Crude World (9 page)

The cruelest joke is that even if oil money is not stolen or wasted, it can nonetheless have negative economic consequences. The problem begins with the influx of foreign currency from oil sales, which seems like a stroke of great luck. When large amounts of foreign currency
flood into an exporter’s economy, the local currency tends to appreciate. When this happens, foreign products become cheaper to buy with the strengthened local currency while domestic products become more expensive for foreigners to buy. As a result, the exporter’s industrial and agricultural sectors can lose local and foreign customers. The loss may not hurt until the boom subsides and the flood of oil revenue turns into a trickle; the exporter’s economy is left with industrial and agricultural sectors that have atrophied. This is known, in economics, as the Dutch disease, named after the decline of Dutch industry in the 1960s in the wake of an influx of revenue from the sale of North Sea natural gas. One remedy, economists have realized, is to “sterilize” oil revenues by keeping them offshore—investing a chunk of them in foreign stocks and bonds, for example. But a government that is mismanaged, greedy or just in desperate need of funds will let the money rush in. The Dutch economy recovered, but others have not been so fortunate.

Nigeria is like a specimen exposed to multiple diseases. Legions of young men, turning away from hard and low-paying farmwork, migrated to the cities for the easier jobs they thought would be available there. The jobs weren’t there—the oil industry is not labor-intensive, and the Nigerian government, even if it hadn’t lost funds to corruption and waste, did not have enough oil revenues to pay for the infrastructure projects that would put such a large labor force to work. Instead, the migrants coalesced into an urban underclass, Dickens gone to Africa. Some used their financial and language skills to perpetrate Internet scams—Nigeria is the origin of many of the too-good-to-be-true e-mail offers that fill in-boxes across the world. Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish writer, noticed a similar abandonment of reason in Iran during the times of the shah. “Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation,” he wrote. “It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money. … Oil creates an illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free. Oil is a resource that anesthetizes thought, blurs vision, corrupts.”

Ironically, oil’s impact can be harshest on the communities where it
is located. Instead of becoming rich and moving to mansions in fancy towns, as the fictional Clampett family did in the 1960s sitcom
The Beverly Hillbillies
, the people of the Niger Delta became poorer, watching as their land and water become polluted by an industry they did not own, had no control over and derived almost no income from. In the delta, once a vibrant marine habitat, fish died off and crops wilted. There was little compensation. Oil revenues that weren’t stolen went directly into the national treasury, because the government in the capital controlled the revenues. The ethnic groups in the delta were not powerful enough to get their way in national politics. The modest funds earmarked for local development were, for the most part, stolen by officials and chiefs before reaching the people who were supposed to be the beneficiaries.

Rebellion, in such conditions, is inevitable. Early on, in 1966, Isaac Boro, an army officer born in the delta, cofounded the Niger Delta Volunteer Service and declared a breakaway republic. His revolt was crushed in twelve days by troops who rushed into the delta on boats supplied by Shell. Soon after, an accumulation of discord—partly over oil, but also over religion, culture and ethnicity—led to a massive and unsuccessful war of secession, the Biafran war, which killed as many as two million people. A new generation of activism emerged in the 1990s, led by the charismatic Ken Saro-Wiwa of the Ogoni tribe, which lived where oil was first found and whose people were its first victims. Saro-Wiwa formed a popular nonviolent campaign against Shell and the repressive military regime that was its partner at the time. In 1994, as martial law was about to be imposed on his restive home region, Saro-Wiwa predicted, “This is it, they are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.” Soon after, on the orders of General Sani Abacha, the military dictator, Saro-Wiwa was arrested and later hanged after a show trial. Investigations after Abacha’s death several years later revealed that he’d stolen $4 billion in state revenues.

Asari’s rebellion was a violent continuation of this history. It was low-intensity warfare that killed thousands of combatants and civilians every year, and it had a postmodern touch, because helicopter gunships were pitted against militiamen who wore bullet-stopping amulets (or
so they believed). For the 30 million unfortunate souls in the delta—the country’s total population is nearly 150 million—life had become a hellish vision that was part
Mad Max
, part
Waterworld
, and, with the prevalence of adolescent fighters, a bit
of Lord of the Flies
.

