Crude awakening, part one and two

For decades, the oil-rich delta of the Niger river has been plundered by western companies and rampant political corruption. But now a small group of ruthless Ijaw tribesmen are threatening to sabotage production unless their demands for compensation are met. Sebastian Junger heads into the secretive mangrove swamps to meet the waterborne warriors who are prepared to trigger a global meltdown

On 23 June 2005 a group of high-ranking US government officials convened in a ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, DC, to respond to a simulated crisis in the global oil supply. The event was called Oil ShockWave, and among those seated beneath a wall-sized map of the world were two former heads of the CIA, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The scenario they were handed was this: civil conflict breaks out in northern Nigeria – an area rife with Islamic militancy and religious violence – and the Nigerian army is forced to intervene. The situation deteriorates, and international oil companies decide to end operations in the oil-rich Niger river delta, resulting in a loss of 800,000 barrels a day on the world market. Concurrently, in this scenario, a cold wave sweeping across the northern hemisphere boosts global demand by 800,000 barrels a day. Because global oil production is already functioning at close to maximum capacity (around 84m barrels a day), small disruptions in supply shudder through the system very quickly. A net defi cit of almost 2m barrels a day is a signifi cant shock to the market, and the price of a barrel of oil rapidly rises above $80. Any other disruption – a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, for example – would spike prices through the roof.

In January 2006, less than seven months after the first Oil ShockWave conference, several boatloads of heavily armed Ijaw militants overran a Shell oil facility in the Niger delta and seized four western oil workers. The militants called themselves the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (or Mend) and said they were protesting at the environmental devastation caused by the oil industry, as well as the appalling conditions in which most delta inhabitants live. There are no schools, clinics or social services in most delta villages. There is no clean drinking water and virtually no paying jobs in delta villages. People eke out a living by fishing, while, all around them, oil wells owned by foreign companies pump billions of dollars’ worth of oil a year. It was time, according to Mend, for this injustice to stop.

The immediate eff ect of the attack was a fall in Nigerian oil production of roughly 250,000 barrels a day and a temporary bump in world oil prices. Mend released the hostages a few weeks later, but the problems were far from over. Mend’s demands included the release of two Ijaw leaders who were being held in prison, $1.5bn in restitution for damage to the delicate delta environment, a 50 per cent claim on all oil pumped out of the creeks, and development aid to the desperately poor villages of the delta. Mend threatened that if these demands were not met – which they weren’t – it would wage war on the foreign oil companies in Nigeria.

‘Leave our land while you can or die in it,’ a Mend spokesman warned in an email statement after the attack. ‘Our aim is to totally destroy the capacity of the Nigerian government to export oil.’

Observer: Part one and Part two

(Sebastian Junger is the author of the nonfiction bestseller, The Perfect Storm, which became a movie…and a popular idiom.)