Report from Nigeria by Michael Fleshman(The Africa Fund ) - The Africa Fund 50 Broad Street, Suite 711 New York, NY 10004 Nigeria Transition Watch Number 9 Report From Nigeria 2 By Michael Fleshman Human Rights Coordinator, The Africa Fund Dateline: June 17, Port Harcourt, Nigeria Obasanjo Takes Control The newly installed President of Nigeria. Retired General Olusegun Obasanjo, is a man in a hurry. He has moved quickly to consolidate his control of government, cannily maneuvering between the country's various political and ethnic blocs, purging an entire generation of senior military officers and demonstrating impressive independence from his party's back room bosses. In perhaps the most remarkable move of his fledgling Presidency, Obasanjo ordered the retirement of 93 senior officers on June 10. Targeted for removal were the powerful heads of the army, navy and air force and every officer to hold a government position in the Babangida, Abacha and Abubakar military regimes. Also dismissed were all internal security agency heads and a great many senior civil servants. The speed and the scope of the purge, widely considered the most delicate and potentially destabilizing task to face Obasanjo, surprised political observers and got high praise from human rights leaders. Nor is there any indication of unrest in the ranks -- an indication perhaps that the military appreciates the depth of the contempt Nigerians hold for the institution after 15 years of brutal and spectacularly corrupt misrule. In a slap at the outgoing military government of General Abdulsalami Abubakar, Obasanjo also ordered the cancellation of all contracts awarded by the regime since January 1, 1999 and established a commission headed by respected businessman Christopher Kolade to investigate the off-budget expenditure of over $3 billion dollars by the Abubakar government in its final months. Human Rights Commission Established In another surprise move, the Obasanjo government announced the creation of a commission to investigate Abacha-era human rights abuses. The commission is headed by respected former Nigerian Supreme Court Justice Chukwufidu Oputa, and includes Catholic Justice and Peace Commission head Father Hassan Kuka. Under the terms of reference governing the investigation, the commission will hold public hearings in the different regions of the country to receive testimony about human rights abuses and will then refer their findings to the President's office. The commission is mandated to investigate "serious" human rights abuses, such as extra-judicial executions and assassinations committed by all military governments since 1983. The commission lacks the power to compel testimony from suspected human rights abusers or refer cases to the courts for prosecution. It is unclear whether the commission will have an independent investigative capacity or the authority to grant immunity to suspects in exchange for testimony. There is also no guarantee of government action on the final report when it is submitted to the government. Human rights leaders and commission members have welcomed the action, but called on the Obasanjo administration to expand both the scope and the authority of the body. Among the cases expected to be investigated are the 1996 murder of Kudirat Abiola, the wife of the imprisoned President-elect Moshood Abiola, and the 1995 execution of environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Familiar Faces for the Obasanjo Cabinet President Obasanjo submitted a list of 49 candidates for cabinet positions to the Senate last week, meeting the constitutional requirement for at least one candidate from each of the 36 states. But the list is drawn almost exclusively from Nigeria's largely discredited civilian political class, and disappointed public hopes for fresher, younger faces. Nevertheless, political observers say that Obasanjo's selections reflect a canny grasp of Nigeria's complex ethnic politics and show an almost total disregard for the recommendations of his own party's leadership. Instead Obasanjo has used his cabinet nominees to co-opt and divide potential opponents and reward loyal ethnic blocs for their political support. By offering two cabinet posts to leaders of the disaffected Yoruba community for example, which voted overwhelmingly against Obasanjo and his Peoples Democratic Party, the President has caused a very visible split within the Yoruba leadership and forced the opposition Alliance for Democracy to abandon its policy of non-participation in the government. Obasanjo is also credited for deft political maneuvering with his surprise support for a slavish Abacha loyalist, Evan Enwerem, for the powerful post of Senate President, against his own party's nominee. Obasanjo's support for Enwerem, a member of the Igbo community, was a reward to the powerful Igbo politician Alex Ekwueme, whom Obasanjo, a Yoruba, had defeated for the Presidential nomination with the strong backing of the Nigerian military. By backing Enwerem's candidacy Obasanjo thus consolidates an alliance with a powerful faction of the Igbo elite, important since the President is widely disliked in what would otherwise be his own ethnic Yoruba base. At the same time he will now pursue his legislative agenda with a Senate controlled by his own party and headed by a man deeply in his debt and known more more for his opportunism than independence. Crisis in the Oil Fields But if President Obasanjo is winning high marks in the capital city of Abuja and the commercial center of Lagos, he has to date failed to persuade the restive communities of the Niger Delta oil fields of his government's good intentions. On Friday June 11 I traveled to the oil town of Port Harcourt to attend a meeting between President Obasanjo and the oil producing communities at the invitation of MOSOP President Ledum Mitee and Ijaw Youth Council spokesperson Oronto Douglas. The meeting had been delayed a day by the crisis in strife-torn Warri, where communal violence between heavily armed young