I hope the new Nigerian peace plan works. For years, Nigeria has been the poster child for everything that can go wrong when a country discovers oil. Instead of the prosperity, thousands have died violently, the country’s infrastructure has crumbled, the Niger River delta has been environmentally devastated, the army has run amok among the population, its politics have set an internationally recognized standard for corruption, leaders have been killed, oil companies sued, the general economy in a disaster with rampant poverty while hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue has disappeared.
Once Africa’s number one oil producer, Nigeria has now slipped behind Angola. For the past couple years, with the attacks on facilities and pipelines, Nigeria has been losing 1 million barrels or more of output a day. Its output, for much of the year, around 1.6 million barrels a day, has been far below its OPEC quota.
Violence against civilians, always bad, increased in the past few years in the Delta, Nigeria’s oil producing region, as rebel groups like MEND (The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) and others attacked locals (for a variety of reasons), fought with Nigerian security forces (themselves guilty of innumerable human rights infractions), and engaged in kidnappings, mayhem, and money-making schemes like bunkering (stealing oil).
But in early October, many leaders of these groups and an unknown number of their fighters had accepted (at least for now) the amnesty offered by President Umaru Yar’Adua.
Why the sudden change? Amnesty is important but it comes down to one thing: money. Money in two ways. First, there is no doubt that the people and communities of the Delta have gotten the short end of the economic stick for decades. One report estimates just 13 percent of the oil revenues is earmarked for the delta states, made even scarcer by massive corruption of local government representatives. The national government is pushing a bill to give a higher percentage of the monies directly to the villages of the delta. After all this agony, shouldn’t any government looking at the case of Nigeria conclude it’s just easier and smarter to share the money with the local people from the get-go?
More ominously, the amnesty offers each former fighter approximately $13 a day to stop fighting. In a country where most people earn less than $2 a day, this is paying them very well, for —- not being a problem. Which is to say, they are cut in on the deal. They are not earning the money; they are being paid off. If you think about it, is a payoff really the best way to address corruption?
Yet such is often the stuff of peace plans. Will it work? It’s a huge step — acknowledging local rights to the money is huge. Yar’Adua will have to deliver on his end of the plan; such plans have failed before in Nigeria and things have gotten worse. No one actually is talking, either, about how many of the 8,000 rebels out there have signed on.
The one thing that will make the biggest difference in the lives of the locals is a real economy. The Economist reports
“the militants have also been promised retraining and education. Many … want to resume careers as welders, lorry-drivers and engineers… Some dropped out of the University of Port Harcourt to join the militants. One, who was studying gas engineering, says he would like to work for the oil companies he used to attack. All say that they expect the government to help them learn new skills or resume studies.
Reuters quotes a local fish-seller speaking the wisest words of all —not just for Nigeria but so much of Africa: “Give them jobs. If you do not give them jobs, they will go back to what they did before.”
