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Two mornings later, with corruption very much on our minds, Sonny and I drove along the traffic-logged expressway leading out
of Port Harcourt. Sticking out of the tall roadside grass was a billboard with a government message that said: DON'T BADMOUTH NIGERIA! THINGS ARE CHANGING.

We were on our way to Ndoni, a small town about 200 kilometres from Port Harcourt, the home town of Rivers State's former governor, Peter Odili. Sonny and I were on a mission to see how politicians spend their pilfered monies. I'd recently read in the newspaper that one of the worst of them, the ex-president Ibrahim Babangida, was itching to run for president again. As we waited in a long line at a gas station, I asked Sonny why the former dictator wanted to re-enter politics. Had his billions run out?

‘He just wants power,' Sonny said.

‘Why does he need more power?'

‘Because when he goes to London, nobody knows who he is any more. When he was president he went to the US . . . people over there received him . . . he went to the White House. When he came to Port Harcourt they would announce it on the TV and radio the night before. He would come here with his big entourage of cars. That is it, now . . . they want power. They like it.'

Sonny's theory was that the process of enriching oneself through politics naturally creates enemies. Therefore the politician in question needs protection, which in itself requires money, which requires more power. They don't want to go the way of the assassinated former president Murtala Mohammed, Sonny believed.

Sonny said that people were particularly disgusted with Odili, a man said to have used the billions he allegedly stole in office to set up Arik Airlines, a domestic carrier. Sonny repeated speculation that Odili greenlighted the construction of three gas turbines in Port Harcourt just to receive kickbacks. The government received a big budget, built the turbines with shoddy, cheap haste, then pocketed the difference. Now the turbines have stopped working, only a few years after being built.

On the highway towards Ndoni, a minibus had parked at the side
of the road, its passengers milling about and motioning for us to keep driving.

‘Armed robbery,' Sonny explained. The passengers reassured us that it was safe to proceed: we had missed the robbery by ten minutes. Earlier that morning Sonny had scolded me for always being late, but I suspected he was now secretly grateful for my tardiness. Further ahead of the robbed minibus, a police patrol vehicle had parked haphazardly on the roadside, its doors flung open in haste, its body perforated with bullet holes. Three officers were wading frantically into the thick bush, pushing aside tall grasses with one hand and clutching rifles with the other, chasing the armed robbers who had fled into the forest. Minutes later, a radio news bulletin reported the kidnapping of two foreigners in Port Harcourt. The dangers of life in the Niger Delta suddenly seemed all too tangible and real.

Odili was said to be partly responsible for the lawlessness. During the 2003 elections, as he ran for the governorship of Rivers State, the ruling People's Democratic Party distributed weapons to gangs in order to intimidate voters. Two gangs – the Niger Delta People's Volunteer Force (NDPVF) and the Icelanders – were hired by Odili to ensure a ‘positive' outcome in the elections. But soon after the polls, the leader of the NDPVF fell out with the Rivers State government, which reacted by urging the Icelanders to destroy the NDPVF. The result was low-intensity warfare, conducted freely on the streets of Port Harcourt. Ordinary streets, bars and restaurants were caught in a crossfire of explosives and automatic weapons. I read newspaper reports of gangsters operating with impunity, robbing banks, gunning down policemen, hacking at the city's stability with machetes and knives. Fortunately, no one in my family was affected, but many other blameless people died.

In 2004, President Obasanjo brokered a truce between the gang leaders. The gangs, however, never disarmed. Angered by the politicians' false promises of jobs and financial security, they continued
robbing banks, and practising kidnapping and extortion. Since 2006, more than 200 expat oil workers have been abducted for large ransoms under the political pretext of ‘resource control'.

By the summer of 2007, a faction of the Icelanders had broken away and formed a more powerful splinter group called the Outlaws, led by George Soboma. Again, the ruling party called on their services during the 2007 elections. The gangsters were seen handing out money at polling stations, becoming de facto chiefs of security in the city. Since 2003, dozens of similar gangs flourished. Again, many of them were disappointed by the government's unfulfilled promises of jobs and money. They eyed Soboma's position with envy. In time, a coalition of gangs (including the Icelanders) began fighting Soboma and his Outlaws for a bigger slice of government largesse. More havoc was visited on Port Harcourt. My brother Junior had been inside our father's former office on Aggrey Road when he heard the snap of gunfire and the screech of vehicle tyres. For a few apprehensive minutes, the street's small businesses and art shops became the backdrop to gang warfare. I felt slightly violated by it all, even from the safety of London. Though I'd had no intention of living in Port Harcourt, those months of violence made me less of an émigré and more an exile in mourning for my home town.

In the summer of 2007, the federal government sent in a military task force to control the violence. Order was restored but the leaders of the biggest gangs, having outgrown government control, were never captured. In contrast to its rhetoric, the government did nothing to punish the politicians or arrest most of the gang members. And Odili, the former governor who allegedly funded these gangs in the 2003 elections, enjoys immunity from prosecution.

Because Nigeria's oil deposits are concentrated in the Niger Delta, political power in this region (and subsequent control of oil money) is highly prized and ruthlessly fought over. Half a century of corrupt rule has done nothing to build the economy of a region
that's earned more than $300 billion since petroleum was discovered. The federal government takes about half of oil revenues and distributes it among the country's thirty-six states. Little of this money benefits ordinary people, least of all Niger Delta people, who have fallen victim to government corruption and the carelessness of the oil industry. Countless oil spills and ceaseless flaring of gas poisons the soil and depletes the rivers of their fish stocks. Age-old farming practices have been disrupted, swelling the numbers of frustrated unemployed men.