men of the Ijaw, Itsekiri and Urubho communities took hundreds of lives. The area remains under heavy military occupation. It was clear that community leaders were gratified by Obasanjo's presence and there was a real opportunity to begin the kind of serious dialogue between the Federal government, the U.S. and European oil companies and the minority communities in the Delta needed to finally resolve the 10-year confrontation between the companies and the communities. The conflict has significantly reduced Nigeria's economically vital oil exports and caused thousands of deaths at the hands of the army and police. Sadly it was an opportunity lost. While community demands include the repeal of military decrees enacted by Obasanjo during his tenure as military head of state during the 1970s, establishing Federal control of the land and oil resources of the Niger Delta, and direct community control of economic development and environmental protection, it soon became clear that the Obasanjo government was only prepared to tinker with the existing top-down system. The government has apparently decided to scrap two corrupt and ineffective Federal development agencies, the Petroleum Trust Fund and a body known as OMPADEC and replaced it with a Niger Delta development agency made up of the Governors of the oil producing states. Even worse, it soon became apparent to the assembled youth and community leaders that the President had decided on his course of action prior to the meeting, raising strong and sometimes angry doubts about the government's willingness to establish a genuine dialogue with the oil communities and incorporate their views in a new and more equitable dispensation. Obasanjo's meeting with the IYC, whose members have spearheaded the occupation of particularly Chevron oil facilities in Bayelsa and Delta states, and where oil workers have sometimes been kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom, began on a positive and even a light note. The President, dressed in flowing white traditional robes, opened the meeting by expressing sympathy for the suffering of the communities and understanding of the problems created by oil production in the crowded and environmentally fragile region. He joked with and teased the young people, taking questions directly from the audience and reminding them that as the commander of Federal forces during the Biafran civil war in the Niger Delta he had "liberated" their parents from the Biafran occupation. But he refused outright to negotiate with youth leaders, and scolded them for their immaturity and disrespect — telling them to take their grievances to their state governors instead. The meeting soon degenerated into an angry exchange and ended on a very negative note. A subsequent meeting with community leaders and elders was more reasoned but equally unproductive, with MOSOP President Mitee saying that he saw no difference between the governor's body and OMPADEC and reiterating MOSOP's longstanding demand for control of community resources and local autonomy. To this observer it seems clear that the groundwork for the fundamental changes needed to finally end the bloodshed and turmoil in the Niger Delta has yet to be laid. Until a genuine dialogue involving all of the stakeholders here begins, the Delta will continue to be an unstable and dangerous place for the oil companies and the communities in which they operate. Environmental Devastation I had an opportunity to see the human and environmental consequences of oil production in the Niger Delta that weekend, when I visited the site of a recent Shell oil spill in the Otuegwe 1 community with Niger Delta Human and Environmental Rescue Organization (ND-HERO) Director Robert Azibaola. The spill is in extremely remote and difficult terrain and the visit itself was one of the remarkable experiences of my life. We left Port Harcourt early in the morning of Saturday June 12 — the sixth anniversary of the election won by Moshood Abiola and then annulled by the military — for the two hour drive to the Bayelsa State capital of Yenagoa. Although the state has been quiet since the protests and repression that took dozens of lives in December 1998 and January 1999, the security presence was heavy and aggressive. At one point our vehicles were stopped by a truckload of heavily armed Mobile Police — the feared "Kill and Go" unit responsible for many human rights abuses during the Abacha dictatorship. After 20 minutes of arguing we were allowed to proceed to our destination, a small landing on a tributary of the river North. With a rather nervous eye on the machine gun emplacement guarding the approaches to the landing, and yet another argument with a suspicious immigration officer, we boarded a small motor boat for a half hour sail upriver to the impoverished village of Otuegwe 1. Like so many other Ijaw villages in this riverine portion of the Delta, Otuegwe 1 is without running water or electricity, paved roads, or a school or clinic. The community's 1500 members depend on the marshy forest for livelihood and drinking water — fishing for mudfish and snails, tapping raffia palms and harvesting renewal foodstuffs from the forests. The army of ragged children with distended bellies that met our boat at the river's edge was sad evidence that life here is hard. We were soon to see why. After an hour of discussions with the chief and village elders we set off with three young men from the community to visit the site of the spill. It was an arduous two-hour walk through the rainforest along a slippery mud track punctuated by chest high ponds that had to be waded or, where the water was too deep, carefully (and sometimes unsuccessfully!) crossed on submerged log bridges. We often met members of the community along the trail, checking their fish traps, carrying newly cut palm leaves or plastic jugs with fresh palm wine, or oil soaked young men from the community hired — for five dollars a day — by a Shell contractor to clean up the spill. Their only equipment