wasteland, said it had been constructed by British missionaries in 1915. A sign by the church declared, “Tombia is dedicated to God. Jesus the King over the land. Holy ghost in charge.”

  A boy who looked to be twelve years old and was blind in one eye stood in front of a house that had burned to its concrete foundation. His older brother had been killed, he said, his town was now dead and his river was dead too, due to oil pollution. He could not possibly catch enough fish to nourish himself and his dead brother’s family. He was angry and hopeless at the same time; the result was listlessness. The government, the army, Shell, Asari, Ateke Tom, the writer who would leave in a few minutes—they would not help. His only hope was, it seemed, the holy ghost.

  Back on the river, the journey continued into a landscape of ruin. The local man steering the canoe did not consult a map as he navigated a maze of creeks; he knew the way to wherever we were going. At times, we ducked to avoid low-hanging vines and branches. There was a primeval feel to this passage, though every few minutes a sign along the shore said, “Warning: Gas Pipeline Under Pressure” or “High Pressure Gas Pipeline: Do Not Anchor.” Intertwined pipes emerged from the water in a tangle of metal that had the appearance of industrial art; these were wellheads, from which the flow of oil was controlled. At some spots, the shoreline was shaved of vegetation and fenced off, to protect flares and pits that burned off excess oil and gas. The earth in these places was, quite literally, on fire.

  Most wells in the delta were run by Shell, which hired subcontractors for some work. That’s why a drilling barge came into view that bore, on its flank, a familiar name—Halliburton, the energy-services company that was once the home of former Vice President Dick Cheney. The barge was painted in Halliburton’s colors, red and white, and was guarded by several dozen soldiers, who stared coldly as Asari’s people passed by. It was understood that war would return soon.

  It was time to visit a kingdom that even smelled of rot.

  The canoe headed to Oru Sangama. The village’s defining feature, apprehended on first inhalation, was a heavy odor of sewage that had fused with humidity to form a fecal mist. Sangama’s several hundred residents relieved themselves in a creek that was just a few steps from their homes; the creek was dead, or nearly so, as was the sickly mangrove jungle around it. The villagers had no clean water, no electricity, no school, no doctor or nurse, not even any wildlife in the trees. The walls of their homes were made of mud bricks, the roofs of sheet metal. The good news was that these homes—several dozen in all—were new, but only because the army had destroyed the old ones in a recent assault.

  I was led to an open-air hut and offered a plastic chair and a soft drink. Someone said “His Highness” was busy at the moment but would arrive shortly. To make me feel at home, a small generator was switched on, along with a television connected to a satellite dish. A villager tuned in Fox News. Thanks to the TV, the residents of Sangama were familiar with Bill O’Reilly and the enviable standard of living enjoyed by the Americans who consumed the oil that was killing them off. About 40 percent of Nigeria’s oil exports went to the United States. From the wellheads I saw in the creeks, the oil flowed to processing stations and then to export terminals like Bonny Island, where it was poured into storage tanks before being loaded onto supertankers and shipped to American ports, where it was offloaded at coastal refineries and turned into the gas that kept our SUVs moving.

  When the TV became quiet, a steady roar, like a giant flamethrower, could be heard. About a thousand yards away, across the fetid creek, stood the Soku natural gas plant, which was part of a multibillion-dollar network of facilities collecting natural gas from Shell’s oil fields. The village was in the shadow of Soku’s main tower, which was several hundred feet tall and shot into the air a plume of fire; the natural gas, burning furiously, sounded like a rocket launch. As darkness fell, Sangama became illuminated by the flare’s reddish glow; the town remained lit in this fashion until the sun rose in the morning. The Martian tint was nearly bright enough to read by, but it was entirely unwanted, because it was lethal.

  This flare was one of hundreds I’d noticed while flying into Port Harcourt; they were so large and bright that you could see them from an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet. They existed because when oil is brought to the surface, natural gas rises, too; in the industry, it is referred to as “associated gas.” Oil firms have several options for dealing with it: transport the gas to customers elsewhere, reinject it into the earth or burn it off. The first option is feasible if the volume of gas is large enough to justify pipelines or liquefication facilities; these often cost billions of dollars. Reinjection is environmentally safe, but the technology, though less costly than pipelines, is still expensive.

  Flaring is the cheapest way to deal with the problem, though its environmental and health costs are colossal. The carcinogens that flaring releases include benzene, benzopyrene and toluene. The metals emitted include mercury, arsenic and chromium (the contaminant that was publicized by Erin Brockovich in Califo
rnia). The released greenhouse gases, which cause global warming, include carbon dioxide and methane. Emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide are so severe in the delta that acid rain eats through sheet-metal roofs; they need to be replaced every few years, though the Nigerian army hastened the pace at Sangama.

  Gas flares in the Niger Delta

  Illnesses caused by flaring include renal and cardiovascular failure, cancer, leukemia, emphysema, bronchitis, immune-system dysfunction and reproductive disorders. Yet it is difficult in the delta to know the toll. Epidemiological studies have not been conducted because funding is not available and the delta has become too dangerous for researchers. When someone in the delta dies of thyroid cancer or leukemia caused by gas in the air or oil in the water, they are buried without an autopsy. These deaths, and certainly the causes of these deaths, are the proverbial trees that fall without being heard.

  This does not happen in developed countries, where oil firms are obligated to invest in technology and infrastructure that reduce flaring to almost nothing. The United States, for instance, burns less than 1 percent of its associated gas. Flaring was banned in Nigeria in 1984, but the practice continued because the only way to stop it, when pipelines or reinjection were deemed too costly, was to cease bringing oil to the surface. The Nigerian government, addicted to the profits of oil, did not order that. As a result, nearly 55 percent of the country’s associated gas was being flared when I was in the country. According to a joint report by the World Bank and UN Development Programme, Nigeria was burning 2.5 billion cubic feet of gas every day, releasing about 70 million tons of carbon dioxide per year; nearly 20 percent of the gas flared in the world comes from Nigeria. Shell claims to have reduced flaring, and the Soku plant was, actually, part of its effort—the facility processes and transports associated gas for use by consumers and also reinjects gas into the ground. But the gas coming out of the ground was more than even Soku could handle. The deadly excess burned.