My father tried to address this problem non-violently through his Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which campaigned to improve the environment and ensure Delta ethnic groups received our fair share of the oil wealth. Since my father's death in 1995, several militant groups, mainly ethnic Ijaws, have adopted a similar political platform, but achieve their aims by abducting oil workers, sabotaging oil pipelines and forcing oil companies to pay ‘protection' money. Their actions have reduced crude oil production by a third since 2006. Gangs such as the Niger Delta Vigilantes attack oil installations to extort money or force the oil companies to create local development projects, which has placated a few people.

These gangs, including the NDPVF, are embedded in a muddy, interchangeable world of criminality and politics. One minute they're fighting the government for ‘resource control', the next they're cooperating with corrupt politicians and policemen to set up arms deals and oil bunkering ventures (oil bunkering involves tapping pipelines and selling the oil on the local and foreign black market).

On the road to Ndoni, Rivers State felt like a feral place. The violence had leapt from the newspaper pages and was playing out in front of me. Sleeping was the only way for me to escape the anxiety.

The road branching off the highway to Odili's home town was freshly tarmacked, and sturdy new bridges carried us across the
numerous rivers and creeks of the Niger River Delta. We turned off the highway and into a sleepy village situated by the steep sandy banks of a magnificently blue river. The tidy streets, paved with interlocking stone slabs, contained only a handful of pedestrians, including a woman strolling contentedly beneath a blue parasol. A bus station under construction nearby was fronted by a sign proclaiming it an ULTRA-MODERN MOTOR PARK.

‘How many vehicles are coming here?' Sonny snorted. ‘This was just swamp before.' He pointed at a clump of trees across the street. Building a motor park seemed an unnecessary expense, considering the size of the village. Like voyeurs, we cruised around, taking inventory of the diverted oil wealth surrounding us.

‘Look at it,' Sonny murmured, ‘look at our money. Odili has turned the village into a town!' Street lights – only 4.5 metres apart – lined the roads. One or two of them were even switched on despite the midday sun, as if smugly emphasising Ndoni's constant power supply. Electricity seemed more a status symbol here than a basic requirement for the functioning of daily life.

Odili's mansion was unmissable: a big white colonnaded structure with a red tiled roof, a satellite dish and several air con units barnacling its exterior. Almost as a statement of virtue, the house stood next to a Catholic church, a fancy red-and-white building, fenced off by an ornate metal gate. Other alleged beneficiaries of Odili's governorship had built mansions in the vicinity. They had two-storey, glass-fronted atriums, with the owner's names – Onyema Hall or Oshinili Villa – emblazoned hubristically across them.

‘These houses look empty,' I commented.

‘That's because they are staying in Port Harcourt – where there's no light.' Sonny sneered at the irony. People spent most of their time in the big city. Nearby was a plot of land scattered with palm trees that had been felled to make way for the construction of more houses. Sonny and I rolled slowly along the streets, past a huge house with a thatched rotunda in the garden, which Sonny
suspected belonged to Peter Odili's older brother. Odili liked to spread his wealth. He is renowned for dashing people money –
20 million here,
50 million there.

‘You cannot get close to him and come back empty-handed,' Sonny said. But what good had Odili really done for Ndoni? The town was still a quiet backwater: messy-haired women still sold fruit and groundnuts on the side of the spotless streets; the school building was a shabby confection of peeling yellow paint, and the pupils ran around in tatty uniforms. How typical that the church should be in better shape than the primary school.

‘When you are in power you bring development to your village,' Sonny insisted, to my surprise.

‘But they should be bringing development to
everyone
. Can you imagine British prime ministers developing their home towns in England and no one else's? They don't do that.'

‘But you cannot be in government for eight years and your village is still bush,' Sonny countered. He told me that when he and my brother Ken attended the funeral of a politician's mother at their village, he was taken aback by the scruffiness of the village. ‘If you are in government you must develop your village and your people. Otherwise what will they take for remember you?'

I had assumed Sonny was against Ndoni's development. In fact, he was simply annoyed that no Ogoni person had had the chance to occupy high political office and develop our villages similarly. He didn't support corruption the way Ekpenyong in Calabar did, but he was still in favour of allocating funds along ethnic lines.

‘
Nobody
from the south has become a minister in Abuja,' Sonny fumed. ‘When I was in Abuja with your father and he saw the way they were building the place, he always be angry.
Twenty-four hours
a day, he was angry.'

I remember that rage. My father would grumble at the gleaming skyscrapers, venting livid clouds of tobacco smoke through his nostrils as he complained about oil money developing the north but not
the south. However, he didn't believe in politicians diverting public funds to help their own village at the expense of others. He was too high-minded to delve too much into Nigerian politics, the rottenness of which I now fully appreciated. In the upper echelons of government, it isn't easy to keep one's head down and do a good job. Having principles is considered a sign of weakness by many politicians, who will punish those who try to uphold any morals. If a governor or senator doesn't help his or her friends and kinsmen, not only do they face the wrath of their nearest and dearest, but their political enemies will see feebleness in their honesty and begin sharpening the knives. In a system like this, politicians of a dishonest bent will gladly swim with the corrupt tide rather than get washed up alone on the penniless banks of virtue.