Port Harcourt, in the fall of 2004, was its usual insane self. The power grid was down, roads had holes the size of craters and foreign oilmen were driven across town with armed bodyguards. Swindles and violence beckoned at every corner, and the police only made things worse. With casually violent ways, paramilitary police teams were known as “Kill and Go,” because that’s what they did. There was only one event to be thankful for, and that was a truce between the government and Asari’s militia, the Niger Delta People’s Volunteer Force. It was rumored that Olusegun Obasanjo, the president at the time, had made an offer that was too lucrative for Asari to turn down—a significant sum of money for some sort of disarmament. In Nigeria, disputes tended to be settled with guns or cash, and in this instance, cash had done the job. Asari moved freely in Port Harcourt, residing in a small hotel that was a thirty-minute bumper-to-bumper drive from mine (or, as the crow flies, a mile or two).

When I arrived to talk with him, several dozen young men were gathered in the hotel driveway and bar, wearing the uniform of toughs at rest—loose T-shirts and sweatpants. They drank Star beer, even though lunch was hours away. At this moment, they were interested in nothing more challenging than watching soccer on the bar’s television, but they were not incurious, at least if their nicknames were windows into their minds. Nigerians love nicknames, and the young men I encountered at the hotel told me to call them Justice or History or some such moniker. It is strange to meet a teenager who introduces himself by saying, in literal truth, “I am Handsome!”

I was led to a small suite where a klatch of these youths were watching a DVD of Asari speaking to villagers in the Niger Delta. They watched avidly, because Asari was a spellbinding orator, and they failed to notice that their leader had woken and shuffled into the back of the
suite from the adjoining bedroom. Asari was wearing gym shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops. He watched the TV with the look of a groggy sculptor sipping his first cup of morning coffee and assessing the previous day’s work. He seemed pleased.

On the screen, a village elder lamented the abundance of oil in the ground and the lack of food in people’s stomachs. Behind him, a boy peeked through the crowd, wearing an Oakland A’s cap.

“Brothers and sisters, your salvation is in your hands,” Asari, on TV, told the villagers. “Today you must choose whether to be free or in jail. If you want to be free, say yes.”

The crowd roared its assent.

A cell phone rang in the suite. It was Asari’s, and he told the caller to phone back later. He returned to watching the best entertainment going.

“Now is the time for us to fight together,” Asari told the crowd. “On this road there is weeping and the cracking of teeth, but the only way we can win is by fighting. We will fight until the enemy abandons control of our resources.”

There was more cheering, and at the speech’s conclusion Asari was driven away in a white Hummer, standing up and waving through its sunroof like the grand marshal at a New Year’s Day parade.

It was easy to understand his allure. Asari possessed the cadences of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the dramatics of Fidel Castro, and he borrowed lines from Bob Marley. His words inspired not only the crowd in the delta and not only the young men watching the DVD—their keen interest was not fabricated—but even Asari himself. Sleepy when he’d padded into the suite, he was now energized. As one of his followers cued up another clip, Asari tapped my shoulder and led me down a corridor to a room that was under renovation or had been relieved of its contents by his followers.

His eyes jumped to the digital audio recorder I placed at his side.

“Can I buy it from you?” he asked.

It would not be wise to refuse a warlord.

“You can buy it on the Internet,” I suggested.

“No. I need it now.”

I said that I needed it to conduct my work in Nigeria. He understood. The interview began.

Asari was an integral part of Nigeria’s ordered chaos. That is an odd phrase, “ordered chaos,” but it gives appropriate due to the connections among the men and women for whom the country is a giant stage where they fight and bargain for the treasure under their feet. In fetid swamps, crowded slums and corporate towers, there is a form of nonstop interaction between warlords, governors, tribal kings and oil executives, like actors and stagehands in the same production. The ones I met would move on sooner or later—to another position, another place of exile or a grave—but others would replace them, because this was not a theatrical production but a system of perpetual conflict that compromised everyone involved in it.