was cotton rags and plastic buckets. Robert Azibaola explained that in June 1998 a 16-inch underground Shell pipeline, laid some 20 years ago, burst, discharging as much as 800,000 barrels of oil into this area, the economic and cultural heart of the community, before it was finally sealed. Without benefit of the required investigation, Shell declared that the cause of the spill was sabotage and refused to pay compensation. The impact of the spill on the community has been devastating, as the oil has poisoned their water supply and fishing ponds, and is steadily killing the raffia palms that are the community's economic mainstay. Lacking any other alternative, the people of the village have been forced to drink polluted water for over a year, and the community leaders told us that many people had become ill in recent months and that some had died. The sight that greeted us when we finally arrived at the spill was horrendous. A thick brownish film of crude oil stained the entire area, collecting in clumps along the shoreline and covering the surface of the still water. The humid aid was thick with oil fumes, caused, Robert explained, by the sun's evaporation of the crude, and quickly making me nauseous. We passed two men tending a fire, dumping sludge and oil soaked rags from the clean-up into the flames and sending thick black smoke up through the dead palm trees into the sky. They had neither masks nor gloves, and told us that they had been burning the waste since early morning. We passed a large dead tree whose trunk was stained with oil fully ten feet over my head. Robert explained that this was the high water mark, as the area flooded several times a year, spreading the hundreds of thousands of barrels of spilled crude over many hundreds of square miles and devastating the entire region. By the time we reached the site of the rupture the fumes were so thick it became difficult to breath. A sheet of oil covered the water in all directions, extending out into the creek and spreading throughout the region's waterways. Two men from the village, wearing only shorts, stood waist deep in the oil-soaked water, skimming the surface of the water with with stained cotton rags and wringing the oil into plastic buckets. >From time to time they would empty the buckets into a 55 gallon drum half full of crude. Later, they explained, they would carry the drum to the burn site and shovel the refuse into the flames. That the cleanup effort — if indeed that is what it is — is grossly inadequate and dangerous to the health of the workers was obvious. After less than 30 minutes at the site the thick fumes had given me a headache and I was seriously nauseated. How the men trying fruitlessly to sop up this vast spill must feel after seven or eight hours without so much as gloves, or masks or overalls is something I consider as we make our slow and difficult way back to the village and the boat. On the following day I visited Ogoniland as the guest of MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. In contrast to the deep forests and marshlands of Otuegwe 1, Ogoni's 500,000 people live on a comparatively dry plain, farming and fishing the streams that crisscross this heavily populated area. In common with the Ijaw people of Otuegwe, the Ogoni people have suffered severe environmental devastation at the hands of the Shell oil company. Today Shell's flow stations and gas flares sit silent and dark. MOSOP was formed in 1990 to organize non-violent mass resistance to Shell's environmental and human rights practices and succeeded in forcing the company to halt production throughout Ogoni in 1993. That success brought with it terrible retribution, as Shell and its business partner, the Abacha military dictatorship, unleashed a campaign of terror against the Ogoni people in an effort to break the resistance. Thousands of people were killed, thousands more fled over the border to neighboring Benin and perhaps 10,000 people were forced from their homes into internal exile to escape the repression. Among the dead was MOSOP leader Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged in 1995 on patently false murder charges. Environmental Disaster With a Gate We visited Ejama-Eleme village, a densely populated community that was the site of one of the worst oil spills in Nigerian history. In the late 1960s a high pressure Shell pipeline ruptured at Ejama-Eleme, catching fire and burying a vast area under a rock-hard crust of burnt oil many feet thick. Shell refused to take responsibility for the spill, arguing that it had been damaged during the Biafran civil war. For decades, therefore, the untreated spill leached crude oil into the groundwater and the nearby stream, poisoning the community's drinking water and fishing areas, and polluting the entire downstream waterway system. In 1995, after MOSOP attracted international attention to the spill, the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fence in the area and posted armed Nigerian soldiers at the gate to keep journalists and international environmental and human rights activists away. The soldiers are gone now, and I walked through Shell's gate and onto an absolute wasteland. Years of rain had eroded some of the oil crust, causing sinkholes and ledges that suggested the depth of the seared crude even as it washed more oil into the land and water. After receiving an estimate from a western cleanup company of $100 million to remove the oil, Shell has reportedly contracted instead with a local company on a $5 million operation to bury the oil under top soil — hiding the spill more effectively than the gate but scarcely making good the damage to the community. Our guide, MOSOP member Bari-ara Kpalap dismissed the clean-up contract as a public relations stunt and showed us a pit cut into the crust by the local company that revealed burnt oil to a depth of over three feet, with no end in sight. Kpalap, who operated underground in Ogoni through the Abacha era, noted that while the company had plenty of money