Analysis: Militants threaten oil industry

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Nigeria's leading militant group has called for its allies to band together to cripple the country's oil industry through attacks on oil installations.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta issued a statement to local reporters earlier this week saying all "genuine" militant groups in the West African country's oil-rich Niger Delta should wage full-blown attacks on oil installations to shut down the industry "once and for all."

MEND's threat against Nigeria's leading industry is a stark reversal for the militant group that announced a cease-fire shortly after President Umaru Yar'Adua assumed office in May.

Since then attacks on foreign oil platforms both on and offshore have decreased, though gang violence and kidnappings swelled, forcing several cities in the delta including its de facto capital of Port Harcourt to institute a curfew.

So far this year some 200 people have been kidnapped by militants and gangs in the delta.

Leaders of MEND, which some contend is part of the delta's pervasive gang culture, have called for a more equitable distribution of the country's oil wealth. MEND, along with other lesser-known militant groups, has launched numerous attacks on both onshore and offshore oil installations in the delta and kidnapped more than 150 people in the last year.

Since the 1970s, Nigeria, Africa's No. 1 oil producer, has pumped more than $300 billion worth of crude from the southern delta states, according to estimates. But high unemployment in the delta, environmental degradation due to oil and gas extraction, and a lack of basic resources such as fresh water and electricity have angered some of the region's youth and incited them to take up arms.

"There is (no) doubt that the youths became frustrated because of several years of neglect," Frank Ovie Kokori, former secretary of the National Union of Petroleum, Energy and Natural Gas Workers, said in an interview with Nigeria's Guardian newspaper Wednesday.

"The struggle initially was to bring world attention to the Niger-Delta problem and they succeeded."

However, some leaders from previous militant movements in Nigeria have spoken out against MEND and other current militant movements, saying they are genuine caretakers of their original struggle to remedy poverty in the delta.

"There is no MEND, or militants," former leader of the delta's armed resistance, Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, who served several months in prison, told United Press International in a recent interview. "They are merely armed gangs bent on violence and thievery, nothing more."

Be it politically minded militants or gunmen bent on thievery and profit, the violence in the delta and the drop in production could play into Nigeria's economic favor, said Eurasia Group analyst Sebastian Spio-Garbrah.

Since attacks attributed to MEND first began in 2005, oil production in the delta has decreased to an estimated 2 million barrels a day, a 20-percent decline from previous levels.

Lower oil prices on the world market, he said, would force the Yar'Adua administration to make peace with the militants sooner rather than later in hopes of getting full production back online. Talks between the militant leaders and government officials have stalled in recent weeks, resulting in an increase in attacks and kidnapping of oil workers.

"If oil prices begin to fall, then the government would be under pressure to reach a deal quickly with the militants," Spio-Garbrah told UPI.