Asari was one of six children in a middle-class family; his father was a judge, his mother a housewife. He attended a Baptist secondary school, became a Marxist in college, dropped out of law school twice and failed on two runs for elective office. He had converted to Islam before his electoral career, changing his name (good-bye Dokubo Melford Goodhead Jr.; hello Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo Asari), and became a Ramadan-observing militant. He professed admiration for Osama bin Laden as well as Nelson Mandela. Because personal as well as moral flexibility is required in tumultuous Nigeria, where life proceeds with the complexity of chess rather than the reliability of checkers, Asari was not accused of inconsistency.

Nigeria’s population is the largest in Africa and is composed of several hundred ethnic groups divided into an even greater number of tribes and subtribes with their own dialects and disputes. Asari belonged to the delta’s largest tribe, the Ijaw, whose members are predominantly Christian. He was one of the tribe’s few Muslims, but in the rock-paper-scissors game of identity in Nigeria, tribe trumps religion; the Ijaw do not care if you worship Allah or Apollo—you are theirs. In the late 1990s Asari was involved in the creation of the Ijaw Youth Council, and became president of it in 2001. A slogan was adopted, “Resource control and self-determination by every means
necessary,” and that meant war. Asari went into the creeks and formed his militia.

It was a slow day at his hotel-turned-headquarters, so we conversed with few interruptions, though once, in response to an argument in a nearby room, Asari shouted something in Ijaw and the dispute quieted. Asari did not look like a warlord. He was of average height and chubby, with the eternally fatigued bearing of a man who must work several jobs to stay afloat. Yet he was the real thing. When I noticed a scar on an arm, he displayed others that were the result of combat, though he could not always recall the injury. “This one,” he said, touching a three-inch tear in the flesh of his leg and pausing over it, “I don’t remember how I got it.”

Asari was fighting an alliance of the foreign companies that extracted the delta’s oil (Shell drilled the most) and the central government, which hired them and provided security for their operations. It was the same alliance that Saro-Wiwa and Isaac Boro had fought against. For them, the government and the companies were partners in a regionwide, decades-long crime. Of course, Asari’s fighters were also receiving money from the oil companies, in the form of ransoms paid for workers taken hostage or protection money to help defend oil installations from … their own attacks. It was a closed loop of recirculated violence.

“The oil companies are working with an occupation government that does not have a legal right to the resources,” Asari said. “They should pack and go because they have contributed so much to the deprivation, oppression and suffering of our people. There is oil in Alaska, there is oil in Siberia. They can explore for oil there.”

Asari liked to be known as a freedom fighter—that’s why he showed off his scars—and he offered a clear definition that explained his collision with the government in Abuja.

“Freedom means the restoration of sovereignty to our people,” he said.

Sovereign, as in apart from Nigeria?

“Yes, as a separate nation. We are not going to be apologetic about it. We have the right to self-determination.”

He responded without anger when it was suggested that he might fare no better than Saro-Wiwa, Boro or, for that matter, any rebel who wishes to separate his region from a government that is brutal, well armed and determined not to let go of a territory under which a treasure is buried.

“Like the people of Ireland and the people of Chechnya and many other people, if it is not the wish of God that I should be the one who succeeds, a better person will take over,” he said.

It was impossible to know whether Asari would reach the promised land that had eluded his predecessors, but one thing was sure: Nigeria was collapsing. Countries do not rot as fast as men or buildings, but rot they do. Laws devolve from tools of order into excuses for payoffs. You need a permit? Very good. How much will you pay? In parts of Nigeria, state control was an idea rather than fact. This is a hallmark of failed states: they fail to even exist. In the delta, there was no formal or informal demarcation between areas controlled by the government and those held by the rebels. Asari, at the time of my visit, was the delta’s alpha rebel, so I needed travel permission from him, not the police, the army or Shell.