to fence in the spill they had stubbornly refused all entreaties to dig the community a well to provide safe drinking water. In any event, he said, it may now be too late, as several privately dug wells have had to be abandoned after dangerously high levels of pollution were found in the ground water. That afternoon I joined MOSOP President Mitee at a meeting of the executives of the various affiliates of the organization, women, youth, elders, professionals, students, to hear his report back on the meeting with President Obasanjo on Friday. The meeting was laborious, given the need to translate Mitee's remarks and the accompanying questions and discussion into a second dialect, as linguistic differences among the six traditional kingdoms that comprise Ogoni can be great. Mitee's message to the leadership was grim. Obasanjo's proposals did not respond to Ogoni demands and he had declined numerous requests to meet with MOSOP to discuss Ogoni grievances and Shell's continuing refusal to negotiate. After lengthy discussions it was decided to reject the government proposals on the Delta and to continue the campaign against Shell. Mitee and other leaders will stand for election at the end of this month, the first Ogoni-wide MOSOP elections since Saro-Wiwa's execution in 1995. Agip: Blood and Oil On Tuesday I joined Robert Azibaola at a meeting with the Italian oil company Agip a relatively small producer in Nigeria that was responsible for the deaths of seven men from the Ikebiri community in Bayelsa state on April 19. The shootings occurred when soldiers accompanying an Agip work crew into the community to reopen a valve closed by the community in a dispute over compensation for a series of oil spills arrested two chiefs and opened fire on a boat heading to the state capital to protest the arrests. At first the company offered only 100,000 naira as compensation to the community and the families — a sum of one thousand U.S. dollars. Now, after the intervention of Azibaola and MOSOP President Mitee, the company and the community have reached a settlement of 330,000 dollars, plus a trust fund for the education of the victim's children. AGIP officials do not dispute that they notified the Nigerian government about the dispute and the interruption of production and defended the use of the army to "restore law and order" in the event of community actions against the oil companies. Although the company denies that its work crew was in Ekebiri on the day of the shooting, the army report on the incident specifically noted that the unit has accompanied AGIP workers to the village on the 19th to re-open the closed valve. The officer in charge of the unit, Lieutenant Commander Go Adaji, remains on active duty and has not been charged with the murders. The AGIP officials I spoke with made a convincing case for the political and social difficulties of operating in the Niger Delta, and for dealing with a joint venture partner, the Nigerian government, that was, until three weeks ago, one of the most brutal military dictatorships in the world. One of the company representative I met said that he had been held hostage by angry Ijaw youths and he complained that human rights activists never speak out for his human rights. But he readily admitted that only an end to the poverty and exploitation of the oil producing communities could finally bring peace to the region and that incidents like the Ekebiri shootings could only guarantee continued hostage takings and turmoil in the Nigerian oil fields. He had no answer to my question about how Agip could conduct itself in the future to prevent further tragedies like the massacre at Ekebiri from occurring in the future. Closing Thoughts It is almost as if there are two different Olusegun Obasanjos. The first is the increasingly popular, pro-active Obasanjo that is winning hearts and minds in Lagos and Abuja with his decisiveness and his political skills. The second Obasanjo is the architect of the dispossession of the land and resources of the peoples of the Delta, the Obasanjo that came to the Delta for a photo opportunity and dumped the Niger Delta crisis on the state governors who have neither the statutory authority nor the financial resources to cope. It is the Federal government that owns the land and the oil of the Delta after all, and sets each states' budget and so ultimately it is the Federal government that must become effectively engaged with the oil companies and the communities to finally solve the Niger Delta crisis. In fact there is only one Olusegun Obasanjo and it seems to me that he deserves high marks for his first few weeks in office. But he is the President of many Nigerias — the sprawling urban Nigeria of Lagos, the miserable and polluted Nigeria of the Delta, and other very separate and unequal Nigerias as well. There is an urgent need for U.S. and European political, human rights and religious leaders to come to the Niger Delta to see for themselves the terrible human consequences of the Western thirst for oil and oil wealth. But I also think that political and religious leaders from the other Nigerias should come, and they too rarely do. Nigerians should see what 40 years of the violent, wholesale extraction of the wealth of this region has done to the land and the people. Oil has destroyed hope along with the environment, and people without hope do desperate things. *** Immediately following the installation of newly elected President (retired General) Olusegun Obasanjo on May 29th, The Africa Fund's Human Rights Coordinator Michael Fleshman began a one month Nigeria visit to meet with a broad range of civil society and governmental representatives, to monitor on the ground progress toward democratization and to develop an in depth assessment of a future role in this process for The Africa Fund. For more information contact The Africa Fund, 50 Broad Street, Suite 711, New York, NY 10004. Tel: (212) 785-1024 Fax: (212) 785-1078 E-mail: africafund@igc.apc.org. Www.priarienet.org/acas/afund.html.