IRIN Background report on Niger Delta crisis

Burnt out buildings dot the centre of Nigeria’s southern oil town of Warri. One week of bitter fighting involving its three main ethnic groups has left at least 20 people dead, scores of buildings in ruins and thousands of residents displaced. Over 200 people have died in the Niger Delta region - which includes Warri - since clashes began a day after President Olusegun Obasanjo took office on 29 May. Fighting in the surrounding creeks between ethnic Ijaws and Itsekiris sucked in the Urhobos on the side of the Ijaws as the violence spread to Warri. Unrest in the Delta, main source of the petroleum that earns most of Nigeria’s foreign exchange, has severely disrupted oil exports in the past year. The latest clashes are yet to have an impact on exports, but they are indicative of how easily the situation could spin out of control and pose the first major challenge for Obasanjo as helmsman of Africa’s most populous country, with its more than 108 million people, analysts told IRIN. Reasons for latest clashes The immediate spark for the latest clashes are demands by Ijaws for the return to their area of a local council headquarters that then military ruler General Sani Abacha relocated in 1997 to an Itsekiri settlement. Since then, the two groups have fought intermittently. However, behind the restiveness in the region fester deep-seated feelings of neglect and rivalry for power among impoverished local communities. “Our key demand is for the relocation of the local government headquarters from the Itsekiri village of Ogidigben to Ogbe-Ijoh,” Kennedy Orubebe of the Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities, one of the militant groups spearheading the fighting, told IRIN. “When that is met, we shall then go to the bigger issue of neglect and underdevelopment of the Niger Delta,” he added. The delta covers at least 70,000 sq km where the River Niger breaks into a labyrinth of creeks before spilling into the Atlantic on its journey through West Africa. The four million Ijaws - reputed to be Nigeria’s fourth largest ethnic group after the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo - occupy most of the area, which is inhabited by 20 ethnic minorities. Despite over 40 years of oil exploration in the region, during which hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil have been extracted, its more than seven million inhabitants remain very poor and without the most basic modern amenities. Early signs of discontent Early signs of restlessness surfaced when author Ken Saro-Wiwa and fellow Ogoni minority rights activists formed the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) in the 1990s to campaign against government neglect and pollution of their land by the oil transnational Shell. Perceived as a trouble-maker by a Nigerian establishment dominated by the major ethnic groups, Saro-Wiwa was charged with murder and executed with eight others in 1995 on Abacha’s orders, after a trial widely condemned as flawed. Rather than cowing the people of the delta, the executions have been followed by increased discontent and militancy. This has posed a serious threat to the lifeblood of the Nigerian economy as the more numerous Ijaws demand greater access to power and the oil wealth produced on their land. Around the town of Warri these demands have resulted in bitter rivalry with the more influential Itsekiri, seen as using the connections of their top people in government and industry to corner more than their fair share of the dividends of power. Blame for violence Officials of oil multinationals who use Warri and the eastern city of Port Harcourt as the bases for their onshore and offshore operations in the delta, blame the upsurge of violence in the region on certain demographic changes noticed in recent years. Youths have now taken over the leadership of the Ijaws, with an often university-educated vanguard leading armies of the unemployed in demanding redress for the perceived misdeeds of oil companies and government, they said. “In the past we settled any difficulties we encountered in the region by simply speaking to local chiefs and opinion leaders who easily got things sorted out,” one senior official said. “But nowadays it’s no more like that. The youths have taken over, and often they’re armed and impatient as well.” President Obasanjo who promised during his electoral campaign to make the Niger Delta crisis a priority met in Abuja this week with leaders of the ethnic groups fighting in Warri. On Friday, he travelled to the area for a larger meeting with all interest groups in the region to end the potentially explosive situation. “The region is in danger of being consumed by a conflagration. It is good Obasanjo is taking steps to defuse the situation,” Yomi Akintunde, a political analyst, told IRIN.