Nigerian bombing: rehabilitation not retribution

A dozen years ago I found myself standing on the dockside in Warri, the city at the heart of Nigeria’s troubled oil-producing region, waiting to meet the young men who had seized control of dozens of oil-pumping stations, shutting down around a third of its oil production.

Their boat arrived and I jumped in. Off we went, passing the rusting hulks of abandoned oil tankers, swinging fast and low out of the harbor. “Keep down,” barked the lookout at the front of the boat. “If the navy sees us, they shoot.” “Out there . . .” He pointed to a line somewhere on the horizon up ahead. “Out there we control the waters.”

That was in October 1998, when the militants of the Niger Delta were first coming to the world’s attention. On Friday, they showed how things have changed, when people claiming to be Niger Delta rebels attacked ceremonies in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, marking fifty years of national independence. The bombings killed at least 12 people.

One year before this happened, I met the spokesman of Nigeria’s then President Umaruu Yar’Adua. The president had decided to offer the rebels an amnesty and to set up a “rehabilitation” programme, aimed at reintegrating them into society if they put down their weapons and gave up on violence. Yar’Adua died of kidney failure in February but his successor, former Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan—himself from the Delta—vowed to continue the amnesty and rehabilitation programme.

Speaking on Friday, President Jonathan struck a different tone. "To those behind these vicious acts, the president wants you to know that you will be found, and you will pay dearly for this heinous crime," he said. Arrests have followed amid nervousness that, if the president does not act tough, the military will go ahead and strike back anyway.

It has been more than a decade since my first visit to the Delta, and I have seen both military and civilian Nigerian rulers pledge to crack down on the militants. And each time they do this, they fail. The reason is that the problems facing the Delta—the region that accounts for almost all government revenues—have got worse, not better. After decades of oil spills and neglect, much of the land is unusable for agriculture and the waters are too polluted to fish in. And outside the oil industry, jobs are few and far between.

If the government’s amnesty programme last year was relatively successful, its rehabilitation programme—taking former rebels, training them to do regular jobs, and providing the working environment needed to create jobs for them—has been a failure which has so far been pursued only fitfully.

The attack on Friday "has nothing to do with the Niger Delta," President Jonathan told reporters on Sunday. This is clearly nonsense. If the government wants peace in the Delta, surely a priority given the elections due early next year, it must speed up, and not row back from, its programme of rehabilitating former militants. Military crackdowns in the Delta swamps will lead nowhere.

Peter Cunliffe-Jones is author of "My Nigeria – Five decades of Independence," published last month by Palgrave Macmillan